Brian Freeman - Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7)

Doubt.

But was it really doubt?

He looked at the facts the others saw and knew the truth. Yes, Janine did it. He was grasping for reasons to believe otherwise, but she did it. Even so, could he really be the one to convict her? She deserved better than Jay Ferris. She was a hero. A life-saver. A beautiful woman. If she saw no other way to escape that despicable man, could he really call it a crime?

They would poll the jury. They always did. They would ask each of them to verify their verdict to the court. He would have to say it out loud. He would have to say it in front of her, so that she knew he’d betrayed her.

Could he do that?

Eleanor was watching him. So were the others. It was as if she could see tectonic plates shifting inside his mind.

‘Let’s take another vote,’ Eleanor said quietly. ‘Guilty or not guilty.’

And so it began. He listened to each voice, man and woman, old and young. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. They went around the room, and each one announced their decision, free of doubt, free of hesitation. They weren’t burdened by what they were doing to her. They weren’t shamed by the thought of a good woman brought to this moment by a bad man.

Guilty.

Guilty.

On and on.

As it had each time, it came down to him. He sat in silence, while they waited for him. He tried to open his mouth, but despite the water, he was dry. His voice caught in his throat. He thought the world was spinning; he wanted to throw up.

‘Howard?’ Eleanor asked him.

He needed to speak. Guilty or not guilty.

He saw Janine’s face. Her blue eyes. The curve of her lips. There was one person between her and her fate. Himself. Him and his strength. If he surrendered, there was no one.

Eleanor met his eyes.

‘Howard?’

Miller Hill Mall was a blur.

It was a summer afternoon. Sun burned through the skylights, making orange reflections on the cool squares of tile. Cindy heard Rick Springfield singing through the overhead speakers, but young laughter drowned out most of his music. The food court was thick with teenagers. Girls giggled and screamed. Boys with newly changed voices shouted. They ran and pushed around her table.

So many people. Duluth was a small city, but it had always felt busy to her. Normally she thrived on dense crowds, but recently she’d found herself enjoying remote, empty spaces. Alaska was like that. She and Jonny had flown over glaciers and forests where there was nothing human at all, only thousands of miles without civilization, untouched and unspoiled. It was a place, like the Canadian wilderness to the north of them, owned by the animals and the earth, not the people. The loneliness and sheer size of it made her feel small, but sometimes small was a good thing. She didn’t mind being small.

She smelled caramel corn mixing with the garlic of tomato sauce and the sweetness of baking bread. The air conditioning couldn’t keep up with the heat of the day, and she felt warm in her long-sleeve red blouse and jeans. Her black hair felt like a coat on her shoulders, so she pushed it back.

Her plate of Chinese food wouldn’t go down. She picked at it, but she had no appetite. Instead, she drank Aquafina from a plastic bottle.

She kept thinking about Janine. She didn’t begrudge her friend her weaknesses as a human being. Some people dealt with pressure by taking pills. Some people drank. Some people didn’t deal with it at all. In the end, it was the same. The shame of it was knowing that Janine had a gift, and her gift was wasted now. She remembered meeting a young mother and her son in Janine’s office, a little boy with a zipper scar on his chest and his whole life in front of him because of what Janine had done for him. His was one story among hundreds of patients who owed their lives to her.

And yet what did it do to someone to know that people lived or died because of you? Cindy knew what it had done to Janine. It had made her an addict. Maybe it had made her a killer, too. She’d been so jealous of Janine’s coolness that she didn’t realize how many cracks riddled the ice queen.

She found herself watching the young people in the mall. They always made her smile. Every generation had to make the same mistakes, had to get it wrong before getting it right. They blundered on, innocent, happy, foolish. She saw a boy and girl at a table near her. Both of them looked to be about sixteen. Definitely dating. They shared a Blizzard from Dairy Queen with two spoons, and they leaned across and kissed.

That had been her and Jonny ages ago. Two teenagers in love. Cindy tried not to be too obvious about watching them, but something about their cute preoccupation with each other made it hard to look away. Mooning eyes. Whispers. Touches.

The boy checked his watch, made a noise like, ‘Oh, no!’ He had to go. He slung his backpack onto his arm, kissed the girl again, kissed her several times more, and then jogged to the exit with a wave. He disappeared into the parking lot. The girl was on her own, missing him already. Maybe it would last, and maybe it wouldn’t. It would be a summer romance, or, like her and Jonny, it would be a lifetime thing.

Cindy wondered what the girl’s name was, and almost on cue, another teenager shouted and waved. ‘Hey, Laura!’

Laura. Her own sister’s name. There were always little twists of fate like that.

Laura, the girl in the mall, had golden brown hair with bangs. The shape of her eyes made Cindy think that the girl had Asian blood in her. She wore a white T-shirt, which slid off one scrawny shoulder. Her lipstick was pale and pink. She twisted a cheap ring around one finger, and Cindy figured that the boy had given it to her. Laura pulled a book from her purse and began reading. One of the Harry Potter series. That was the craze. Laura popped gum in her mouth as she read, chewed, blew a bubble, popped it. When she saw Cindy watching her, she gave her a big, bright smile, and Cindy smiled back.

You saw people, and then you never saw them again. Have a nice life, Laura.

Watching the young girl, Cindy finally decided she’d been putting something off for too long. She grabbed her phone and dialed and held a hand over her ear. Steve Garske was her doctor, and she expected to get his nurse, but she got the man himself. Steve and Jonny were old friends. Tall, gangly, sweet, heck of a guitar player. His clinic was small, and if no one was around, he answered his own phone.

‘Appointment time, Steve,’ Cindy said.

‘You want me to figure out my own calendar system?’ Steve asked in dismay. ‘Okay, hang on. How about next week? Thursday?’

‘Perfect.’ She wrote down the date and time and felt better.

Then Steve said: ‘Everything okay?’

If everything was okay, you answered right away, and when she didn’t, his voice slid down an octave. ‘Cin?’

‘I–I don’t know.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘Well, there’s pain sometimes.’ She lowered her voice and cupped a hand in front of her mouth. ‘Sharp pain between my legs. I’ve been nauseated, too. Throwing up.’

‘When did this start?’

‘Winter.’

She expected the lecture. You’re only calling me now? You let this go on and did nothing? He didn’t need to chastise her, because she’d said all those things to herself. ‘Well, I’ll see you in a few days,’ he told her. ‘We’ll check it out.’

‘Thanks. Nothing to Jonny about this, right?’

‘Of course.’

She hung up. Tears welled in her eyes. She stared at the young girl in the mall, Laura. The girl with her sister’s name. She tried to make herself smile again, watching this sweet teenager who was in love and learning about sex and reading about boy wizards. What a great life.