“Not by the standards of college students, no. That’s the time in your life you’re supposed to be having fun. And I wasn’t doing any of that. I put a lot of pressure on myself to do everything by the book. I still do.” The single mother was watching me intently.
“Is it fair to say that you felt the nickname was well suited to you?”
“Yes. That’s why deep down it embarrassed me. I couldn’t defend myself when Denise called me Pam Perfect, because I knew it was true.”
When it came time for the cross-examination, Veronica Ramira reviewed her notes for a moment before rising. She had her hair clipped back with a barrette on either side, giving her a girlish, youthful effect. I knew that was intentional, an optical illusion for the jury—just as easily as one young woman could accuse her client of a horrific act, another could believe in his innocence. It was a clever touch on her part. Not that she ever got any credit for it.
“Good afternoon, Miss Schumacher,” she began pleasantly.
“Hello,” I replied. We smiled hatefully at one another.
“I want to start on Saturday night, January fourteenth,” Veronica said, sauntering around the counsel table with her hands folded comfortably at her belly button. “The evening before the attack. What time did you fall asleep?”
“I don’t know exactly, but some of the girls came into my room and said they were going to get hot fudge cake from Jerry’s, which closed at midnight. I remember they said they would make it just in time. Jerry’s is about a ten-minute walk from The House, so I’d estimate that was about eleven forty or eleven forty-five. I’d fallen asleep by the time they got home, though.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Because later, one of my sorority sisters said she came upstairs to tell me the cake was here but she found me asleep and decided to just let me be.”
“So at the absolute latest, you fell asleep at twelve fifteen in the morning.”
“Yes.” I nodded. “That sounds right.”
“And you say you were awoken a few minutes shy of three in the morning, correct?”
“That is correct.”
“Two hours and forty-five minutes is a significant amount of time to be asleep, would you agree?”
“Practically a full night for me,” I said, and some of the female jurors laughed.
Veronica Ramira was unrattled. Worrying, frankly. She had something up her sleeve; she must. “I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty groggy when I wake up from a deep sleep.”
I said nothing. There was no question.
“Did you feel groggy?”
“A little, at first. But when I came out in the hallway and saw that the chandelier was still lit, I snapped out of it. I’m a total neat freak, and when things are out of place, I get very focused on correcting them. I was determined to figure out why the timer wasn’t working. That cleared away the cobwebs.”
“Is that part of being Pam Perfect?” When one of the male jurors snickered, four female jurors swung their heads, boxing him in with severe, reprimanding expressions. His smile turned limping and apologetic.
“If Denise were here,” I replied, “and I really wish she could be”—my voice caught as I thought how very much Denise would wish it too—“she’d tell you yes.” I batted away my tears and stole a glance at Mr. Pearl. A little emotion is all right, he’d told me, but Judge Lambert doesn’t have patience for hysterics. Mr. Pearl gave me an almost imperceptible tip of his chin. Just enough.
“And what happened then?”
I went through it for the final time. The I Love Lucy rerun. The dirty plates in the rec room. The draft coming in from the back door. The thud. The reptilian impulse to run him down.
“And you believed it was Roger Yul you saw at the front door, isn’t that correct?”
“Only for a split second, and then I looked closer and realized it was a stranger.”
“The chandelier was on, though.” Veronica Ramira tipped her face up to the harsh track lighting in the ceiling of the courtroom, purpling the hollows of her eyes. “Would you say it was as bright in the foyer as it is in here?”
“Close enough,” I said.
“And yet,” Veronica Ramira said, unblinking, “you still thought you saw Roger.”
“Only for a second,” I repeated with a certain measure of relief, thinking her strategy at last had been revealed. If this was all she had, I could handle it. “And then I got my bearings and realized I did not recognize the person after all.”
Veronica Ramira followed up swiftly: “What was your relationship to Roger Yul?”
The low-level fluttering in my stomach intensified, but I answered quickly too, not wanting to be seen as stalling. “He was a friend. He was a member at the same fraternity as my boyfriend, and he and Denise dated on and off for years.”
“So you spent a lot of time with him?”
“Roger was in the mix. We found ourselves in the same place, hanging around the same people, fairly often.”
“But never alone?”
Here was where I faltered. “N-no. Of course not. We didn’t spend time alone.”
Veronica Ramira said dubiously, “You’ve never been alone with Roger before?”
“I’m sure there were times… over the years. When someone went to use the bathroom, maybe, and yes, we were alone for a few minutes.”
“During one of these times,” Veronica Ramira said, “did you and Roger kiss?”
The witness box is precisely designed to be the second-highest prominence in the courtroom, lower than the judge but higher than the jury, meant to convey the importance of the person providing the testimony. An unintentional consequence of this layout is that it provides clear sight lines for the witness—you can see every spectator in the room. In that moment, my eye fell on Mrs. Andora, who looked like she’d just had a religious revelation. I knew what she was thinking—that was why the last breakup was as bad as it was. That was why Denise ended up in the hospital for dehydration.
Veronica Ramira’s voice cut like a knife. “I asked if you and Roger kissed, Miss Schumacher.”
I needed to see how bad this was, so I was looking at Mr. Pearl when I answered, “He made a move on me once.” Oh, it was bad.
“Did you kiss?”
“He kissed me. And I pushed him off right away. He was very drunk, and I don’t think he even remembered doing it the next day.”
Veronica Ramira smirked as though this was exactly the kind of blame off-loading she expected from a girl who kissed her best friend’s boyfriend. “And it was after that when Denise and he broke up, in the December before the attack, correct?”
“That’s correct. Because I told her what he did. And she was mortified and made me promise not to tell anyone.” I hadn’t, not the detectives and not Mr. Pearl, figuring it didn’t matter, because only two people in the world knew about the kiss, and one of us was dead. I’d assumed Roger had been too drunk to remember, not just because he came at me with the motor functioning of the walking dead, but because when Denise broke up with him in December, she had asked him if he knew why she was ending things for good this time. He had begged her to tell him, and Denise had refused, thinking it would be a harsher punishment for his imagination to run wild. I wouldn’t ever find out how it got back to The Defendant and his team, but at some point, Roger must have come clean. Told someone that he’d played dumb to Denise when, really, he remembered everything.
“I’m sure she was mortified,” Veronica Ramira agreed. “Her best friend and her boyfriend. It must have hurt her a lot.”
I flashed hot at the suggestion that anyone but Veronica Ramira’s client had hurt Denise. “I would never hurt Denise. I loved her.”
“But Denise was upset with you.”
“Denise was upset. But not at me.”