The Devil Amongst the Lawyers (17 page)

Carl Jennings arrived at the train station half an hour before the departure time. Being an early riser was the easiest way he could think of to get a reputation for being serious and hardworking, whether you deserved it or not. Today, though, all he gained from getting up at the crack of dawn was useless extra time to pace the platform in the icy wind, watching his breath make locomotive smoke in front of him.

The virtue of early rising had failed to impress his little cousin Nora, and perhaps she was right. Once, when her mother chided her for lying in bed until well past sunup, Nora said, “People who get up early are boastful in the morning and stupefied in the afternoon.”

She knew her own mind, did Nora. And sometimes other people’s, as well, he thought with a twinge of uneasiness. He wondered if she’d like a penny postcard from Abingdon. As far as he knew, she had never been there, never been anywhere. Someday he’d send her a card from Paris or Hong Kong, but right now the closest he could get to foreign parts was the Virginia side of the state line. He was about to head back across it, anyhow. The Clinchfield Railroad in its bureaucratic wisdom had decreed that the only way to get from Abingdon to Wise by train was to pass through Kingsport, Tennessee, and disembark at Norton, the next town over from Wise. It would waste a couple of hours, but since it was Sunday, he didn’t suppose the delay mattered much one way or the other.

The little café near his hotel served up a cut-price breakfast of runny eggs and buttermilk pancakes, and he’d stuffed himself, and then he drank as much sweet milky coffee as he could hold, hoping to make the morning meal last him until suppertime, to save time and money on the journey. If the trains were running on schedule, he should reach Wise by early afternoon, and then he hoped to persuade the jailer to let him interview the prisoner.

She wasn’t much older than he was, and he thought they had a deal of things in common: two clever mountain young’uns who had taken themselves off to college with more grit than money to see them through. Maybe on the strength of that she would see him as a kindred spirit, and talk to him. Maybe, if he was careful not to treat her like a criminal or a celebrity, she would trust him enough to explain what had happened on that night in July when her father died.

That was a journalist’s pipe dream, he told himself. He would never trust a sympathetic stranger with the time of day, much less a murder confession. The more Erma Morton was like him, the less she’d be inclined to confide in him.

It was important, though. He was young and inexperienced, and the editor had made it plain that he was taking a chance to send him on this story at all. If he didn’t succeed, he might never get anywhere.

He turned his thoughts back to the defendant, wondering what she minded most about her imprisonment: the shame of being arrested, the loss of privacy, or being forever indoors in cramped confinement. Carl thought he would not have minded the lack of solitude, but he knew that for most of his mountain neighbors, a prolonged confinement indoors would have constituted torture. The mountain people spent as much time as they could outdoors—working, hunting, gardening, walking wherever they needed to go. They would languish like caged animals if you shut them away from the seasons. But Carl was different. To hear his family tell it, he had stuck his nose in a book from the time he could lift one, and he
would have considered it no punishment at all to be locked in a small room alone with a stack of books. It would be a long time before he missed people in general. At least the ones you found in books made sense.

BY THE TIME THE SKY LIGHTENED
to pewter, outlining the silhouettes of the buildings across Main Street, Henry Jernigan had been awake for hours. He always repacked his suitcase before he went to bed, leaving out only his toilet articles and the next day’s clothing, so that in the event of an emergency, or, even less likely, if he overslept, he could vacate his hotel room in a matter of minutes. Now, enveloped in the black silk
juban,
he sat in front of the window, tapping his pen as he counted the scrawled words in his notebook.

He had not slept well in the cold room. The surrounding mountains had conjured up ghosts of other mountains: the spine of Honshu, with majestic Fuji towering in the distance. It had begun as a pleasant dream, but he fought his way to the surface of consciousness, knowing what was coming next. So he got up. A morning walk in the predawn chill did not appeal to him, and since the Martha’s dining room would not open for two more hours, he was left with but one alternative: work.

He decided to write a preliminary description of the town of Wise and its citizens. Just as well to get that out of the way, so that when he actually got there, he could concentrate on the trial itself.

