“What are—” we both started, then laughed again. I gestured at him. You go.
“I’m here for a funeral, unfortunately. How about you?”
I felt my heart race. “Not for Catherine McCall, by any chance?”
David stopped walking and turned to stare at me, thunderstruck. My husband’s name is David. “Yes, actually. She’s my great-aunt.”
That weekend, in the house where I was once as much a stranger to myself as I was to the man I thought I would marry, I got to know the one I did.
* * *
But before that charmed reunion could happen, before my father walked me down the aisle asking if I’d heard the one about the divorce lawyer who gets married （something about the wedding qualifying as a billable hour）， and after the difficult pregnancy that resulted in the daughter who made me go easier on my mother, I still had the trial to get through. And The Defendant seemed hell-bent on dragging it out as long as legally possible.
I was descending Columbia’s Low Library steps, on one of those crisp East Coast April days that feels more like fall than spring, when I passed another first-year who lived on my hall. “Oh, Pamela!” she cried without slowing down. “There’s a message for you back at the dorm. The guy said it was important.”
I pivoted on the spot, shielding the sun from my eyes in what looked like a salute. “Do you remember his name?” I called up to her.
“Pearl something!” she yelled before the Ionic-style columns absorbed her.
When I arrived at the dorm, the hair at the back of my neck was damp with sweat. I knew of only one man with the last name Pearl. He didn’t call about important matters; his calls were a matter of life or death.
“This is Pamela Schumacher,” I said to the receptionist at the state attorney’s office in Tallahassee.
“One moment, please.”
I bounced on my toes anxiously while I waited for the prosecutor to come to the phone. Henry Pearl and I had yet to meet in person, but that would soon change, since we’d officially entered the discovery phase of The Defendant’s trial.
“Afternoon, Pamela,” Mr. Pearl said in a brusque voice that made my throat go dry.
“The message said it was important.”
“I have good news and bad news. Which do you want—”
“Bad.”
Mr. Pearl coughed and cleared his throat. “I received notice of your deposition. It’s scheduled in two weeks’ time at the Leon County Jail, which can mean only one thing.”
The Defendant would be the one to depose me. That was the only thing it could mean—because traditionally, depositions take place in a courthouse or law office by licensed attorneys who do not harbor a penchant for bludgeoning dozens of women to death.
It felt like the old brick dormitory on Amsterdam Avenue was swaying. I put my hand to the wall, feeling the pulse of its pipes, the vibrations of the new album from the Cars. A guy upstairs listened to it on repeat every day that spring quarter. “Does that mean Farmer’s out?”
“That is the good news,” Mr. Pearl said more buoyantly.
The famed Millard Farmer of Atlanta had a federal charge of contempt on his record. He’d had to file a special request to represent The Defendant in an out-of-state trial, and Mr. Pearl was calling to tell me that the judge had denied it. The Defendant would go on to accept and reject the same team of public defenders right up until the first day of the pretrial. People talk about him representing himself like he was the only one on his side of the counsel table. But if that had been the case, I would have had nothing to worry about. He would have drowned in his own ignorant hubris.
“Listen,” Mr. Pearl said, “whatever you’re hearing about The Defendant’s capabilities as an attorney, they’ve been grossly exaggerated. I watched the same display as your journalist friend, and frankly”—he laughed cynically—“I’m wondering if we attended the same hearing.”
The Defendant Making Judicial Gains had been Carl’s headline in the Tallahassee Democrat, to which I must have been the only New Yorker who subscribed. Carl was in the courtroom to cover The Defendant’s request for a delay to the trial, better lighting in his cell, and more hours of exercise. The Defendant was photographed with one ass cheek on the counsel table, wearing a tan suit and glancing down at his notes while he made his argument. Carl wrote that he “appeared relaxed and confident in his own defense—asking articulate, well-contemplated legal questions in a calm, deliberate voice.” The “fit young man,” Carl noted, had “succeeded in putting the prosecution on the defense.”