'Jack's made arrangements to send him to a treatment center in California. It's a one-year in-patient program. For God's sakes, give us a chance to correct our problem.'
'Darl came out to my house. He offered to give up his father,' I said.
'He offered to—' Her face had the startled, still quality of someone caught in a photographer's strobe.
'You've got a monster in your house, Emma. Whatever happens in this courthouse won't change that,' I said.
Temple and I left her standing in the middle of the corridor, her mouth moving soundlessly while her stepson snipped his fingernails on the bench behind her.
Temple and I went up to the second floor of the courthouse and bought cold drinks from the machine and drank them by a tall, arched window at the end of the hall. It had stopped raining temporarily, but the streets were flooded and the wake from passing automobiles slid up onto the courthouse lawn.
'You bothered about what you said to Emma?' Temple asked.
'Not really.'
'If you're worried about hanging it on Darl Vanzandt—'
'The jury won't see motive in Darl. We can make him an adverb but not a noun.'
She was silent. I heard her set her aluminum soda can on top of the radiator.
'You want to spell it out?' she asked.
'Bunny Vogel's going to have a bad day,' I said.
'Wrong kid for it.'
'Damn, I wish I could adjust like that. "Wrong kid for it." That's great.'
I walked back down the hall to the stairs, my boots echoing off the wood floor.
She caught me halfway down, stepped in front of me on the landing, her arms pumped. A strand of her chestnut hair was curved on her chin. 'There's one person only, one, who has always been on your side. Sorry I never let you fuck me a few times so I could leave town without even a phone call. You only get that kind of loyalty with federal grade,' she said.
She walked down the rest of the stairs alone, the anger in her eyes her only defense against tears. I stood in the silence, wondering what the final cost of Lucas's trial would be.
After Darl Vanzandt took the oath he sat at an angle in the witness chair, lowered his eyes coyly, as though the world's attention were upon him, played with his class ring, suppressed a smile when he looked at his friends.
'Bunny Vogel used to go out with Roseanne Hazlitt, didn't he?' I asked.
'Everybody knows that.'
'Is Bunny your friend?'
'He used to be.'
'He looked out for you at Texas A&M, didn't he?'
'We were from the same town, so we hung out.'
'He paid off a grader to change an exam score for you, didn't he?'
Darl's green eyes looked at nothing, then clouded and focused on me for the first time, as though the words he heard had to translate into a different language before they became thoughts in his mind. He rubbed the peach fuzz on his jawline. 'Yeah, we both got expelled,' he said.
'Did your stepmother get him a job at the skeet club?'
'Yeah.'
'You double-dated and you hung out at the drive-in restaurant together?'