“Now,” Bernadette said, surveying the scene at our feet. “Where do you suppose we go?”
I looked back down at the bench to see that while Carl’s colleagues were still there, Carl had gone. He’d seen me, I knew.
Bernadette flagged down a police officer, who took us to another police officer, who took us to the chambers of a judge whose secretary found the bailiff, who showed us to the witness room on the second floor. Eileen was already there, along with another young woman with strawberry-blond hair pulled off her face in a clashing peach headband, the hearing aid in her left ear strategically on display for the jurors. It was Sally Donoghue, the FSU senior who’d been asleep in her off-campus apartment on Dunwoody Street when The Defendant crawled through the kitchen window and landed six blows to her head before the neighbors came to her rescue. That morning, she was still walking with a cane.
“I brought goodies,” I said. “Sally, can I make you a plate? We have fruit, muffins, yogurt.”
“Oh, bless you,” Eileen said. She was helping me unpack the shopping bag and had come across the real creamer. “The coffee here is putrid.”
* * *
The trial revealed to me things I knew and things I did not. Eileen had lost teeth, I knew, but I learned the approximate number was nine. I knew her jaw had to be wired shut, but I didn’t know how long （seven weeks, plus another six, after the doctors discovered it wasn’t healing correctly and had no choice but to rebreak it）。 I knew Jill didn’t remember the attack, but I didn’t know that her first memory occurred in the back of the ambulance, when the EMTs were trying to cut off her pajama top and she came to pleading with them not to. I had no idea that her finger was nearly severed in half, and because of that, she had lost an opal ring given to her by her grandmother. To this day, that ring has never been recovered.
These were not things that the girls would have talked about unless they were compelled to under oath. They wouldn’t have wanted people to pity them or think they were complaining. Nobody liked a complainer, and we wanted so much for people to think well of us.
A grisly day of tearful testimony, Carl’s story would read the next morning, but still no word from the state’s only eyewitness.
I waited around all day as the witnesses were led into the courtroom by the bailiff, one by one, until it was just me, acid-mouthed from drinking too much of the putrid courthouse coffee.
“Won’t you sit, Pamela?” Eileen begged four hours in. “You’re making me nervous.”
But I couldn’t risk wrinkling my dress. The judge was allowing cameras in the courtroom, and it seemed a matter of life or death that no one caught the star witness without so much as a hair out of place.
In the end it didn’t matter, because court was adjourned and the bailiff was telling me it was time to go home, reminding me not to read the papers or watch the news until I had testified. Tina would collect all the headlines from that week and save them for me to read, something I wouldn’t do until well after the trial ended, out of some bizarre sense of superstition.
I walked through the lobby on tiptoe, straining my eyes to locate Mr. Pearl. Why hadn’t I been called to the stand? I was scheduled to fly back to New York the following morning. Did I need to change my flight? I was externing at a firm in Midtown that summer, and I’d used all of my excused absences to make the trip for the trial.
“Pamela!” Mr. Pearl had found me first. I turned to see him hurrying toward me at a forward-leaning angle, as if walking uphill, his briefcase latched but corners of paper sticking out of the seams. I focused on those shards of papers, a pit in my stomach. He had closed it in a hurry.
“You need to go back to your hotel room,” he said the moment he was within earshot, “and not watch the news or read anything, and just wait to hear from me. Can you do that?” He put one hand on my shoulder in a consoling gesture.
“Yes, but—”
“I have to get to Judge Lambert’s chambers. Right now. But I need you to do that for me. Okay?”
I nodded. Okay. “But my flight is tomorrow and—”
“Don’t change it for now.”
Panic constricted my lungs. Don’t change it? “But if I don’t change my flight, I won’t be able to give my testimony.”
Mr. Pearl squeezed my shoulder harder, not comfortingly but out of frustration. “Please, just—I’ll explain as soon as I can.”
I watched him go, my shoulder throbbing.
* * *