“It’s normal to be nervous,” Tina said. “That doesn’t mean you don’t get up on the stand and do a good job.”
It was more than nerves, though. It was a fatalistic feeling about the world in which we tried to make our way. I once had a doctor tell me there are a certain number of catastrophically bad things that, statistically speaking, must happen every year to a certain number of people—rare diseases, freak accidents, and, yes, serial killer attacks. Little grains of tragedy carried by the wind. I could make peace with the idea that one of those currents happened to catch my corner of the world. But a brush with the improbable Defendant had amplified something about my everyday terrain that was proving harder to accept. Which was that guys like Roger did not arrive into our lives on the curve of some unfavorable wind. They were already rooted and ubiquitous.
Some nights I lay in bed sleepless and full of apathy, realizing that The Defendant could have gone anywhere in the country, done this to any other group of women, and the defense could likely raise reasonable doubt by pointing a finger at the Roger who already resided among them. Rogers were everywhere, reasonable-doubt scapegoats waiting in the wings for a case like this. There was not so much as a hair of forensic evidence linking The Defendant to the scene at The House. This was a capital punishment case, and a man’s life—a normal-looking, normal-seeming man’s life—hung in the balance.
“You’ve already done the hard part,” Tina said, referring to my pretrial testimony, which The Defendant’s team had moved to strike, calling me a “well-intentioned but unreliable witness.” I had pretended not to notice the way Mr. Pearl’s posture sagged with relief when Judge Lambert had ruled I could testify for the jury. Without my eyewitness account, all we had was junk science known as bite-mark analysis. Robbie had been bitten on her left breast and buttocks, and an odontologist was prepared to testify that only five sets of teeth in the whole world could have made those marks, of which The Defendant’s was one. The defense would call it guesswork, and they would be right. So right that, in the years since, many states have banned bite-mark analysis in criminal trials.
Bernadette called my name again, and I hurried to meet her on the stairs, shopping bags bouncing and rustling against my outer thighs. From up there, I could see everything and everyone beneath us, including Carl, sharing a bench with some colleagues, press badges hanging around their necks. They were sipping from Dixie cups and ribbing one another while they waited for the lobby to clear out before taking their place in the roped-off media section. Carl had been at the courthouse every day for the pretrial, and he would be there every day of the six-week trial that would have taken five if not for The Defendant’s colicky tantrums and spectacles. I was clenching my jaw in the way that made my neck string with veins, seeing Carl joke around like he was killing time before his favorite band took the stage.
“Now,” Bernadette said, surveying the scene at our feet. “Where do you suppose we go?”
I looked back down at the bench to see that while Carl’s colleagues were still there, Carl had gone. He’d seen me, I knew.
Bernadette flagged down a police officer, who took us to another police officer, who took us to the chambers of a judge whose secretary found the bailiff, who showed us to the witness room on the second floor. Eileen was already there, along with another young woman with strawberry-blond hair pulled off her face in a clashing peach headband, the hearing aid in her left ear strategically on display for the jurors. It was Sally Donoghue, the FSU senior who’d been asleep in her off-campus apartment on Dunwoody Street when The Defendant crawled through the kitchen window and landed six blows to her head before the neighbors came to her rescue. That morning, she was still walking with a cane.
“I brought goodies,” I said. “Sally, can I make you a plate? We have fruit, muffins, yogurt.”
“Oh, bless you,” Eileen said. She was helping me unpack the shopping bag and had come across the real creamer. “The coffee here is putrid.”
* * *
The trial revealed to me things I knew and things I did not. Eileen had lost teeth, I knew, but I learned the approximate number was nine. I knew her jaw had to be wired shut, but I didn’t know how long (seven weeks, plus another six, after the doctors discovered it wasn’t healing correctly and had no choice but to rebreak it). I knew Jill didn’t remember the attack, but I didn’t know that her first memory occurred in the back of the ambulance, when the EMTs were trying to cut off her pajama top and she came to pleading with them not to. I had no idea that her finger was nearly severed in half, and because of that, she had lost an opal ring given to her by her grandmother. To this day, that ring has never been recovered.
These were not things that the girls would have talked about unless they were compelled to under oath. They wouldn’t have wanted people to pity them or think they were complaining. Nobody liked a complainer, and we wanted so much for people to think well of us.
A grisly day of tearful testimony, Carl’s story would read the next morning, but still no word from the state’s only eyewitness.
I waited around all day as the witnesses were led into the courtroom by the bailiff, one by one, until it was just me, acid-mouthed from drinking too much of the putrid courthouse coffee.
“Won’t you sit, Pamela?” Eileen begged four hours in. “You’re making me nervous.”
But I couldn’t risk wrinkling my dress. The judge was allowing cameras in the courtroom, and it seemed a matter of life or death that no one caught the star witness without so much as a hair out of place.
In the end it didn’t matter, because court was adjourned and the bailiff was telling me it was time to go home, reminding me not to read the papers or watch the news until I had testified. Tina would collect all the headlines from that week and save them for me to read, something I wouldn’t do until well after the trial ended, out of some bizarre sense of superstition.
I walked through the lobby on tiptoe, straining my eyes to locate Mr. Pearl. Why hadn’t I been called to the stand? I was scheduled to fly back to New York the following morning. Did I need to change my flight? I was externing at a firm in Midtown that summer, and I’d used all of my excused absences to make the trip for the trial.
“Pamela!” Mr. Pearl had found me first. I turned to see him hurrying toward me at a forward-leaning angle, as if walking uphill, his briefcase latched but corners of paper sticking out of the seams. I focused on those shards of papers, a pit in my stomach. He had closed it in a hurry.
“You need to go back to your hotel room,” he said the moment he was within earshot, “and not watch the news or read anything, and just wait to hear from me. Can you do that?” He put one hand on my shoulder in a consoling gesture.
“Yes, but—”
“I have to get to Judge Lambert’s chambers. Right now. But I need you to do that for me. Okay?”
I nodded. Okay. “But my flight is tomorrow and—”
“Don’t change it for now.”
Panic constricted my lungs. Don’t change it? “But if I don’t change my flight, I won’t be able to give my testimony.”
Mr. Pearl squeezed my shoulder harder, not comfortingly but out of frustration. “Please, just—I’ll explain as soon as I can.”
I watched him go, my shoulder throbbing.
* * *