CHAPTER 10

On Sunday, July 17, the day before the scheduled beginning of Rose’s trial, major features—each dominated by at least three or four photographs and in a few instances a map of the Linden Hills neighborhood—appear on the front pages of newspapers throughout Minnesota, the Dakotas, Iowa, and western Wisconsin. The headline and kicker stretched across the top of the Minneapolis Tribune’s front page are typical:

CURTAIN RISES ON DENTIST’S TRIAL
Did Rose Strangle His Pregnant Patient?

Dante DeShields did everything but unspool the newsprint and lay out the pages. For many readers, the preview of the most highly anticipated criminal trial since the end of the war must seem predictable and tame, which was no doubt central to DeShields’s plan. Even the driver, reading the Tribune on a bench in sun-dappled Powderhorn Park this Sunday morning, is disappointed.

The photos of the dentist and his wife sitting demurely in their living room, with a portrait of their virginal daughters on the piano behind them, were nicely staged and are surely faithful if not exactly flattering portraits of a middle-aged, middle-American, upper-middle-class family circa 1955. Ruth appears straitlaced and competent, the doctor placid and self-possessed if perhaps a tad aloof. The driver wishes the girls’ photo was larger. It’s difficult to determine whether they’re pretty or not. Only the dentist looks unmistakably Jewish.

The driver, a slow reader, crawls through George Appel’s text. This includes the case’s chronology ending with Rose’s arrest, a who’s who of the attorneys, assistants, and presiding judge, a thumbnail sketch of the Honorable Haakon T. Nordahl (“a no-nonsense, twenty-four-year veteran of the district court bench,” according to Appel), a panoramic photo of Courtroom No. 1 with the key players’ designated positions boldly labeled, and a long list of possible witnesses, including the Nicollet Avenue characters the driver knows personally—Tony Zevos and Richard Ybarra. Reading the familiar names, the driver feels the shiver of excitement that people experience when they see a friend or relation on TV.

There is little discussion about courtroom strategy. But while County Attorney Scofield offers the usual huff about proving the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, Defense Counsel DeShields, choosing more vivid language, says he’s not only going to “dismantle, top to bottom, the state’s specious case against this innocent man,” he is going to “make it abundantly clear that, owing to police sloth, incompetence, and bigotry, Teresa Hickman’s actual killer still prowls our streets, threatening other young women.”

The driver decides that he will enjoy the trial in person. (Television sets are common in American living rooms in 1955, but no cameras of any kind are allowed in Minnesota courtrooms during trials.) From the Tribune story he learns, however, that Courtroom No. 1, though the courthouse’s largest, has a seating capacity of only a hundred spectators, and Judge Nordahl will allow no standing. Thus, added to the problem of finding a way to spend time off the Canary Cab clock is the necessity of showing up by six o’clock on a weekday morning to have a chance of securing a seat.

Well, no fucking way that’s going to happen unless Teresa Hickman herself is coming back from the grave to testify. The driver will rely on the papers, though he may try hanging around downtown to see what opportunities present themselves.

Miles Mckenzie and Milt Hickok will cover the trial for the United Press. Mckenzie, of course, conducted the bureau’s interview of the Roses. He did his usual businesslike job, with Hickok and Pullman adding detail and color to the stories and updates that clattered over the bureau’s teletype en route to regional clients. Mckenzie considers this one of the biggest stories of his career, certainly the biggest local murder case since Bunny Augustine rubbed out his erstwhile partner “Swifty” Platt in 1948 and walked free thanks to a hung jury. Robert Gardner is happy to pitch in and can’t help but feel he’s working a big story, too, though because his byline won’t run atop any of the Hickman dispatches, if anybody is going to know he’s part of the action, he’ll have to tell them.

All such grumpy considerations vanish, at least temporarily, when on Sunday afternoon Meghan Mckenzie stops by the bureau to drop a manuscript on her father-in-law’s desk and on her way out pauses at Robert’s station, brushes his collar with her manicured fingertips, and inquires if he’s free to join her for a drink when he finishes his shift.

“Do you know the Starlight on Highway 12?” she asks.

