The jury deliberated for just two hours before coming back with its verdict:
Guilty.
Two hours! Frank’s lawyer had told him that it would take the jurors at least a few hours to simply go over the charges. What this meant, then, was that they hadn’t had to deliberate at all.
Nancy’s expression was impossible to read. She sat stock-still, with her hands in her lap, staring straight ahead into the distance. But Frank’s children, who had sat behind their father throughout the trial and not on Nancy’s side of the courtroom, were visibly angry. They stormed out of the courtroom without saying a word to their mother.
Nancy knew they would blame her for not having done more to help Frank beat the charges. But what more could she have done? Every word Nancy had said on the stand was true. It had been a fair trial. Frank’s lawyers had done the best they could have done, given what they’d had to work with. And, in the end, the jury had made up its mind. There would be an appeal, Nancy was sure. Another trial. She would see Frank again. But as she looked over at him in the courtroom, Nancy saw something else. Her husband, Frank Howard, was gone. The man sitting in his chair now was someone else—a stranger.
It was John Howard that Nancy was looking at now.
Mr. John.
* * *
Frank was almost relieved.
He had survived the worst thing he feared could have happened to him. All of the witnesses, there on parade, were like walk-ons in the story of his life. Each time one of them told just a bit of the truth—and really, Frank knew, it was only his lawyers who’d lied—it was the lifting of a burden that Frank had been carrying for years. If he’d been younger, he would have been better at juggling all his affairs: his love affairs, and all the money he’d stolen from Raley. But Frank was older and slower now, and once he’d dropped that first ball he’d been juggling, his world had crashed down all around him. For a long time before the shooting, he’d been frantic. So anxious, for so long, he’d gotten used to it. He had not allowed himself to feel the anxiety. But it was there all along, and it got so much worse in the aftermath of the shooting. Now, as he sat in the rubble and ruins of his own life, Frank felt still and at peace. It was a feeling he had not known in years. There was nothing to hide now. No more trouble that he could get himself into. Nothing to fear.
Frank stayed in that state for some hours after the verdict, and the days that followed were full of calm. Even walking back into the courtroom for sentencing didn’t alarm him.
“Life” was a sentence Frank Howard had been serving all along.