James PATTERSON - Alex Cross’s Trial

Miss Fanny went to meet him. Through the window to the kitchen I saw the two of them in serious conversation, the boy gesticulating wildly.

I waited until Miss Fanny came back out front, then lifted my finger for more coffee. She brought the tin pot over to me.

“What’s the trouble?” I said.

“Big trouble,” she said quietly. “Seems like there was another hangin’ party last night.”

I kept my voice low. “You mean… a lynching?”

“Two of ’em,” she said.

I TOOK ANOTHER SIP of coffee and noticed that my hand was shaking some. Then I folded my napkin and headed back through the kitchen as if I intended to visit the privy. On the way I detoured to the side of the room where the boy stood over a sinkful of dirty dishes.

“What happened, son?” I said. “Please, tell me everything.” At first the boy just stared at me without speaking a word. Fanny came up behind us. “It’s okay, Leroy. This here’s Mr. Corbett. He’s all right to talk to.”

At last the boy spoke. “You know who is Annie?” he said. “The one cook for Miz Dickinson? She got a girl, Flossie, little older than me?”

I didn’t know who he was talking about, but I nodded so he would continue.

“Well, it was that Mr. Young,” he said, “Mr. Jasper Young.”

I knew Jasper Young, who owned the hardware and feed stores. He was a quiet, grandfatherly man who exercised some influence behind the scenes in Eudora.

“What does Jasper Young have to do with it?”

“I can’t say.” The boy stared down at his dishes.

“Why not?”

He shot a look at Miss Fanny. “Lady present.”

“Aw, now, come on, Leroy. Not one thing in this world you can’t say in front of me!”

He wiggled and resisted, but at last he turned his eyes away from Fanny and fixed them on me.

“Mr. Young want some lovin’ from Flossie. She didn’t want to go along with it. So he… he force the love out of her.”

What an incredible way to put it.

He force the love out of her.

The rest of the boy’s story came quickly.

Flossie had told her mother of the rape. Annie told her husband. Within minutes, her husband and son, crazed with rage, broke into Jasper Young’s home. They smashed china and overturned a table. Then they beat Jasper Young with their fists.

A neighbor summoned a neighbor who summoned another neighbor. Within an hour, no more than that, Annie’s husband and her son were hanging from ropes in the swamp behind the Quarter.

“Where are they, exactly?” I asked the boy.

“Out by Frog Creek.”

That was not the place I’d visited with Abraham, but I knew where it was.

I practically ran all the way back to Maybelle’s. I didn’t ask if I could borrow the bicycle, I just climbed on and rode out the old McComb Road, toward the swamp.

Toward Frog Creek.

I CAME UPON A VISION of horror, all too real. Two men, one young, one older, naked and bloody, dangling from ropes. Already the smell of rotting flesh was rising in the morning heat. Flies were on the bodies.

On the ground beneath the stiff, hanging bodies, amid the cigar butts and discarded whiskey bottles, sat a woman and child. The woman was about thirty-five years old. The boy was no more than four. He was touching the woman’s face, touching the tears on her cheeks.

The woman saw me and her face furrowed over in rage. “You go on, now,” she shouted. “They already dead. You cain’t do no more to hurt ’em.”

I walked closer and she drew the boy to her, as if to protect him from me.

“I’m not going to hurt anybody,” I said. “I’m a friend.”

She shook her head fiercely. No .

I wanted to comfort her terrible sobbing, but I stayed back. “Are you Annie?”

She nodded.

Now that I was close to the dangling bodies, I saw the welts left by whips, the bloody wounds covering almost every part of their bodies. The older man’s arm hung down from his shoulder by a few bloody tendons. As the younger man slowly twisted, I saw that his testicles had been severed from his body.

My voice finally came out choked. “Oh, I am so sorry.”

I noticed a pink, rubbery thing in her hand, something she kept stroking with her finger as she wept.

She saw me looking. “You want to know what it is? It’s my Nathan’s tongue. They done cut his tongue out of his head. Stop him from sassin’ them.”

I looked up. Blood was thickly caked around the older man’s mouth.

“Oh, Jesus!”

“Ain’t no Jesus,” she said. “There ain’t no Jesus for me.”

She wept so terribly I could not hold myself back. I knelt by her in the clearing.

For a moment all was quiet, but for her sobbing.

Then a noise. A rustling in the underbrush, a crackling of twigs. I saw birds fly up in alarm.

Someone was there.

No doubt about it.

Someone was watching us .

And then out came several people, some men but also women, black people from the Quarters come to cut down the father and son who had been murdered.

COULD ANYONE POSSIBLY PEDAL a bicycle as slowly as I did going back to Eudora?

I looked all around me. Although my little town still looked much as it had when I was a boy, now it was stained and tattered almost beyond recognition.

Now the whole place was poisoned by torture and murder. The proof was still swinging from that oak tree out by the banks of Frog Creek. I thought about going to the police, but what good would it do? And besides, it would raise the question of why I had gone out to the scene of the lynchings.

“You all soakin’ wet,” Maybelle said as I trudged up onto her porch. “Set here with me and have a lemonade.”

I put myself in a porch rocker and prepared to be disappointed, but the lemonade was cold, sweet, delicious.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Maybelle said. “You had a visitor while you were gone. Senator Nottingham’s wife.”

“Elizabeth? Did she leave any message?”

“No, she said she would stop by again. But that reminds me, I know how much stock you put in getting the mail, and you did get some today. I put it in the front hall.”

On the hall table was a square, cream-colored envelope with my name written in Meg’s delicate hand.

I took the stairs two at a time. Inside my room, I removed my jacket and settled into the chair at the window for a good read.

Dear Ben,

I know I ought to be ashamed for not having written sooner. The girls have done very little else but remind me. They have pestered me about you night and day. But I’ve been busy doing almost all the housekeeping, because Mazie had to go up to Trenton on account of her sister has been “ill.”

Do not worry about me. Other than sore muscles from wringing out the wash and from scrubbing the floors in the house, I am in good physical shape.

These opening lines filled me with joy. My wife was still my wife. My fears were unjustified. The letter sounded so much like her – the teasing complaints, the emphatic descriptions, even the hint that she regarded Mazie’s sister’s problem as nothing more than a love of the grape.

Later on, when I reflected on this moment, I wished I had stopped reading at that point.

Ben, I might as well get to the point. I have suffered and wept many nights over this. Finally I have reached my decision. There is no reason for me to delay the pain for both of us, and pain there will surely be when I tell you what is in my heart.

I think it would be best for all involved if I move back in with my father.