Hickok is preoccupied with something he’s typing, and Johnny Dawson, the bureau’s teletype mechanic, is tending to business on the other side of the room.

“Yes,” Robert says.

He’s never heard of the Starlight, but he’ll find it.

Arne Anderson spends Sunday by himself, so hungry for Janine that his body aches. He thinks about driving by the Currys’ apartment and coming up with an excuse to drop in, knowing he’ll probably interrupt Janine and Mel in bed, which, according to Mel, is how they like to spend Mel’s days off, and decides against it. He hasn’t seen or talked to Lily Kline since they split, so despite the obvious reasons not to, he thinks of Janine as his woman, though he knows their relationship can only end bad.

Arne skims the Tribune’s trial preview. When he spoke to Homer Scofield on Friday, the prosecutor, sounding anxious and unsure of himself, said he expects jury selection to be contentious and take more than a week. Arne’s job, and the job of his “colleagues,” as Scofield always calls the investigators, is to make sure the state’s witnesses are accounted for, available when they’re needed, and “steady on their feet.” Arne and his men have stayed close to Grace and Bud Montgomery, Richard Ybarra (who didn’t seem to know who his “buddy” with a car could be, so the cops wondered if Grace had made the guy up), and the Zevoses, father and son. Harold Hickman, granted another emergency furlough, is flying in from Germany on Monday, and Walter Kubicek and Kenneth Landa are scheduled to arrive from North Dakota the following day.

Gerald Bergen, who discovered the body, and Fred MacMurray, the coroner, are on board. But Wallace Ralston, the physician who informed Charlie Riemenschneider that Teresa Hickman told him that Rose is the father of her unborn baby, has since been treated for alcoholism, abandoned his practice, and disappeared, supposedly somewhere out West. Ralston’s hearsay testimony wouldn’t seem to matter a great deal, however, inasmuch as Rose himself told the police that Mrs. Hickman had accused him of her fetus’s paternity.

Arne daydreams about Janine taking the stand and describing for the court her experience with Rose, but it’s only a daydream and not the most excruciating ones he has about her.

He is eager for the trial to start. He’s now inclined to believe, more than he did a month ago anyway, that the dentist murdered the girl, but he still has trouble envisioning a convincing scenario. He knows DeShields’s cross-examination will be hellish. DeShields will accuse Arne and his squad of botching the investigation, giving in to the department’s—and the city’s—historic anti-Semitism, and letting the real killer run free. It could be the worst experience of Arne’s career that doesn’t involve his fists or a gun. He decides to buy a new suit and tie for the occasion.

Dr. Rose, sitting in a fragrant cloud of Mixture No. 79, listens to Brahms and Schubert, the Sunday paper partially read and discarded on the glass-topped coffee table in front of him.

The memory of going to work on Monday, the beginning of a new workweek with its challenges and satisfactions, seems as distant as images of his small-town boyhood. He has spoken to his daughters on the phone and enjoyed a half-hour visit with the girls at a roadside diner just over the Wisconsin line. This evening he is calm and disengaged, neither worried about the trial’s eventual outcome nor confident of the verdict.

If forced to describe his mood he would say he is saddened by everything he has lost. People don’t understand all that is taken from a man when he’s accused of a terrible crime, all that is lost. Time will tell what, if anything, can be reclaimed. He suspects that most of it is gone for good.

Ruth, who does understand, is finally showing signs of strain, snapping at Ronnie about some inconsequential matter and dropping a bowl of strawberries on the kitchen floor. Finally, she goes upstairs to “check on” her husband’s wardrobe for the coming week.

That night Rose has a dream about Teresa Hickman, but he will remember only a fragment of it in the morning. Terry, it seems, had twisted her ankle and lost a shoe.

Anderson and Curry are about to head downstairs to the courtroom when Sid Hessburg, putting down the phone, gets their attention and says, “Herman Goranski.”

Arne and Mel look at Sid. It takes a moment for the name to register, the murder of the old queer in a Phillips tenement, which, like the shootings of the two coloreds on Fourth Avenue, has been all but forgotten with the focus on the Rose trial. Hessburg scribbles something on a pad, tears off a sheet, and hands it to Anderson.

