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  “They left without further incident?”

  “Grant was wailing. Hunter was cowering against one of the fathers there. I think their frightened reactions bothered Jeremy. And he was aware that everyone was witness to his grip on my arm, the shaking. I think he might have felt ashamed. I’m guessing. I don’t know. In any case, he let go of me.

  “When Mr. Strong told him he ought to do something about me and my ‘smart mouth’—that’s a quote—Jeremy told him to shut up and to mind his own business. With an expletive. Then he opened the front door and shoved Mr. Strong out onto the porch. Mr. Strong cursed him, and I believe he would have retaliated if—”

  “Objection.”

  “Sustained.”

  Jackson asked quickly, “Did Mr. Strong retaliate to Mr. Wesson’s shove?”

  “No. He was too unsteady on his feet. He staggered off the steps and nearly fell down. Jeremy grabbed Mrs. Strong’s hand and pulled her behind him through the door. The two men were angrily pushing and shoving each other as they made their way to Jeremy’s car parked at the curb. I shut the door and didn’t see anything more. When the police arrived, they were gone.”

  Jackson returned to the table to once again consult his notes, probably unnecessarily. He was letting his witness take a breather and giving the jury time to imagine the scene and the antagonism that obviously had existed between the two so-called friends.

  Ms. Nolan took a sip from her glass of water. Even from the back of the room where Dawson sat, he could see that her hand was trembling.

  As Jackson walked toward her, he frowned and slid his hands into his pants pockets, looking rueful, as though regretting the direction his questioning was about to take. “Ms. Nolan, you had a second encounter with Willard Strong, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “When was that?”

  “The third of May last year.”

  “Again, you remember the exact date.”

  “Yes.”

  She lowered her head, causing a loose strand of hair to fall against her cheek. Absently she reached up and tucked it behind her ear. Dawson wondered if that was a nervous gesture, specific to these circumstances, or if it was an unconscious habit with her. He would bet the latter.

  “Ms. Nolan, why do you remember that date with such clarity?”

  When she raised her head to answer Jackson’s question, Dawson realized that he, along with most everyone else in the courtroom, including the accused, was leaning forward in anticipation of her answer.

  She cleared her throat delicately. “That was the day Mrs. Strong and Jeremy went missing.”

  Chapter 3

  Jackson asked her to describe that day.

  “It started out like any other weekday. I dropped the boys off at their preschool at Saint Thomas Episcopal Church and went to work.”

  “You work at the Collier War Museum?”

  “I’m a curator. I specialize in the Civil War.”

  “It’s a full-time job?”

  “Yes, but the museum allows me a lot of flexibility, which, as a single parent, I require.”

  “On that day of May third, did anything out of the ordinary happen to alert you to what was coming?”

  “Nothing. Not until I got a call from the school. It came shortly after one o’clock in the afternoon. The museum director, George Metcalf, and I were in his office.”

  * * *

  “Because, George, it’s crap.”

  “Humor him, Amelia. Humor me.”

  “It has no value. Either on the open market or to the museum.”

  “That may be.”

  “Not ‘may be.’ Is.”

  “Okay. It’s little more than a trinket. The Confederate Army handed out hundreds—”

  “Thousands.”

  “Thousands of them. But the medal is valuable to Patterson Knox. It came down through his family from his great-great-great-grand something or another, and he’s named after that particular ancestor. I don’t need to remind you—”

  “But you’re about to.”

  “—that Patterson Knox contributed over one hundred thousand dollars to us last year. Mrs. Knox is—”

  “On our board of directors. I’m not stupid, George. I get it. It’s just that you and I approach these issues from different directions. As a curator, it’s my job to protect the integrity of the museum.”

  “That’s my priority, too.”

  “Yes, but as director you must also pander to people who keep our doors open. It galls me to display junk in order to ensure that a large donor continues donating.”

  “I hear you. But—”

  “Never mind. I recognize a dead end when I run into one. I don’t concede defeat, but I acknowledge the futility of further argument, which I believe you had won even before it commenced. However, I had to give it my best shot.”

  “I would expect nothing less from you. Put Mr. Knox’s medal in a corner somewhere.”

  “With a spotlighted brass plaque extolling his and Mrs. Knox’s generosity?”

  “It doesn’t have to be a large one.”

  * * *

  Continuing her testimony, she said, “We’d just concluded our meeting when my cell phone rang. I recognized the school’s number and answered immediately. It was Mrs. Abernathy, the headmistress. She was extremely upset.”

  “Why?”

  “A man had come to the school, barged his way into her office—”

  “Objection. Hearsay.”

  Lem Jackson countered. The judge ruled in his favor and Amelia was asked to continue.

  “The man demanded to know if Jeremy had been to the school that day. He hadn’t, but Mrs. Abernathy had difficulty convincing him of that. Finally he left, but only after she threatened to call the police.”

  Jackson reminded the jury that Mrs. Abernathy earlier had testified to the same, and that she had identified Willard Strong as the irate man. He then asked Amelia if it had been her ex-husband’s habit to visit Hunter and Grant at the school.

