Mystery Writers of America Presents the Prosecution Rests (13 page)

At first Mama thought he was raving. “It’s all right, Matthew,” she kept repeating, “Mr. Keresztnévz’s been acquitted.” But
finally she ushered me out, shut the door, and sat talking to him for a long while alone.

When she opened the door again, it was to tell me my father had died.

The agony of that moment comes back to me in the small hours of lonely nights to this day. But there was no time for it to
sink in then, because my mother would not let us rest. She arranged for the funeral to be the next day. There were few mourners
besides the Keresztnévzs, who laid a huge wreath on the fresh-covered earth, and no sooner had the tiny reception concluded
than Mama told me she would be keeping me home from school to help clear my father’s office.

Clearing the office was a pretext for finding that mysterious letter, I suspected, but my mother would not discuss it. When
she found the blue envelope she opened it right away, scanned the single sheet inside, and tore it all to bits. Then she made
me help her tear up several folders full of other papers, and we tumbled all the pieces together in the garbage can.

I never dared ask her what was in the letter.

Our lives resumed, though with a different dynamic. With my father’s death, my mother was transformed. She never threatened
me again. Evident as her own grief was in the premature gray that quickly frosted her hair, she set her mind immediately to
protecting me, using the small savings we had left to pay for a typing course. Before long, she’d landed a job as a secretary.

There was another surprising turnabout too: My father wasn’t two weeks gone when she started urging me to resume my friendship
with Gretchen Hilgendorf. “They’ve been through a lot, those children,” she said. “You should ask her to come home with you
one afternoon, Sadie. It’s the charitable thing to do.” And instead of avoiding Adelaide when she made her Tuesday delivery,
my mother now insisted on bringing the girl inside for a cup of tea and a chat, often over Adelaide’s strong objections that
she still had other deliveries to make.

Clearly Mama was trying to make friends with the Hilgendorf girls, but whether her purpose was to atone for my father’s defense
of Mr. Keresztnévz I couldn’t be certain.

My own picture of my father was slowly, inexorably changing. While I wouldn’t have tolerated anyone else saying it, I wondered
if the term “philanderer” had applied to him—because I couldn’t get that letter on a woman’s stationery out of my mind. I
remembered the smile on his face as we’d walked with the pretty woman in the red feathered hat and wondered if she had written
it.

In time, my transition to adulthood pushed such questions about my father into the background. What would I do when I finished
high school? It was Mama’s wish that I go on to college, where, I suppose, she believed I would meet an appropriate sort of
man.

She scraped together enough money for me to enroll at the city campus of the state university, where I met a plucky young
Irishman called Pete O’Rourke, whom my mother came to adore, her prejudices about the Irish notwithstanding.

By the time I graduated, the war was on. Unwilling to marry a man who was shipping off overseas, I did something that shocked
my mother speechless: I enrolled in law school.

It was three years later, on the day I learned I’d passed the bar exam, that she sat me down and turned my whole world inside
out.

“Do you remember that letter that came for your father during the trial of Mr. Keresztnévz?” she said.

In an instant I was covered in pins and needles—as if after nearly fifteen years I was coming painfully awake. I wanted to
shut her up, tell her not to speak—protest that there was a time when I had wanted to know, but not anymore.

Before I could object she continued, “You must have wondered who wrote it.”

“No—what’s the point? He’s gone.”

My mother laughed. “You think there was another woman, don’t you? Your father and I were in love, Sadie, whether you knew
it or not. There was never another woman.”

Women of my mother’s generation looked nothing like the fifty-somethings of today’s boomer generation. They looked old: hair
gone to white, middles stout and barrel-shaped. I found it hard to connect what I saw before me with being in love.

“What, then?” I said, fear starting to crawl up my spine.

“It was about the murder. I’m telling you now because you are about to enter your father’s profession. Because you have just
been admitted to the bar, and if he’d lived, your father might well have been
dis
barred. You aren’t going to be accepted easily, a woman in a profession like that. You’ll need to be careful.