“Guy walks up to Dewey Ostlund’s car in front of the White Way on Cedar a half hour ago, says he knows who killed the geezer by Holy Rosary,” Hessburg says, looking at what he’s written on the pad. “‘Yeah, who?’ Dewey asks him. ‘Me,’ the guy says. ‘Bashed his head in with a leg off a table.’”

Officer Ostlund and his partner, whose name Arne can’t remember, are standing behind a sour-smelling, sorry-looking, middle-aged gent with a lazy eye in one of the interrogation rooms off the MPD’s lobby. Walking over from Homicide, the detectives can hear the hubbub in the courthouse atrium at the bottom of the grand staircase, preparatory to the gavel falling in Courtroom No. 1.

“This here’s Willard Woolworth,” says Ostlund, a trim, pink-faced cop in his late twenties. “Says he clubbed his neighbor Goranski and knocked him dead.”

“Woolworth?” Curry says. “Any relation to—”

“Sheee-it,” the suspect says, shaking his head at the question’s foolishness. “Do you think I’d be living in that dump if I was? Maybe a coupla generations ago there was a connection, but that never done me no good.”

Woolworth, who can produce no identification but says he’ll turn fifty on Labor Day, tells the officers he was having sex—“after a fashion”—in his pal’s apartment when Goranski “started making fun of my equipment.” Woolworth pulls a stiff, yellowed handkerchief out of his back pocket and loudly blows his nose. “I’d warned him about that crap, but once Hermie got going, he wouldn’t let go.” With that wandering eye, it’s difficult to know whom Woolworth is addressing.

Anderson and Curry look at the man while the patrolmen make halffhearted attempts to stifle their snickers.

“Where’d the table leg come from?” Curry asks.

Woolworth fusses with his nose, which is bulbous and cross-hatched with broken blood vessels.

“I brought it up from the alley.”

“So you were planning to kill him,” Hessburg says.

“Naw. I thought I’d see if there was enough scratch in his billfold to borrow some—I’d only smack him if he objected.” He shakes his head. “Turns out there was only about ninety cents, so I thought, fuck it, we’ll have a little fun instead and unbuttoned my trousers. Hermie would be alive today if he hadn’t cast aspersions on my winky.” Hard to know with his eye, but he seems to be talking to Anderson.

“That was more than a month ago,” Mel says. “What took you so long to tell us?”

Woolworth pulls out the handkerchief again and says, “I was thinking about the old cocksucker this morning and realized I missed him. I thought maybe I should tell someone what happened, you know, for the next of kin.” Goranski, the cops have learned, has a nephew in Colorado.

Arne tells Hessburg to book Woolworth on suspicion of murder and take him upstairs.

By the time Arne and Mel enter the courtroom Judge Nordahl has ascended to the bench and the lawyers are facing each other across the attorneys’ table, two on each side. There are twenty-six reporters seated on folding chairs behind two long tables on the left side of the well while the two-tiered jury box on the far right side awaits the dozen jurors and two alternates. From the back of the room, standing alongside a half-dozen uniformed officers, Arne can see, seated in the front row of the gallery, Dr. and Mrs. Rose, Ronald Oshinsky, and two well-dressed couples Arne presumes to be the defendant’s brothers and their wives. The ninety-odd other gallery seats are filled with spectators. Only the policemen and miscellaneous court personnel are standing.

Arne has been in Courtroom No. 1 several times and is always impressed. The big, high-ceilinged room, with its ornamental light fixtures, stained-glass windows, decorative columns, and heavy, dark wood, reminds him of the Calvary Lutheran Church he attended with his mother until he was out of high school. Most of the major criminal cases tried in Hiawatha County since the turn of the century have taken place here.

This morning’s session, already under way, will comprise a numbing series of procedural issues between and among the attorneys, rulings by the judge, and anticipation replaced by boredom in the gallery as spectators, most of whom have been up since well before sunrise, stifle yawns, look at their watches, and wonder when the judge will declare a recess for lunch. Many, clutching brown paper bags, have brought sandwiches, carrot spears, homemade cookies, and apples, though Nordahl has made it clear that there will be no eating while court is in session.

