She continues, her voice calm, “I saw him washing that bat of his in the bathroom sink the morning of the murder.”
Her words take the rest of the fire out of me, out of both of us. I want to call her a liar, but I’m doused, drowning in her words.
Rita is quiet now. The whole house has turned silent. “I saw him, Hope. I came home that morning and tried to go back to sleep. I thought you and Jeremy must be in bed still. But I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and went to the bathroom. I opened the door, and there he was. He was trying to wash blood off his bat.”
“What did you do?”
“I looked at him. He stared back at me with his wide, panicked eyes, like he was begging me for something I couldn’t give him. I closed the door.”
“You-?”
“I know. I should have asked him right then and there what he done. But I figured he’d clubbed some animal-not a dog or a cat, but a squirrel or a gopher. And I didn’t want to deal with it.” She stares past me, at the blank TV screen. “I didn’t think he’d… he’d… used that bat on a… a person.”
I’ve been backing away from her, stumbling toward the door. Images of the crime scene flash through my head. They bring pain, as if they’re mounted on arrows. Coach, bloody, curled on the stable floor. Jeremy curled in the corner of his bedroom.
My back slams into the door. I reach behind me, frantically feeling for the doorknob. I have to get out of here.
Rita is shouting at me, but I can’t hear her. A buzzing in my head drowns her out.
I’m outside. I take off running. One foot, the other foot. I used to read a book to Jeremy when we were little. Dr. Seuss. One foot. Two feet. I can’t remember how it goes. Left foot? Right foot?
I keep running. I want the pain in my chest to hurt more. To explode.
My run ends in front of an old church that’s been turned into an antiques store. If it were still a church, could I pray? Would it help? A dozen signs are posted on the big front door: DON’T TOUCH
ANYTHING! IF YOU BREAK IT, YOU BUY IT. NO CHECKS, NO CHARGE. CASH
I shove the door and go in. I’ve been here before. Every inch of this place holds a table, or chair, or dresser, or picture frame, or statue, or trinket. The smell of dust and must mixes with lemon and varnish.
“May I help you?”
May she? May anybody?
God? I ask in my heart. May you help me? Is it a question? A plea? An antique prayer?
I shake my head, then walk to a wooden banister and climb the stairs to the loft. It’s been transformed from a choir loft to period rooms. Dresses from the 1920s hang on a rack in front of the open room. Inside, there are helmets and uniforms from every war. Did their original owners kill people? Did they have sisters at home who would have died for them? Who believed they were heroes, no matter what they’d done?
I sit on an army trunk tucked in front of a Japanese silkscreen room divider that splits the space in half, the West and the Orient. A bayonet hangs on the wall to the left, rifles and pistols in a glass case against the opposite wall.
I want out. Out of my own century and into this one, the past. I don’t want the present, and I don’t want the future. “I can’t do this.” I say it out loud, even though there’s nobody to hear except God and me. I can’t prove Jeremy didn’t kill Coach Johnson. All I’ve done is wreck his chances for being found insane.
Rita was helping Jeremy more than I was.
26
“Hope? Hope!”
The shout jars me back to the present. I get up from the army trunk, walk to the balcony railing, and peer down. I know it’s Chase even before I see him. I turn away and slink back to the war room. I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to see anybody.
But Chase must have spotted me. “Hope?” I hear his footsteps on the stairs. He barges into the past, my room, shattering the quiet here.
“Go away.”
“Hope, listen…”
I shake my head.
“What did you do to your face?” He touches my cheek.
It doesn’t hurt. I can’t feel it. Maybe I’ll never feel anything again. I brush away his finger.
He sits down beside me on the trunk. “Talk to me.”
“Go home, Chase. Leave me alone.” I stare at the floor, the wooden slats that let light peek through from below. Choirs used to sing here.
“What happened?”
I shake my head. “It’s over. I’m done.”
“You don’t mean that. What about Jeremy? He needs you. And now you’ve got Caroline Johnson coming to court and reasonable doubt and-”
“Wait. How did you know I was here?”
“Rita,” he answers.
“Rita?”
“She called me, Hope. How else did you think I knew to come looking for you? She’s worried about you. She was afraid you might do something stupid.”
This isn’t making sense. “Wait. Rita called you?”
He smiles and nods. “Surprised me too. I don’t think I was her first choice. But she is worried about you. So am I. You can’t give up. I think things are looking better for Jeremy than they ever have.”
“No. They’re not.” I shake my head and lower my voice. “Rita saw Jeremy that morning. Chase, he was trying to wash his bat.” I can see it in my head-Jeremy trying to get the bat into the sink, water and blood splashing, and that look, the wide-eyed look of being caught in the act. “Why would he do that if he hadn’t…?” But I can’t finish.
“First of all, whatever Rita saw, Jeremy washing the bat, might never come out in court.”
“If Rita has to testify, Keller will get it out of her.” My hand hurts, and I raise it to see why. My fingernails have left deep marks on my palm from the fist I must have been making.
“Rita might surprise you. She kept it from you this long. My money’s on her keeping what she saw out of court.”
Chase is right. Rita’s stronger than I am, a better match for the prosecutor. “Still… it doesn’t change what she saw.” I make the fist again. I want it to hurt.
“What did she see?” Chase asks. “Jeremy cleaning his bat? So what? Who knows why he was doing it? Even you don’t know how his mind works all the time. Maybe he loved his bat so much that he couldn’t stand to have it dirty. Or maybe he was trying to cover up for somebody, to protect somebody.”
“Like who? Caroline Johnson? They didn’t even like each other.”
Chase shrugs. “Okay. So maybe he wasn’t trying to cover up for anybody. Maybe he just couldn’t stand having Coach’s blood on his bat.”
That rings true to me. “Jeremy hates the sight of blood. Once when I got a nosebleed, I grabbed the nearest thing, a dish towel, to stop it. Jeremy made me throw it away, outside of our apartment.”
“See?” Chase says, like I’ve proved him right. “Maybe that was why he tried to wash the bat. Or not. We don’t know, Hope, and we probably never will know. But it doesn’t prove anything. That’s all I’m saying. What Rita told you hasn’t changed anything. We’ve still got reasonable doubt. Jeremy still doesn’t have a motive for killing Coach, and Caroline Johnson still does. After Bob’s testimony, the jury could even believe that he had a motive.”
“Bob? Why would he have a motive to kill Coach?” I can’t imagine Bob hurting anybody, not really.
“Who knows?” Chase takes off one running shoe and dumps out a tiny pebble. He’s not wearing socks, and his shoes aren’t tied. “But if your mother was having some kind of love triangle thing going with Coach and Bob, that would give Bob a motive. I’m not saying he did it, just that he has a motive.”
“And Jeremy doesn’t.” Relief, mixed with guilt, rushes over me. It’s hot, blazing hot, up in this loft. “Jeremy doesn’t have a motive.”
“And,” Chase continues, the lines of his face deep and intense, as if he’s willing me to believe, “juries don’t like to convict without a motive, no matter what the law says about not needing to prove one. My dad’s always told me that people on a jury have to understand why someone would kill. That’s just human nature, and jurors are human.”