  “No. To my knowledge he’d never gone there, not even on visitation days. Our divorce had become final. Given the incident at the birthday party, his visits with the boys were supervised. He resented that, bitterly, and hoped to have the restriction revoked. But in the meantime, he was adhering to it.”

  “Did this call from the school’s headmistress alarm you, Ms. Nolan?”

  “To put it mildly. When she described the man to me, I recognized him as Willard Strong. My knee-jerk reaction was to go immediately to the school. But Mrs. Abernathy assured me that Hunter and Grant were in her office, that they were safe, and that they knew nothing about the incident.

  “Nevertheless, I wanted to see them myself and make certain that they were all right. Mrs. Abernathy offered to personally deliver them to me at home. I left the museum immediately to meet her there.”

  “Did you talk to anyone?”

  “I tried to reach Jeremy. I wanted to know what was going on. But my repeated calls to his cell phone went straight to voice mail. I also tried his workplace. I was told he had called in sick that morning. No one at the construction firm had seen or heard from him since the day before.”

  “You went home?”

  “That’s right.”

  * * *

  In terms of mileage, the museum wasn’t that far from her townhouse, but it seemed to take forever to cover the distance. The streets were familiar, so she could drive them without having to concentrate. But that only allowed her mind to spin wildly with chilling thoughts. Jeremy’s relationship with Willard and Darlene Strong was obviously volatile, and the possibility of it endangering her sons to any extent and on any level was untenable.

  Would she have to get a restraining order after all? Should she appeal to the family-court judge to deny Jeremy all visitation rights until he got himself sorted out? Perhaps a drastic move like that would wake him up to how self-destructive his behavior had become. Maybe withholding his sons would compel him to seek treatment, to get
counseling, before he completely ruined his life.

  Such were her thoughts as she pulled onto Jones Street, which looked absurdly placid. Enormous live-oak trees cast welcome shade onto the sidewalks buckled by their roots.

  After moving out of the house where she and the boys had experienced so many unhappy times, she’d leased the townhouse. The walled courtyard provided a safe place for the boys to play. The neighbors watched out for one another. Until she decided where she wanted to settle, it was a comfortable and convenient stopgap.

  To her disappointment, Mrs. Abernathy hadn’t yet arrived. She turned in to the narrow, oyster-shell driveway and followed it along the side of the building to her parking space in back. She alighted quickly, climbed the steps, and unlocked the back door, which opened directly into the kitchen. Her alarm started beeping. It sounded unusually loud, and it took her a frustrating three tries before she punched in the correct sequence of numbers to turn it off.

  When it stopped, her ears continued to ring—the only sound she heard above the portentous silence that pressed itself against her eardrums. All her sensory receptors seemed heightened to a thousand times greater than their normal capacity. Because there was no motion or sound, the absence of stimuli was deeply disturbing. It bespoke the void her life would be without her sons in it.

  The rambunctiousness of two active preschoolers, which sometimes frazzled her, was now what she craved. She wanted to hear their laughter, inhale their little-boy smells, feel the pressure of their warm bodies against her chest and the damp smear of their kisses on her cheeks.

  She went to the sink, turned on the faucet, and took a drinking glass from the open shelf. She filled the glass with water and drained it thirstily. Thinking that surely the headmistress had had time to get there by now, she glanced at the clock on the stove, then, thinking she heard a car on the street, turned.

  When the glass slipped from her hand, it shattered on the floor, spraying her feet and legs with shards of glass.

  Willard Strong was standing not three feet from her. He held a double-barrel shotgun crosswise against his chest, from shoulder to hip, one hand on the stock, the other on the barrels. “You scream and I’ll kill you.” Her back door was standing ajar. Calmly, he reached behind him and pushed it closed.

  * * *

  Amelia rolled her lips inward and took a deep breath through her nose, held it for several seconds, then released it slowly.

  Jackson regarded her with concern. “Do you need a moment, Ms. Nolan?”

  She shook her head, then murmured, “No, I’m fine.” She wasn’t, but hopefully no one in the courtroom would call her on the fib. She wanted no more delays in the proceedings. She wanted to get through this, past this, so she could get on with the rest of her life.

  She barely remembered a time when she’d had complete control of her life and could make decisions without factoring Jeremy into them in one way or another. He’d been out of her life for more than a year, and still he was dominating her thoughts and dictating how her days were spent. But once she got through this—

  “Mr. Strong used those exact words?” Jackson asked. “‘You scream and I’ll kill you?’”

  Refocusing her thoughts, she answered yes.

  “Did you feel that you were in imminent danger?”

  “I did, yes. The threat seemed real. He was glaring at me, breathing hard. He was flexing and contracting his fingers around the barrels of the shotgun. He looked distraught. Furious. I was afraid for my life.”

  Jackson let that sink in as he walked over to the table where evidence, which had already been introduced, was exhibited. “Is this the shotgun he brought with him into your house?” He carried the weapon back to the witness box for her inspection.

  “It looks like it. I remember the design carved into the stock.”

  He asked that the record note that she had identified Exhibit A, the shotgun with which Darlene Strong had been shot in the chest.

  As he replaced the shotgun on the table, he asked, “Did the defendant say anything else to you?”