Arne, standing beside Mel, wonders what Janine is doing at the moment, and damned if he doesn’t feel, at the thought of her, the familiar thrill between his legs. Like a concupiscent high school kid during Sunday services, he tries to find another image to take his mind off the activity in his trousers. He settles on Herman Goranski and his red-nosed, wild-eyed killer, and that seems to do the trick.

Jury selection, the vital process the law dictionaries call voir dire, is, as Homer Scofield predicted, drawn out and contentious. There are the usual gaffes and buffoonery, which would be amusing if it didn’t make a long process even longer.

An elderly Northside woman says, for example, she’s had no personal experience with violent crime, and then recalls that her husband served a decade in the state penitentiary after an aggravated-assault conviction before the war.

A distinguished-looking man with a fashionable Kenwood neighborhood address is promptly selected, only to be promptly dismissed when he’s overheard chatting about the case with the Star’s Oscar Rystrom during the lunch recess. (Rystrom throws himself on the mercy of the court and is fortunate to be allowed to keep his courtroom privileges.)

A retired Augsburg College classics professor is rejected when his pseudobulbar affect—unprovoked, uncontrollable laughter, later described to Arne as “emotional incontinence”—is determined to be a distraction.

DeShields rejects thirty-seven prospects when each admits to an “extreme fear” and/or “loathing” of dentists. Oddly enough to several observers, the defense asks no questions about the prospective jurors’ feelings toward Jews, as though DeShields hopes to ignore the subject entirely or intends to fall back on a bias plea if the verdict is appealed.

After almost two weeks and the examination of ninety-two prospective jurors, seven men and five women, plus a pair of male alternates—ages twenty-three to sixty-four, all white and all Christian—are seated on July 29.

Opening arguments will begin on August 1.

The Starlight on Highway 12, a dozen miles beyond the Minneapolis city line, is a two-story, twenty-four-unit motor hotel with a detached knotty-pine bar at one end, across the small parking lot from the office. Robert Gardner and Meghan Mckenzie have met in the bar three times since the day before the trial opened and have so far resisted the temptation—though it’s been discussed—to rent one of the motel rooms for their tryst.

Robert is taking his cue from Meghan, an older, presumably more experienced adulterer, and suspects the tawdriness of a motel room, even in a relatively clean and respectable-seeming establishment such as the Starlight, is below her.

She does not seem nervous about meeting him for a drink here, but comes across skittish as a sixteen-year-old virgin when he suggests booking a room. Howard and Meghan Mckenzie, she’s told him, live twenty-some miles away, in the south Minneapolis suburb of Richfield, three blocks from Miles and Loretta Mckenzie, so the Starlight, on the edge of west suburban Wayzata, is distant enough from friends, neighbors, and in-laws to meet a guy for drinks. Why it’s a step too far to rent a double bed on the other side of the parking lot remains a mystery.

So they have sex in the backseats of his Ford coupe and her more capacious late-model Dodge, off one of the heavily wooded back roads that snake around Lake Minnetonka minutes from the Starlight or, if time allows, in his modest but air-conditioned apartment in Minneapolis.

She doesn’t invite him to her house, even when her husband is out of town.

Meghan fucks the way she walks and talks—purposefully and with a studied competence, as though she studied the erotic arts in grad school and is determined to follow the lesson plan. Her pale, lightly freckled, small-breasted body is beautiful in what Robert considers an austere, aristocratic sense, and he tries not to compare her with the voluptuous, olive-skinned, indefatigable, unmistakably hoi polloi Pam Brantley, whom, ironically, he misses with renewed passion since beginning his affair with Meghan.

But he’s not about to pass up the opportunity to have sex with a beautiful woman, and he’s filled with both affection and admiration for Meghan, the only child of a Pillsbury Company vice president and his socialite wife.