When it was full daylight, he would walk down to the train depot and telegraph this first dispatch before meeting Shade and Rose to depart for Wise. Telegraphed stories always required a judicious mix of satisfying information coupled with an economy of verbiage. Western Union charged by the word; editors frowned upon prolix articles sent by wire. He would confine his remarks to three hundred words or so, mostly background and local color, which he felt he could do
in his sleep, but, even so, it took him the better part of an hour to frame the story to his satisfaction. A pot of coffee might have speeded up the process, but he managed without one.

With a white steepled church, whose spire falls short of the dark encircling mountains, an imposing courthouse, and white clapboard storefronts facing a (
long main street? Village green? Picturing the villages of New England, he opted for the latter)
rustic village green, the little town of Wise, Virginia, conjures up images of Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence, and—perhaps less fortuitously—the young and beautiful Hester Prynne, unjustly marked with a scarlet letter, as another young woman in this twentieth-century village has been branded an outcast and a sinner.

Time has passed by Wise, Virginia, as surely as did the opposing armies of the War Between the States, who confined their gallant endeavors to the wide swath of valley to the south of these fortress-like mountains. But no matter how narrow the pass or how remote the settlement, Death always finds a way in. In this sleepy little village, where cows wander down the main street, and where life drifts along in a rustic haze, punctuated by the seasons, a man has been struck down, and, as ever in primitive societies, blood calls for blood.
(Strictly speaking Pollock Morton did not live in Wise, but in a smaller village a few miles away, but Henry decided that economy of words and poetic license trumped strict accuracy.)

In just such a bucolic hamlet, a few centuries back and a few states farther north, there was another cry for innocent blood in the name of righteousness. Those innocent maidens of Salem, Massachusetts . . .
(How had the witches of Salem been put to death? Burned at the stake? Stoned? Hanged? Henry made a note in the text for the editor to check this point
before sending the article to press.) . . .
done to death by METHOD—
check on this! HJ—
would no doubt weep sympathetic tears for their imprisoned sister in adversity, Erma Morton, languishing in a dank prison cell, friendless and forlorn . . . Sometimes, be it in rose-covered cottages or shambling frontier cabins, the most peaceful-looking country town can harbor dark secrets, cold suspicions, and uncharitable hearts.

That was a good stopping place, he thought. It set the stage for future dispatches. Henry looked at his watch. It was nearly time to leave, and he still had a few articles to repack. He had not allowed himself time to go back to the train station, which also served as the telegraph office. No need for that. He could leave the article and some money at the front desk, and they would see that it reached its destination. Henry had been favorably impressed with Abingdon. He doubted that Wise would offer any comparable amenities.

“THIS TRIP IS GOING TO TAKE
forever, fellas. What do you say we review our notes as we go?” Rose Hanelon, ensconced in the passenger seat of the Ford Tudor, had opened her briefcase and was now sitting in a paper nest of scribblings.

A mummified Shade Baker sat behind the wheel, enveloped in his wool overcoat, leather gloves, and two mufflers. “I can listen while I drive, Rose, but you’ll have to chair the proceedings. Say, can you fiddle with the knob of that heater? It feels like I’m sitting on a block of ice here.”

Rose leaned forward and twiddled the knob that allowed hot air from the motor to flow back into the car. “Henry! Can you hear us all right back there?”

Henry, who had been staring out the window at the distant
mountains, roused himself and peered over the seat. “Carry on, Rose. I will endeavor to pay attention. Do you intend to solve the case before we reach our destination?”

“I don’t see why not,” said Rose. “But even if we don’t, we’d better have a good grasp of what the facts are. It’ll save time when the trial gets going. Get the names sorted out, and the order of events. Plus we can compare what people tell us to the official story.”

Shade Baker smiled. “Well, I don’t aspire to be a court stenographer, Rose, but you go ahead and rehash the facts to your heart’s content. It’ll pass the time. Just don’t bury the map under all those notes. If I take a wrong turn, we may never find our way back.”

Rose retrieved the map from the floor and passed it back to Henry. “I hereby appoint you navigator, sir. Will you be able to read the road signs?”

“How optimistic of you to assume that there’ll be any,” Henry intoned.

