“Where’d you hear that?”
“Mr. Jensen heard it on the radio,” she says, swiping the paper cup of melting ice cream from her brother. “He announced it in government. He said it’s kind of a big deal.” She dumps her backpack on the floor as she climbs in.
“I didn’t win anything, not yet.”
He takes the ride home to explain what he’s doing and why, laying out the timetable, what it will mean for their lives, Thanksgiving upended, and probably Christmas too. He mentions, awkwardly, their mother’s name, and their family’s own firsthand experience with loss, how desperate it makes one for answers, even sharing with them Bernie’s feelings about the other girls who’d been killed, wrapping it all up in a stumbling speech about cynicism and electoral politics. For an opening statement, it stinks. In the backseat, Ben is digging the last of his chocolate-strawberry swirl out of the soggy waffle cone with the tip of his pale pink tongue. Jay is not sure he’s heard a word of it, save for his mother’s name. Without the least preamble, Ben asks, “Can we get a tree this year?” In the front seat, Ellie turns to look at Jay. Ben, in the back, catches his father’s reflection in the rearview mirror. They’re waiting on him, Jay knows that. They are waiting on their father, their unelected leader, to show the way.
Last year, their first without Bernie, he had dreaded this very question, and nearly shook with relief when it never came. Christmas, any thought of it, went unspoken. They simply got into this car and drove as far away from it as they could get in a day. His kids, they had saved him by not making any extraordinary demands on life after death, and now he feels selfishly, shamefully angry at being so emotionally tethered to them, at having to grieve in lockstep with his children. He’s already gotten himself into a murder trial this month. He doesn’t think he can handle a Christmas tree too. He would, if he could, kick his own ass for thinking he was strong enough for any of this, for involving himself this deep. “We’ll talk about it,” he says, without explaining why the time to talk about it isn’t right now, the three of them alone in the car, idling at a red light.
The first roundtable takes place in Jay’s office Wednesday morning. In the conference room upstairs, they start at eight sharp. Jay, Lonnie, Rolly, Eddie Mae taking notes, and Neal pacing around the hard edges of the long table; they’re all gathered. With a black Sharpie, Jay makes the first stain on a large white pad, starting with a list of the facts that are not on their side. They’re three weeks from voir dire, and this is what they’re up against.
1. Neal called the victim, Jay writes, an hour before she was last seen.
“It was seven thirty-two, to be exact,” Lon says, reading from her notes of the phone records from Alicia Nowell’s pager. Matt Nichols, to his credit, had been true to his word. They’d met in his office yesterday morning, combing through every inch of the state’s file, making detailed notes, and working through lunch. “Alicia was last seen at the corner of Guinevere and Ledwicke.”
“Waiting, the old lady said,” Rolly adds, for in a day he too had memorized the state’s file, and after seeing the evidence against Neal–all of it admittedly circumstantial–had asked a second time if Jay was sure about this dude. Here in the conference room, Rolly watches the client pace.
“Elma Johnson saw her at about eight forty-five,” Lonnie says. “And, yes, she said it looked to her like she was waiting for someone.”
“Which suggests a rendezvous or a planned meeting,” Jay says.
“Or some prior contact,” Rolly adds.
“Plus there’s the boyfriend’s story,” Lon says, “about the meeting at Jones High School in the spring, at that meet-the-candidates forum or whatever it was called. Kenny told the cops that Neal was extra chatty, flirting.” Neal, halfway through his fifth lap around the conference table, rolls his eyes impatiently. He has not said a single word since they began, except to answer a phone call from his grandfather, to assure Sam that he was fine. Jay has held Sam to his directive that he would run this thing his way, without any interference from the elder Hathorne, and Sam, unable to control a situation he in fact engineered, has already called the office three times this morning. He must have figured out by now that Jay never cashed his check for the retainer. It is still sitting in Jay’s top desk drawer, tucked away, as useless to him now as the deal he cut with Sam. He doesn’t want to lose the Pleasantville civil case as his retirement plan, but neither is he willing to gamble with Neal’s life over money.
“And he gave Alicia his card,” Lon adds, flipping through her notes.
Jay nods. He marks down this fact along with the others.
2. Neal was evasive with the campaign staff about his whereabouts.
“The obstruction charge was dropped when the murder indictment came down,” Jay says. “But they’ll line up staffers on the stand to tell the same story.”
“It’s Tonya Hardaway that matters,” Lon says. “She did the schedule.”
“The one that he fired,” Rolly says.
Jay adds this regrettable fact to the board too.
Eddie Mae steals a glance at Neal.
He makes her nervous, a man who won’t eat.
She laid out a plate of Shipley’s doughnuts first thing this morning.
Again, she asks Neal if he won’t sit down, nibble a little something.
Neal, his back to them, is at the window, the one Jay had to replace.
He never answers.
3. Neal lied to police detectives about knowing the dead girl.