“Maybe I’m also telling you because I’ve spent all these years wondering what I would have done in your father’s shoes.”

It was a punch to the solar plexus. Several moments passed before I could draw a normal breath.

“You remember that terrible man who came to the house, the witness who saved Rags?” she continued.

“Of course.”

“Your father paid him.” Bald as that, it came from her mouth. “He took the grocery money from the jar where I kept it and
he paid him.”

“Paid him to give his testimony, you mean?!”

“Worse. He told him what to say.”

I flushed so hard it felt as if my skin would burst.

“Don’t judge him too harshly,” my mother said, studying my face. “That’s why I never told you when you were younger. You idolized
your father so. I always saw his faults, and I loved him anyway—”

“We’re not talking about
faults
here!” I interrupted. I stood up and leaned toward her, staring her down as if she were before me in a witness box. Anything
to make her recant her terrible testimony. “We’re talking about lying. Breaking the law!”

“He was so certain Mr. Keresztnévz was innocent,” she said calmly. “And there was little doubt he’d be executed if your father
lost the case.”

“What has the letter got to do with it?”

“The letter was from someone who had information about the real killer. The trouble was, it came too late. Your father’s witness
had already testified, and if what the letter said was true, Margaret Hilgendorf’s body must have been in Rags’s cart—without
Rags realizing it—before he parked it for the night.”

“And if Daddy had taken the letter to the police,” I said, seeing where this was going, “it might have come out that he bribed
his witness to concoct a false story.”

“That’s right. And there was no guarantee the prosecution would believe what was in the letter and drop the charges against
Mr. Keresztnévz anyway.”

“What did the letter say, Mama?”

I still stood over her, but less menacingly now.

She hesitated for a long while. Finally she said, “It was an anonymous letter, from one of the Hilgendorfs’ neighbors. It
said that on the afternoon Margaret Hilgendorf went missing, the letter writer was in an upper-story room of her house, which
gave a vantage point above her backyard fence. She saw Mrs. Hilgendorf, or someone who looked like her, running along the
backs of the houses with a bundle in her arms. She deposited that bundle in Rags’s cart.”

“Why didn’t she sound the alarm right away then?”

“Because there was nothing unusual in someone forgetting they had something for Rags and catching up and putting it on his
cart. There was no reason to think there was something wrong until Margaret was discovered dead. By then, Rags had already
been arrested. And the letter writer wasn’t confident she’d be believed if she said something against the grieving mother
when the whole city already had its scapegoat. When her conscience finally got the better of her, she laid the decision at
your father’s door instead of going to the police. I’m sure she was surprised that nothing ever came of her writing that letter.
She couldn’t know that your father’s hands were tied by then.”

“But it can’t be true. You’re saying that Mrs. Hilgendorf killed her own child!”

“No, Sadie. I’m not saying that. But just in case there was something to the letter writer’s story, I tried to keep an eye
on those Hilgendorf girls over the years. I let them know there was another adult they could come to.”

I looked at the white hair and worn face of the woman I’d been about to visit my wrath upon and my heart expanded.
Yes, you did,
I thought
. And I never knew why.

I sat down and recalled my own childish fears of Mrs. Hilgendorf and her broom. I’d seen her more often in recent years, since
Adelaide and Gretchen had married. She still baked for old clients like my mother, but she had to deliver the cakes herself
with her girls gone. She was anything but scary in the twilight of her life. Bovine and passive was more like it, with big,
sad eyes.

Surely she could not have killed her own child. And yet… I remembered those strange burns that had run down one side of Margaret’s
body. And suddenly I knew what had caused them.

“She did it, Mama!” I said.

She stared at me.

“No one ever explained the burns, did they? I mean, I know Daddy thought they were from a hobo’s fire, but why straight along
one side like that?”

She said nothing, just continued to stare.

“It was the water heater. Mrs. Hilgendorf used to chase Margaret and Margaret would hide behind the water heater. I saw it
with my own eyes. But the day Margaret died, when Mrs. Hilgendorf found her daughter out of her reach, she must have been
unwilling to give up. If she could just catch hold of one of Margaret’s arms she could yank her out and punish her. I think
she banged Margaret’s head accidentally—but fatally—and scalded the side of her body against the heater as she tried to pull
her out.”