“All right, let’s start with the defendant herself. Erma Morton. Twenty-one years old. Pretty girl. Schoolteacher. Got a college degree and then went back home to live with her folks.”

“There’s the material for an insanity defense, right there,” said Shade.

“Dutiful daughter,” said Henry. “ ‘Honor thy father and thy mother.’ The gentle Cordelia, straight out of
Lear
. Quite proper, I should think.”

“Not all that proper.” Rose peered at another page of smeared jottings. “Some of the local papers dropped hints that she had a mind of her own, to say the least. Went out drinking at roadhouses . . . stayed out later than she should have. . . . Have you got a literary reference for that, Henry?”

He considered it. “Hans Christian Anderson springs to mind. A swan raised among ducks is harshly judged.”

Shade laughed. “How about Aesop, Henry? A wolf in sheep’s clothing doesn’t fit too well into the flock, either.”

“So this swanlike wolf is living at home, teaching school, sowing a few wild oats—”

“A kid’ll eat ivy, too. Wouldn’t you?”
Shade sang, his eyes still fixed on the road.

“I’m ignoring that, Shade. So . . . we come to the night in question. Late July, so it stays light until nine o’clock or so, and Erma Morton goes out with some friends. She comes home past midnight, and her old man has been drinking. He gets shirty about her being out until all hours. They have words. And—she bashes in his head with her shoe?”

In the backseat Henry sighed and spread his hands. “People do unaccountable things, Rose.”

“Not in the newspaper they don’t. Readers expect logic. We’re going to keep at this until it makes some kind of sense. Hey, Shade, you’re from some one-horse burg on the Great Plains. How does it look to you?”

Shade slowed down to let a skinny hound dog amble out of the road. “The way you put it, I’d say you’re missing some pieces of the puzzle. I don’t say it didn’t happen, mind you—just that we’re missing facts that would allow us to make sense of it. But what do I care? If she’s pretty enough to look like a helpless heroine in my photographs, I’ll believe anything she tells me.”

“Self-defense,” said Henry, tapping the seat with his glove. “The poor frightened girl is accosted by her drunken father, crazed with inebriated rage, and to save herself—better yet,
to save her dear mother—
she tries to fight him off, but, alas, the blow she struck in frantic self-defense finds its mark all too well, and, tragically, her tormenter dies.”

Rose rustled her notes. “Save it for the paying customers, Henry. Hold on a minute. There’s something in here about her story changing. When she was first questioned, she told the cops that her father had fallen and hit his head on the butcher block on the back porch.”

“She’d better be a raving beauty,” said Shade. “Changing her story. So she lied about what happened. That’s a bad sign. Say, that’s a right smart view off there to the left, Rose. Look at the way that red-brown field of rye grass stretches out until it touches the foot of that mountain. See the colors on the slope there? Bare silver branches and clumps of evergreen, and here and there some gold leaves that haven’t yet fallen. Pretty as a penny postcard. Mind if I stop and take a couple of shots?”

“Yes,” said Henry. “It takes you forever to get out your equipment, to decide upon the optimum shot, and then to take far too many variations of it. I’d like to get to this benighted village before midnight, and if you stop to take pictures of every stand of trees we pass, we’ll be lucky to make it there by Christmas.”

Rose nodded. “Henry has a point, Shade. You’ll need daylight to photograph the village. Anyhow, all those pretty colors wouldn’t show up in your picture. Newspapers only do black and white, so what’s the use?”

“Well, it would give folks an idea of what the land was like around here.”

“They can get that from the
Trail of the Lonesome Pine
movie.”

“Which is being shot in California, Rose.”

“You’ve seen one tree, you’ve seen ’em all. Folks will never know the difference. But maybe taking some local color shots wouldn’t be a bad idea. If you pass a pigsty or some ramshackle farmhouses, you might take a shot of them. Line up a bunch of dirty children in rags on a sagging wooden porch, and that would be a money shot for sure.”

“Look at that big place on the left.” Henry leaned forward and tapped on the window, indicating a trim white-columned mansion on the brow of a hill. “Wonder who lives there.”