I did not sleep on Sunday night. I lay in the farmhouse bedroom and went over the evidence, the way I used to go over a hard case.
Five years. Five Golden Gherkins. Five photographs in the Ledger, all with the same closed face. All of them looking at the same spot above my left shoulder.
Rhoda's complaint had been right about one thing. The champion had been receiving a signal from my general area. It just was not the signal anybody thought.
"You're thinking loud," Walt said into his pillow at two in the morning.
"Lydia says Dennis is afraid of me."
Walt was quiet for a while. I thought he had gone back to sleep.
"You ever see a heifer that won't go through a gate?" he said. "Farmer's standing right there, waving his arms. Heifer stands still as a post. Farmer thinks she's stubborn."
"Is she?"
"No. She's just watching the farmer." He rolled over. "Farmer needs to step out of the gate."
Dennis came to the farmhouse at nine o'clock on Monday morning, with his clipboard.
I had forgotten. The farmhouse was on his autumn list. Walt had put a reminder on the refrigerator three weeks ago, under a magnet shaped like a Holstein. I had walked past it twenty times a day.
"Good morning, Judge," Dennis said on the porch. "I'm here for the reassessment. Walt confirmed by phone."
"Of course," I said. "Come in."
He wiped his boots twice on the mat. He came in. He began, as he always does, with the kitchen.
I followed him from room to room. I did not mean to.
I just found that wherever Dennis went, I was standing in the doorway behind him. It was only in the upstairs hall that I realized I was doing exactly what the mayor had done. I was just doing it more quietly.
Dennis measured the pantry. He looked at the furnace. He checked the new porch Walt had built in the spring and wrote down a number that made Walt, out in the yard, visibly wince.
"The porch is very well made," Dennis said. "That's the problem."
In the kitchen, he stopped and looked at the clock above the stove. It runs four minutes fast. It has run four minutes fast since before I married Walt, and nobody has ever fixed it.
"That clock," Dennis said.
"It's four minutes fast."
"I know," he said. "I've noticed it every Sunday for ten years." He wrote nothing down. "I'm only mentioning it."
We sat at the kitchen table when he was done. I poured coffee. He accepted it the way he accepts trophies.
I have questioned perhaps two thousand witnesses. I know how to get to a point. I decided to go straight to this one.
"Lydia says you're ticklish," I said.
Dennis put down his cup. He looked at it for a while, the way he looks at a cabinet he is trying to price.
"Lydia is correct," he said.
"Then how have you lasted sixty seconds five years running?"
He did not look above my left shoulder. That was the first thing I noticed. He looked directly at me, which he had not done much in four years, and I saw how much it cost him.
"Do you remember the Delancey appeal?" he asked.
I did not.
"It was eleven years ago," he said. "A property tax appeal, in your courtroom.
"A man named Delancey said his house was overvalued because it was haunted. He brought a photograph of the ghost. It was a coat on a hook."
Something stirred, very faintly. A coat on a hook.
"I was the county's witness," Dennis said. "Delancey's lawyer held up the photograph and asked me whether I had included the ghost in my valuation."
He paused. "I laughed. On the stand. I couldn't help it."
"And I said something."
"You said, 'Mr. Kettering, is something about this proceeding amusing to you?'" He said it in the voice. My voice, every consonant ironed.
"Then you said, 'This court expects dignity from the county's witnesses.'"
I did remember it now. Not the words, but the courtroom. A gray Tuesday with forty cases on the docket, and a young assessor turning red.
"Dennis," I said. "I said that to everyone. I said it to a man who brought a parrot."
"I know that now," he said. "I didn't then. I was thirty-four. I thought I'd ended my career over a coat."
He told me the rest while his coffee went cold.
Six years later, Lydia dared him to enter Straight Face. The fire department needed a roof. He paid his twenty dollars and signed in triplicate and sat down in the chair. At second three, he was about to go.
Then he looked up and saw who was presiding.
"You were at the table," he said. "Same robe face. Same voice. And I was on the stand again."
He shrugged, very slightly. "My face just closed. I couldn't have laughed if the building was on fire. The firefighters would have been busy."
"And the spot above my shoulder?"
"In your courtroom, there's a county seal on the wall behind the bench. I looked at it during the Delancey appeal so I wouldn't look at the ghost."
He turned his cup a quarter turn. "In the Grange Hall, it's the fire department's photograph from 1971. It's in the same spot. More or less."
"And every year since?"
"Every year since, you've been at the table. And for four of those years, you've been my wife's stepmother." He looked at his cold coffee. "I didn't want to be the son-in-law who was undignified in front of the judge."
I thought about four years of Sunday dinners. The squares of pot roast. The fence posts. The silences I had taken for steadiness, or worse, for judgment of me.
He had been sitting in my courtroom the entire time. I had never once adjourned it.
Walt came in from the yard and found us sitting in silence at the kitchen table. He looked at Dennis. He looked at me. He poured himself a cup of coffee and stood at the counter, because Walt has always known when a room did not need another chair.
"Two steady animals in one pasture," he said, to no one in particular. "Neither one going to the fence."
"Walt," I said.
"I'm just making an observation."
Dennis stood and tucked his clipboard under his arm. At the door, he turned back.
"I want you to know I'm not complaining," he said. "I've liked winning. And I won't lose on purpose, Judge. Not even for the truck."
"I know," I said.
He nodded and left. I watched his car go down the lane. Then I looked at the clock over the stove, four minutes fast, and understood exactly what I had to do.
Then I understood that I could not do it.
The fix was obvious. If I stayed home on Saturday, Dennis would sit in that chair with no judge at the table. Faye Mulroney would play her scales on his ribs. He would laugh by second five, and the fire department would have its ten thousand dollars.
And I would have rigged the contest. Not for him. Against him.
Twelve years on the bench teaches you one lesson above all the others. If you know something that could change the outcome, you put it on the record. You don't decide privately what to do with it. That is how a judge turns into a person with opinions and a robe.
So on Tuesday morning, I drove to Rhoda Merriweather's house.
Rhoda lives on Orchard Street in a yellow house with a quilt frame in the living room. This year's library raffle quilt was on it, half finished, a pattern of blue and white stars. She let me in and offered me tea, and we sat on either side of the stars.
I told her everything: the Delancey appeal, the coat on a hook, the county seal and the photograph from 1971. I told her that the champion of Straight Face had been holding his breath in front of me for five years.
Rhoda listened without interrupting. Then she picked up a needle and put three stitches into a blue star.
"If you stay home because you know he'll crack," she said, "that's rigging."
"Yes."
"And if you come because you know he won't, that's rigging, too."
"Yes," I said. "That's my problem."
She tied off the thread. She bit it, neatly, the way her mother must have taught her.
"Then you'll do what you always do," Rhoda said. "Front row, left side. Same seat as every year.
"Nobody can say you changed a thing." She looked at me over her reading glasses. "That's my ruling, Constance. I'm the presiding judge."
It was the right ruling. I would have made it myself.
That was the worst part.
So on Saturday, in front of the whole town, I would sit a few yards from my son-in-law. And I would be the only thing standing between Larkin Falls and its ladder truck.
Up next: Conditions Calm
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