Уильям Макгиверн - Summitt

The night he’d picked up Shana at Little Tenn, Barby Kane had shouted at her mother about the blanket Shana was wrapped in. “It’s already been worse places tonight...”

Casper Gideen had been convinced the preacher and Coralee had been together that night...

Where? In the Tabernacle of the Golden Flame, it must have been there. And they could have seen Earl Thomson, could identify him...

Gideen had been shot and killed because he had suspected that and was trying to prove it...

“Someone” had sent Coralee Kane down to Florida, and was arranging through a British company to bribe Goldie Boy with land and a new church in New Jersey.

Selby called Brett a last time and got another busy signal. He settled down then with his father’s diaries and sheaf of snapshots.

For the first time since they had come into his possession he felt the beginning of a sympathy for the tall, scowling young man in the cracked snapshots, some recognition and understanding of the voice that seemed to sound from the frayed old notebooks. “The hills are all climbed, the creeks are all passed...”

They were both up against something hidden and threatening, he thought. The same thing, perhaps, except a generation later...

It made Shana feel sad, even disloyal to wonder if it meant all that much to love people. Her father said, “I love you,” and she knew he meant it. Loving was sort of easy... it always was for her. It was something you didn’t really have to think about. She loved her father and she loved Davey and Mrs. Cranston and Blazer and lots of her friends and the kittens and flowers and biscuits in the morning and she’d loved her mother’s wide smile. Even the tiny gap between her mother’s front teeth, she’d loved that.

In school she’d read a poem that said, “Love loves to love love.” She’d copied it out and passed it around to her friends, and they’d smiled at it because they knew what it meant too.

But hating was hard. She didn’t really know how. She didn’t even hate Earl Thomson, even though she realized he hated her. And tomorrow she’d have to say in court the shameful, hideous things he’d done to her that would make him hate her all over again and worse than ever. And she couldn’t understand why he’d done them in the first place.

It had almost made her sick to tell Miss Brett what he’d done. She’d hardly known the words to describe it. She’d been surprised that there were actually words for it. Miss Brett had finally shown them to her in a dictionary.

Shana’s tears were cold on her face. The shadows from the trees moved across the picture of the dead Olympic athletes. She wished she could talk to her mother even for a minute, or just touch her. Or pray to someone who could answer.

Tishie had prayed all the time. She told Shana she didn’t expect the clouds to open and an old man to say nice things to her, but the answers to prayers were in the world around you, in rainbows, and in what was inside you. Shana didn’t understand or believe in Tishie’s rainbows that meant new life, as her grandmother claimed, or the songs she said she could sing again after Treblinka. But now Shana tried to pray. She spoke aloud in a clear voice, but softly so as not to wake Davey... “I wouldn’t say those things about anyone unless I knew they were true. Unless I knew... It would be better to live with the hurt and pain inside me than take the chance of being wrong. It would be too terrible to hurt anybody else by making a mistake, or accusing someone who was innocent...”

That was Shana’s prayer.

Well, she’d told the truth. Nobody could take that away from her...

She had heard the cars on Fairlee Road and Blazer’s barking, had seen the flashlight going through the woods that night...

She knew who it was and what he was looking for on the road where his speeding red car had hit her. Earl Thomson would never find it there.

“Love loves to love love...”

That’s what she’d thought. But she had heard a different truth in her own voice, a voice she hardly recognized, hoarse and bitter, on the tapes... “Mommy, I’ll kill it, it’s evil.”

Shana lifted the picture of the dead Israeli athletes away from the wall. A tissue-wrapped object was Scotch-taped to the back of the frame. She unwrapped a layer of paper from the silver swastika she’d torn from his neck when he struggled with her that awful night in the farmhouse. She held up the square cross by links of chain still attached to it and let it swing back and forth in the moonlit shadows.

His initials, e.t., were on one side and Munich — 11/9/38, on the other. Thin traces of dried blood streaked the edges that had pierced and cut the palm of her hand.

He knew he’d lost it. But he’d lie and say it was stolen, or that he’d given it away...

She wrapped the swastika and taped it in place, carefully straightening the picture. The leaves and vines that decorated it had turned dry and brittle, but the eyes of the young men were as joyously stern as when she had cut out their photographs and surrounded them with the flowers of love and honor and remembrance.

Judge Flood’s clerk said, “Place your left hand on the Bible and raise your right hand. Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you are about to give is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

“Yes, I do.”

“State your full name.”

“Shana Teresa Selby.”

“State your address.”

“Mill Lane and Fairlee Road. Muhlenburg, R.D., Pennsylvania.”

“Please be seated.”

Shana removed her hand from the Bible and took the witness stand. Her face was pale. Tiny silver clips held back her long hair. As Brett approached the stand, Judge Flood rapped his gavel to quiet a stir in the courtroom, a murmuring tension, anticipation.

When the sounds faded, Flood said, “I don’t want any disorder in this courtroom. The testimony to be given will be of an intimate and sensitive nature. Television coverage of these hearings has been suspended for the duration of plaintiff’s testimony.”

Flood raised his eyes to the crowded spectators’ gallery. “If there is any unseemly reaction to these proceedings I will order the marshals to clear the court. Your presence here is a privilege, not a right.”

Swinging around in his chair, the judge looked down at Shana. “Now, young lady, I don’t want you to be nervous. I want you to be just as relaxed as possible. Take your time answering our questions. If there is anything you don’t understand, feel perfectly free to ask the People’s attorney or myself for clarification. You understand?”

Shana nodded yes, then blushed, realizing she would have to say yes out loud so the court stenographer could record it.

“Yes, sir.”

The judge nodded to Brett. “The People may proceed.”

“Thank you, Your Honor... Shana, I’d like to go back to October sixteenth of last year, a Friday. On that day, you rode your bicycle from your house down to Fairlee Road?”

“Yes.”

Brett had positioned herself so that she could watch the judge and jury’s reactions to Shana’s responses.

“How far is it from your driveway on Mill Lane to Fairlee Road?”

“About a hundred yards, I think.”

“What time of day was it?”

“It was just getting dark. It was around five o’clock.”

“Do you ride down to Fairlee Road every afternoon?”

“No, not every afternoon. But when the weather was nice, I usually did.”

“Did you usually go alone?”

“Sometimes my brother Davey went with me. Or I took our dog—”

“But on this afternoon, you were alone?”

“Yes.”

“So what you were doing — riding your bike a hundred yards from your home — that was routine and casual after-school activity. Is that right?”