An English major at Northwestern University, Meghan might be the best-educated woman he’s ever met, and surely the most widely traveled. She has studied in France, hitchhiked through the Balkans, and sailed around the Horn of Africa. She subscribes to The New Yorker, speaks knowledgeably about the reportage of John Hersey and Joseph Mitchell (Robert’s gods since j-school), and is “intrigued” by the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and other modernists. She voted for Stevenson in ’52—the first member of her father’s family, she says, to vote Democratic in a presidential election—and vows to do it again if he runs in ’56. (She also speaks enthusiastically about a handsome, young Massachusetts senator named John Kennedy.)

She doesn’t raise her voice, curse, or use dirty language, even in the throes of their lovemaking, and he tries not to either when he’s with her.

Meghan, of course, could cost him his job and God knows what else, but he’s confident that she won’t—she has too much to lose herself, plus he’s pretty sure it wouldn’t be her way to kiss and tell, much less confess to backstreet infidelity. She rarely speaks about her husband, as though to do so while with another man would be in bad form. Thus Robert knows little more about the couple than that they’re childless and that “Howie,” who lost an eye in a childhood accident, is an avid fisherman, which helps account for her availability on summer weekends. She talks occasionally about Miles and Loretta, but always in an affectionate and uninformative way.

He can’t believe, given how easily their relationship blossomed, that he’s her first or only lover, but he doesn’t really care. He’s confident, earlier thoughts to the contrary, that he is not going to fall in love with her, nor she with him. Best he can tell, they are only colleagues who enjoy each other in bed (or a backseat) and are content to leave it at that. The attitude pleases him as European and sophisticated.

Though she is by all accounts a facile and resourceful writer, her father-in-law has not assigned her to the Rose trial or to any case-related stories.

“He won’t say it, but I know he doesn’t think a woman can report and write like a man,” Meghan says on a Saturday morning during the voir dire. “I also think he’s trying to spare me the ugliness of the stuff journalists have to report on, such as the murder of a pregnant girl. He has an old-fashioned, sensitive side that he doesn’t want you guys to see.”

“No kidding,” Robert says. “The way he shepherds you in and out of Smokey’s—like you’re a lamb passing through a pack of starving wolves. Is his son like that?”

Meghan shakes her head. “Howie’s indifferent,” she says without emotion. That helps explain, Robert thinks but doesn’t say, why you’re lying beside me in bed while your husband wets a line in a Montana trout stream. He also acknowledges that Meghan’s rationale for her infidelity echoes Pam Brantley’s.

“Does Miles say much about the case when you see him?” Robert asks.

“He thinks Rose is guilty, but isn’t sure he’ll be convicted,” she says. “I agree, though all I know is what I read in the paper.” She laughs at her feeble joke.

She is not especially curious about Robert. He’s told her he’s the son of a Mayo Clinic surgeon, which must be at least as prestigious, if not quite as lucrative, as a milling-company executive, but there’s an unmistakable gulf between them, owing to what—her private-school education and refined sensibilities, or maybe her age (she’ll turn thirty in October) and marital complications? He knows she finds him attractive and enjoys their lovemaking. For his part, he doesn’t volunteer much about himself, has never mentioned Pam (she’s never asked about other relationships), and is determined, this time, not to say a word about his secret connection to Teresa Hickman.

He does his best, certainly when he’s with Meghan, not to think about his gruesome discovery along the trolley tracks. He pretends, when he can, that his accidental involvement with the Hickman murder is still unknown and will stay that way forever.

Dr. Rose survives the thirteen days of stultifying jury selection and now sits beside Ruth, his brothers, Samuel and George, Sam’s wife and George’s girlfriend (George has been widowed for ten years), and Ronald Oshinsky in the row just in front of the gallery, a few feet behind the table where the attorneys have begun their opening statements.

Rose tries to be attentive, but, God help him, he has all he can do to stay awake. He knows, because he’s been advised by Ronnie and prepared by DeShields, that he will hear nothing new during these initial presentations, only the familiar arguments floated in the papers by County Attorney Scofield and discussed in his dining room by his lawyers.

So much of the experience, however, is new to Rose, a man who has never had to answer for so much as a traffic violation and has visited the courthouse only to pay his property tax.

