Lu has a reluctant admiration for the woman’s bluntness. She’s saying what everyone thinks, in almost every situation. I’ve got to think about myself. Most jurors, even the ones who take the job very seriously, think about themselves first. If, when—and it will be when, it has to be when, all she needs is a fingerprint to come back, and this perp is no debutante, she’s sure of that, no one commits a crime like this his first time out—Lu comes to a jury with the story of how Mary McNally died, they will be judging the victim as much as the defendant. Did she know him? Did she grant him access to her home? Had they met online or in line, at that 10 P.M. showing of The Theory of Everything? A truly random case, one in which the victim appears to have been singled out for no reason, would be the best one to try in Lu’s experience. An intruder, surprised. He lashes out. The victim turns to run, he hits her from behind, strangles her, then keeps beating her after she’s dead, literally defacing her. Any juror can empathize in that case.
But if Mary invited the man into her home—that will complicate things. It will be better in some ways if the bedspread is pristine, as Mike’s preliminary scan indicated. With the break-in and presumed burglary, Lu already has a first-degree murder. Sex will just complicate everything. As sex does. Then again, if he didn’t break in, Lu might have the advantage of witnesses who saw them together somewhere. She catches herself: she, like Mike, is assuming it’s a man. The violence at the scene—not a lot of women have that in them. The anger, yes. Just not the strength to act on it. And there is something personal about it. The postmortem beating, the damage to the face. It doesn’t get more personal than that. Then again, men can be surprisingly swift when it comes to having expectations from women they barely know. Strange men tell women to smile, they interrupt conversations, they demand female attention in all sorts of ways.
And when they don’t get it, they can get very angry.
THE BOY IN THE BUSH
My family moved to Columbia, our future house rolled down the highway on a flatbed trailer, I was born, my mother died—and I remember none of it. These are the stories I was told. The first vivid memory that I trust as my own, in part because AJ agreed on every detail, is the August day in 1976 when we found Noel Baumgarten in our bushes, peering into our kitchen.
Teensy, rinsing the lunch dishes at the sink, shrieked when she realized there was a person in the bushes. His eyes, green as sea glass, might have passed for light-dappled leaves if they had not been moving rapidly back and forth, scanning everything he saw.
“Got-dammit.” Teensy belonged to a storefront church in West Baltimore and she never cursed, so this was serious business. She grabbed a broom and headed outside, AJ and I trailing her. We weren’t the least bit scared or disturbed by our Peeping Tom. We were excited because something was finally happening and so little happened on those slow summer days, when most of the kids we knew went to camp or the ocean or the mountains. We never went anywhere.
“What are you doing?” Teensy demanded of the boy in the bush.
“Taking photographs,” he said cheerfully, showing us the heavy, old-fashioned camera he wore on a cord around his neck.
“Whaaaaaaa—?” Teensy yelled, making futile passes with the broom, the boy ducking and swerving as if it were a dance.
“Of your house. It’s wild. What was it, before Columbia was built? Did George Washington sleep here? It’s a thousand times nicer than any other house around here, that’s for sure.”
“Why did you come up to the kitchen window if all you wanted to do was photograph our house?” That was AJ, not Teensy. She was now completely nonplussed, a first in my experience. Maybe it was those eyes. They were so big and green, like something you’d see on a tiny jungle animal in National Geographic. Or maybe it was his juicy confidence. Noel, as we would soon learn, was completely without guilt, even when he was doing things for which he should feel guilty. He could stare down any authority figure and proclaim his innocence.
“I bet people take photographs of your house all the time,” he said, ignoring the question put to him. “Don’t they?”
They did. And, like this boy, they assumed that the house had been there first, that the wood-sided split-levels were the interlopers who had forced themselves on this dignified matron. In that way, the house, although chosen to lure my mother to Columbia, was not unlike my father. A newcomer just six years ago, our father had been appointed to the state’s attorney’s office in 1975 and already seemed a fixture in the county. People often asked if the Brants went back as far as the Warfields, one of Howard County’s oldest, most storied families. That’s how my father’s brand of confidence worked. He found the place he wanted to be, kept still and poised, and eventually people assumed he had been there all along.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” Noel said as he emerged from the bushes, brushing a stray leaf from his hair, blue-black and shiny, like Prince Valiant in the Sunday comics. His hair was all the more striking with those otherworldly green eyes and fair skin. “I just wanted to see if the inside of the house was as old-fashioned as what’s outside. I’m Noel Baumgarten.”
He offered his hand to AJ. At the time, he was considerably shorter than AJ, although that would change. But he was short enough so that it wasn’t crazy of me to hope he might be closer to my age than my brother’s, or at least right between the two of us, and therefore a suitable friend to both.
“Where do you live?” AJ asked. “Where are you going to school in the fall?”