  “He asked if my husband was there. I told him no and reminded him that Jeremy was no longer my husband. He said, ‘But she’s still my wife, and he’s’”—she darted a glace toward the jury box, then finished—“‘he’s fucking her.’ I told him that I knew nothing about it, that it wasn’t my business to know, and that whatever was happening between them, Jeremy wouldn’t come to my home.”

  “What did he say to that?”

  “He laughed. With contempt. He called Jeremy a coward and said, ‘He might, now he knows I’m on to them. Let’s see.’” She paused to wipe her moist palms on the lap of her skirt. “He took me by the arm.”

  She went on to describe how he had roughly propelled her through the house, searching the rooms on both stories for Jeremy, all the while deaf to her denials that Jeremy would seek refuge in her house. “By the time we got back downstairs, he was even angrier and more frustrated than before. He was sweating profusely, swearing with every breath.”

  She paused, expecting an objection from Strong’s lawyer, who was sitting perfectly still, staring at her as though contemplating his counterattack. Strong’s stare was malevolent. Quickly she shifted her gaze back to Jackson.

  He asked, “Was he still restraining you?”

  “Yes. I thought this was the point where he would kill me. But then…” She swallowed, remembering the fear that had gripped her. “Then we heard the car pull up out front. Car doors slamming. My boys laughing and shouting excitedly, calling my name as they ran toward the townhouse. I heard Mrs. Abernathy cautioning them to be careful on the steps.”

  “What did Mr. Strong do when he heard them?”

  “He started moving toward the front door.”

  “Was it locked?”

  “Yes, but I was afraid that he would open it, and there my sons would be. Or I thought that he might fire the shotgun through the door.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I dug in my heels and tried to bar his way.”

  “You placed yourself between him and the front door.”

  She nodded. “I didn’t think about it, or plan it, I just reacted.”

  “You reacted to what you perceived to be mortal danger for your children.”

  Again, she swallowed drily. “Yes. I begged for their lives. By now I was on the verge of hysteria. Frantic. I asked him what he was going to do. He shoved me away from him with enough force to knock me to the floor. I was terrified that he would blast the front door.” She looked over at the glowering defendant and said quietly, “But he didn’t.”

  She hoped that in spite of Willard Strong’s ferocity and the enmity with which he was glaring at her, he knew how grateful she was to him for sparing the lives of her children.

  “What did he do, Ms. Nolan?”

  She brought her gaze back to Jackson. “He stepped past me, went through the kitchen, and out the back door, the same way he’d come in.”

  “When you frantically asked him, ‘What are you going to do?’ did he offer a reply?”

  She dampened her dry lips and looked toward the twelve people who would decide Willard Strong’s guilt or innocence. “He said, ‘I’m going to find them, and when I do, I’m going to kill them.’”

  * * *

  Lemuel Jackson was seasoned enough to know to quit when he was ahead. He told the judge that he had no further questions for Ms. Nolan.

  The judge consulted both attorneys. Cross-examination was likely to take a while. Considering how late in the day it was, and the approach of the holiday weekend, they agreed that court should be adjourned until after Labor Day. The judge told Ms. Nolan that she could step down. A bailiff escorted her out through a side door.

  The judge said, “Defense counsel will be ready to cross-examine Ms. Nolan when we reconvene at nine o’clock next Tuesday morning. Enjoy your holiday.”

  She banged the gavel. Dawson was the first one out of the courtroom.

  A few
minutes earlier, his phone had vibrated, signaling a text message. He claimed a relatively private place in the corridor and accessed the text. It was from Glenda, the researcher, asking him to call her. He wasted no time punching in her number, wanting to take advantage of her help while she was in a generous mood.

  As soon as she answered, he said, “Have you finally decided to marry me? Please say you’re calling to accept my many proposals.”

  Crossly she said, “Kiss my skinny ass, Dawson.”

  “You name the time and place.”

  She snorted, but he could sense that one of her rare smiles was behind it. “You ready?”

  “Lay it on me.”

  “Amelia Wesson née Nolan is the daughter of the late US Congressman Beekman Davis Nolan—he went by Davis—who represented his district for thirty-two years.”

  “Huh.”

  “If you’d’ve been paying attention, you would’ve heard of him. He served on too many committees and advisory boards to list, presided over one congressional hearing in 1994 and another in ’98. A public safety bill that was voted into law bears his name, because he wrote it and introduced it. He was well liked and admired on both sides of the aisle.”

  “Which side was he on?”

  “He hailed from a state that usually goes red, but he didn’t always toe the party line. He was a flag waver, for sure, but he was often outspoken against diehard conservatives, especially when it came to personal-liberty issues. Abortion. Gay marriage. Like that.”

  “Made enemies?”

  “He had his critics. But his more liberal outlook also won him admirers on the other side. Basically, he was that rare bird that’s almost extinct in politics—a man of integrity. Even the people who disagreed with him admired him. Couldn’t be influenced by lobbyists, never backed down from what he believed in. His hero was Jefferson, and he quoted him a lot. By the way, do you want Harriet the Harridan in on any of this?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I didn’t think so. She’s cussing you over something.”