Every day he will have to pass through a gauntlet of gawking, grinning, jabbering spectators waiting to claim a seat in the gallery as reporters shout his name and the name of his counsel—as though either he or DeShields is going to stop and chat—and the blue-white pop and hot stink of the photographers’ flashbulbs fill the hallway. Police officers in leather jackets stand by, but Rose feels no physical threat from the crowd. Despite the occasional shouts of “Rapist!,”

“Killer!,” and “Kike!,” he understands that he is a curiosity these people are here to see, not to lynch.

Once seated, he will do little more than take in the surroundings of the grand chamber and its accouterments. He finds mildly interesting the faded portraits of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century mayors, aldermen, and jurists, irregularly spaced on the cream-colored walls above the dark wainscoting. The gallery’s long, oak pews have been buffed to a dull sheen by uncounted backsides over the past fifty-plus years, but the tables and chairs in the well are nondescript and temporary-looking, and the linoleum covering what he assumes to be the original marble floors is scuffed and worn thin in the high-traffic areas. The big room has the feel of a temple that is no longer quite equal to its original mission.

Then the players begin filing in: the pokerfaced court clerk and court reporter, the three bailiffs, and the four attorneys. Dante DeShields and Michael Haydon are now as familiar to Rose as his family, but Homer Scofield and his second chair, an older man in a rumpled suit and hideous flowered necktie named Rudy Blake, are not. Rose, of course, has seen the Hiawatha County attorney at an early interview and then at the grand jury proceedings. He reminds him of the Catholic farm boys he grew up among in Morrison County—all sharp elbows and knees, with a skinny neck and protuberant Adam’s apple, skin white as parchment, and a wide mouth full of buck teeth. Blake, who looks to be in his sixties, is there, according to Ronnie, to add “experience and gravitas” to a prosecution needing both. He’s wearing a silver hairpiece that doesn’t quite match the dull gray that’s visible beneath its edges.

Rose will learn later that DeShields worked under Rudy Blake when DeShields, not long out of the University of Connecticut’s law school, was briefly employed in the Hiawatha County attorney’s office. “The old man may not be as quick as he used to be, but he knows a lot and has a mean streak you wouldn’t guess to look at him,” DeShields told Ronnie.

DeShields himself is the picture of controlled ferocity at the attorneys’ table. Is he a Jew? The possibility again occurs to Rose, who, besides his wife and siblings in the pew beside him, may be the only other Jew in the courtroom. The lawyer has revealed nothing, other than his East Coast education, about his background and personal life, and when referring to the Roses’ Jewishness or the community’s anti Semitism, he’s never suggested that he and his client have their heritage in common. A thin gold wedding band on his left hand suggests the presence of a wife, but she is never seen or mentioned. Rose has no idea where in town he lives.

When a bailiff shouts, “All rise! The Honorable Haakon T. Nordahl!,” a tall, straight-backed, white-haired man with eyes so blue their color can be discerned from the last row of the courtroom emerges through a door behind the bench and steps up to his perch. “He’s considered a prosecutor’s judge,” Michael Haydon said when Nordahl was named to the case earlier in the summer. A former county prosecutor himself, Nordahl, according to his official biography, is a member of the Interlachen and Minikahda country clubs, Mount Olivet Lutheran Church, the Sons of Norway fraternal organization, and the Twin Cities Torsk Club, among a dozen well-known local institutions.

Rose presumes that Nordahl is no friend of the Jews. Because the judge rarely smiles, it is difficult to speculate how he might feel about dentists.

On their way into the courtroom, Sam Ross’s pretty second wife, Noreen, hands Rose a small notebook and a freshly sharpened pencil.

“It will give you something to do while you sit here,” she tells him in a whisper. Her breath smells of cherry cough drops.

Now, as the razor-faced Viking in the black robe settles down behind the bench, Rose opens the notebook and prints in a neat, straight up-and-down hand, “God help me.”

In the days leading up to the trial, Grace Montgomery is twice delivered by Anderson and Curry to Homer Scofield’s office in the courthouse.