My mother put her hands to her face as if she was sorry she’d ever started down this road.

“Not Mrs. Hilgendorf,” she said at last, folding her hands sadly in front of her. “Mrs. Hilgendorf was training Adelaide to
join her in the business. They were saving to open a real bakeshop when Adelaide finished high school.”

She sighed and looked regretfully into space. “The day Margaret was killed, Mrs. Hilgendorf had to go downtown with her husband.
It was a proud moment for Adelaide, who was entrusted with baking the coffee cakes—the stollen—for the first time. Only Adelaide
and Margaret were home. Adelaide thinks Margaret must have envied the attention her mother paid her. Whatever got into her,
she waited until the stollen were all braided and left out to rise and Adelaide had left the room, then she picked them up
and threw them onto the floor of the kitchen fireplace. I remember those rages a four-year-old can get into from when you
were little, Sadie… . Anyway, when Adelaide came back and saw what her sister had done, she was determined to thrash her,
but Margaret slipped past her and ran for her hiding place in the basement, taunting Adelaide all the way. Adelaide was more
persistent than her mother. She caught hold of her sister and pulled. And then it was just how you say. She banged the little
girl’s head.”

“She told you this?” My whole body went cold. “It was
Adelaide?
”

My mother nodded. “I’d given her a cup of tea one evening. You weren’t home… . I asked after her mother and her face collapsed.
Then it just… came out—along with her sobs.

“I believed her, because it made sense of something I’d been unable to reconcile: how a mother could put her own child out
with the rubbish. It wasn’t Mrs. Hilgendorf who put Margaret there, of course. It was Adelaide—tall, big-boned Adelaide. Wearing
her mother’s apron, she’d have looked a lot like her. Big as she was, though, she was only fifteen, still a child. She did
what a child instinctively does—tried to hide the evidence of her crime.

“I’m sure she expected me to tell her mother. Maybe that’s why she confessed it all to me. Because she didn’t know how to
tell her herself.”

“But you didn’t,” I said, bitterness creeping into my voice.

“I let her grow up and decide for herself, Sadie, to wait on her own conscience.

“And I wasn’t going to be the one to destroy your father’s good name. That’s what will happen if the case is ever reopened.
You won’t do it either.”

____

S
HE WAS RIGHT
. I never did. I settled quietly into my job at the Cook County Public Defender’s Office, which was formed soon after “Rags”
Keresztnévz’s trial. And I stayed there until the scandal of 2000, when the convictions of several men we’d inadequately represented
were overturned, causing the governor to put a moratorium on the death penalty. They did a clean sweep of ancient warhorses
like me then, even though lack of funding was to blame—or so I told myself.

Much as I loved him, I was never quite able to forgive my father for risking my future, my mother’s happiness, and even justice
for Rags Keresztnévz. It’s only now that I’m old and have my own doubts and regrets to contend with that I think I might have
done the same thing. Because in those days, when almost everyone lived on the edge of poverty, we could all see a little of
ourselves in a frightened, indigent defendant like Rags.

BY KATE GALLISON

W
aitstill Winthrop smoothed his cravat and adjusted his wig, preparing to enter the courtroom, which doubled as Salem Village’s
meetinghouse, and take his place with the other judges who were to preside over Governor Phipps’s first court of Oyer and
Terminer in the case of the accused witches. Some of the nine judges were the same Salem magistrates who had first brought
the witchcraft cases forward, Judge John Hathorne for one. But the other jurists had been chosen by Governor Phipps from among
the most illustrious men of the Massachusetts Bay Colony: Nathaniel Saltonstall, Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton, and
of course Winthrop himself. Men of Boston, Harvard men, men who had been educated as Christian gentlemen, men well prepared
to deal with an assault on the Bay Colony by no less an adversary than the Devil himself. Nathaniel Saltonstall slid over
and made room for Winthrop on the bench.