The mistrial hearing was set for Friday morning, before the chief judge of Harmon County. That gave me three days to think about it. Nine years of courtrooms had taught me that three days of thinking is not a gift.
The chief judge was Harriet Lindqvist, sixty-one. She ran the courthouse the way some people run a kitchen. Everything had a place, and she always knew which drawer you'd opened.
She sent me a letter by courier on Tuesday morning. It was short. Pending the hearing, my press credential for Courtroom 4B was suspended.
The letter called this a "routine precaution." It said, in bold, that it was "not a finding of misconduct." I have read a great many legal documents. Whatever they put in bold, they are thinking about.
So for the first time in nine years, Seat One was somebody else's.
Leon covered the trial alone. He called me at lunch on Tuesday with news. Barnaby had been moved to the corner by the jury box, facing the wall, "like a gnome in time-out."
"How's the judge?"
"Cold," Leon said. "Colder."
He paused. "I drew him as he was. Every line."
"You did?"
"It felt wrong to do anything else," he said. "Even the jaw. It's a disappointing jaw today, Wren."
On Wednesday Marcus sent a news van to my apartment.
It wasn't to interview me. It was so a reporter could stand on my sidewalk and say I had "declined to comment." My front door was visible in the shot.
I watched from behind the curtain. The reporter was wearing one green sock and one yellow one.
Marcus called at 4:16 out of habit.
"Artist. Silent. Mysterious," he said. "Ratings, Wren."
"I'm suspended, Marcus."
"Suspended. Sympathetic. Underdog," he said, and I could hear him writing it down.
I spent most of Wednesday at my drawing table with nothing on it. I tried to sketch the view from my window. It came out looking like a parking lot, because it was one.
At four o'clock, Deb called.
"'Hiding,' five letters," she said.
"Deb."
"Lying low. Two words." I heard a pen click. "Come down to the third-floor vending machine. I'm on break. Bring a dollar. The crackers went up."
The vending machine coffee was exactly as bad as I remembered. Deb drank hers like medicine she believed in.
"He's not mad at you," she said.
"He's not mad at anyone. He's the Iceberg."
"Hon." She put her cup down. "He hasn't been the Iceberg since 2012. He's been the Iceberg on the outside."
She looked at me over her glasses. "You've been sitting in the one chair in the building where you could see the difference."
I didn't say anything. Deb looked at her crossword without filling anything in. It was the first time I had ever seen her do that.
"I'll tell you a story," she said. "But it's his story, and he'll tell it better. So I'm only giving you the outline. Think of it like one of your sketches."
"Okay."
"He was twenty-eight. Public defender. First trial of his life." She waved at the building. "Not big like this. But big to the man he was defending."
"He was so scared he didn't sleep," she went on. "Got dressed at five in the morning in the dark."
I could see where this was going, but I let her get there.
"His little brother had given him joke socks that Christmas. Tacos. He also owned socks with ducks on them, for reasons I've never been told." She sipped. "In the dark, he put on one of each."
Deb smiled then, for the first time since I'd known her. "Halfway through his opening, he looked down and saw them. And he laughed out loud in front of the jury."
"Did he lose?"
"He won. He says it was the case. I say it was the laugh."
She picked up her coffee again. "He told me once what happened when he saw those socks. He understood that everybody in that room was just a person trying to get dressed in the morning."
"Including the judge," she said. "Including him. He stopped being scared."
"And he's worn them ever since."
"Every trial day for twenty-two years. Not always the same pair. Always mismatched." She shook her head. "Hon, I've seen a sock with a lighthouse on it."
I thought about day two, and the plain black socks, and the way he had cut Priscilla off. I thought about him saying "Take your time" to Teddy in the wrong voice.
"So when he went plain..."
"Twenty-two years," Deb said. "First time."
She filled in a clue at last. "'Off balance,' six letters."
"Shaken."
"Wobbly," Deb said, and wrote it in pen.
On Thursday morning I did something I had never done in nine years. I went to see the parties to a case.
Larkspur Lane was a quiet street of small brick houses and large opinions about lawns. You could tell which two houses were the important ones. One had a gnome-shaped dent in the grass where Barnaby usually stood. The other had a tulip bed with an empty, eleven-inch hole in it.
I knocked on Gil's door first, because the cousin was on the porch and had already seen me.
The cousin's name was Walt. He was sixty-four and had been guarding the gnome-shaped dent for nine days, from a lawn chair, with a thermos. Barnaby himself was back from court and sat under a fresh tarp in the driveway.
"Is he in there?" I asked.
"He's in there," Walt said. That was all Walt said, the whole time I was on Larkspur Lane. He said it again when I left, as if I might have doubts.
Gil made me tea and showed me his garage. There were three unfinished gnomes in there, and a rack of tiny outfits on hangers.
A pumpkin. A raincoat. A little Santa suit with a hood. The tiny judge's robe hung on the end of the rack. It had a sticky note on it that said SORRY in Gil's capitals.
"I know the robe was a mistake," he said. "I wanted the jury to like him. Teddy told me not to."
He poured more tea. "Can I tell you something? That first night, when your drawing came on the news, I laughed so hard my cousin thought I was choking. First time I'd laughed since this whole thing started."
"You didn't laugh in court."
"Didn't want Dolores to see," he said. "She'd think I was laughing at her."
Then I crossed eleven inches of disputed lawn and knocked on Dolores's door.
She let me in with the wariness of a librarian who has caught you returning a book late. Her living room was all bookshelves and photographs. Many of the older photographs had Gil in them.
A barbecue. A birthday. Somebody's graduation, with the two of them in the back row, laughing at something out of frame.
"I saw your drawing," she said. "On the news. I want you to know I did not find it funny."
"That's fair."
"I found it hilarious," she said, with great dignity. "I had to sit down on the kitchen floor."
She smoothed her skirt. "I haven't laughed like that in three years. I didn't tell anyone. I didn't want Gil to think I'd gone soft."
I looked at the photographs. I looked out her window at the house across the hole in the tulips. Two people had sat in their kitchens on the same night, laughing at the same thing. Neither had told the other.
"Mrs. Pemberton," I said. "Did you ask Ms. Vandermeer to file for a mistrial?"
Dolores looked at me for a long moment.
"Ms. Vandermeer," she said, "files a great many things."
When I got home there was an envelope wedged in my door. It was not from the chief judge. It was a subpoena from Priscilla's office, commanding me to appear and testify the next morning.
Paper-clipped to it was a short note in Priscilla's sharp, upright handwriting.
Please bring your sketchbooks from all four days. All of them. We'll want to see everything.
I had drawn three hundred witnesses in nine years. I had never once been one.
Up next: The Witness Stand
Continue to Part 5 →