Grace stays sober on those days and does her best to look presentable in a clean dress and a touch of makeup. The most noticeable bruises have faded, and she avoids arguments with her husband, who, coincidentally or not, spends more time away from the apartment than usual. She knows the police are keeping their eyes on Bud, so she doesn’t worry about him one way or the other.

Scofield reminds her of some of the homely boys she knew in Dollar, and can’t help but be amused to think that one of them, or one like them, has such an important job in the big city. He tells her she will testify for the prosecution—“You must and you will,” he says, sounding like the father of a five-year-old child—and “provide information about your sister and Dr. Rose that no one else can.” The prosecutor doesn’t use the term “star witness,” but the papers do, and that amuses her, too. Terry would be jealous.

Grace tells Scofield and Scofield’s assistant, who impresses her as a kindlier, more refined version of a couple of her Kubicek uncles back home, what she’s told the detectives over the past three months. The prosecutors are most interested, of course, in her experience with Dr. Rose and her understanding of Rose’s relationship with Terry. She will be asked to place Terry in Rose’s office on the evening of April 8.

“Just answer the questions, dear,” Blake (“call me Rudy”) tells her, and pats her arm with a slightly tremulous freckled hand. “Don’t reply to anything that isn’t asked. Look at the jurors from time to time when you’re speaking, as though they asked the question. Do your best to maintain your composure, but it won’t be the end of the world if you shed a tear when you’re talking about your sister.”

Like her uncles, Rudy has an old man’s yellowed smile and sour breath.

The prosecutors do not tell Grace that she is in for a long day, or days, on the witness stand. She is aware, as is most of the Twin Cities by this time, of DeShields’s reputation, but all Scofield says is that her cross-examination by Rose’s attorney will likely be “extensive.”

On her second visit to Scofield’s office two days after the first, the prosecutors lead her through a lengthy “dress rehearsal,” in Rudy’s words. She is sober and presentable, but visibly nervous, wringing her hands, licking her lips, crossing and uncrossing her legs.

“You need to control your emotions, Mrs. Montgomery,” Scofield says after she stumbles over a few anodyne questions.

“Take a deep breath, dear,” Rudy says. “We’re going over the information you’ve already given to the grand jury. The trial jury will be on your side.”

An hour into the rehearsal, Grace knows she won’t be able to do this. She was never good at exams in school, smart as she was and even when she’d studied. She did not do well in the face of other people’s expectations. Unlike Terry, she can’t stand people staring at her, waiting for a response. Today her mind darts away from the practice questions like a fearful dog when someone tries to pet it. Her resolve to pull herself together, do her civic duty, and see to it that her sister’s killer is punished has all but vanished.

She can tell by the lawyers’ reactions that she isn’t doing well. Scofield noisily pushes his chair away from the table where they’re sitting, stands up, and turns toward the window, running a hand through his thatch of red hair.

“Focus, Mrs. Montgomery!” Rudy tells her, no longer so avuncular. “For the love of God, madam, focus!”

Then he lights a cigarette for her, and they continue. She does a little better, describing Rose’s office and her visits there—but she knows it’s no use. They can’t say exactly when they will call her to the stand, but it will likely be a few days after the opening statements, following the testimony of the detectives and the coroner and the citizen who found Terry’s body. It doesn’t matter: she knows she won’t be there when she’s called.

She also knows she won’t tell the lawyers or Anderson and Curry or whoever is assigned to “look after her” (Rudy’s words) about her decision. She won’t tell her father or Hal or any of the other North Dakota witnesses who have arrived in Minneapolis during the past few days and who she’s managed to avoid, partly because the attorneys have cautioned her about speaking to other witnesses prior to her testimony, and partly because she doesn’t want to see them. The only kin she’d like to see is Hal Junior, but the child is now and likely forever beyond her grasp, in the hands of Hal Senior’s parents in Grand Forks.

She is overcome by the dizzying sensation that the life she’s led during the past half year belongs to another woman, a woman she doesn’t know, and therefore the names, dates, and places the lawyers are badgering her about have nothing to do with Grace Kubicek Montgomery.

She is suddenly, or maybe not so suddenly, very tired and sad. She wants to go home. She wants to have a drink. She wants to take a bath.