The appeal took seven months. Nobody can hold their breath that long. We stayed busy instead.

Naomi and William Crawford moved to Chicago a couple of months after the trial. She called me once in a while to update me on her accomplishments in the field of interior design and to remind me that she was still healing from the loss of her son. William she mentioned only when I asked.

The Russells divorced and Ruth moved away, where no one knew or would say. When the paper did a six-month follow-up, a neighbor said Bobby had stopped talking pretty much altogether and Ruth decided she could live with death no longer. You saw Bobby now and then at the grocery or in the field. His expression lived flat in the middle distance, eye contact and waving gone from his repertoire, too.

When he was sentenced, Jake sank like bait into the System, but every month or so, he coughed up a letter to Alice and Wood. Each told rough tales, and always they ended the same. Jake asked if Wood could please find his daddy.

Wood would not respond, and after the first couple, Alice started keeping an eye out. She shortstopped them. They made Wood just pretty tough to live with, she said.

The Convict’s father fired Reardon and Ms. Reynolds and hired an appeals specialist. In the brief she filed with the Court of Appeals, the specialist claimed her colleagues had been ineffective as counsel. The primary arguments were that Reardon failed to thoroughly pursue and present evidence to support his theory that someone other than the Convict had been present in Lottie’s trailer and committed the murders and that he should have taken the mistrial when he had the chance.

Two of the three-judge appellate panel, enough to stick the decision, ruled against the Convict. They concluded that since the high burden of proof was on the State and not the defense a reasonably competent defense attorney need not have produced any more evidence to persuade the jury of reasonable doubt than Reardon did. Whether Reardon could have gotten a mistrial was speculative, the judges said, and whether there would have been a different outcome if the case had been retried was even more so.

The dissenting judge inferred from what he called the “tortured” reasoning of the majority’s decision and the nearly record speed with which they reached it that his colleagues had no stomach for second guessing the jury’s documented, underlying opinion. That opinion, the judge said, was expressed by the jury foreman in an interview in a certain local paper. It was that the Convict was a monster.

There was some slim evidence that the Convict’s father and the bar had come around to that view as well. When the old man turned off the tap and fired the appellate attorney, the appeals ended, and word among those who should know was that no lawyer in the state was willing to sue Reardon for malpractice, despite what the Convict wanted.

As soon as it was clear the legal maneuvering was done, Lottie let me interview her. By that point, we knew almost everything we needed to know about her, but two points stood out.

She does not babysit anymore. Children and, more likely, their parents, she said, were almost certainly spooked by her place and probably by her. Such a pleasurable way to spend time, being with young people, she said. She hadn’t found anything that could replace it.

She’d gone back to living in that damned double-wide. She said she stayed because all the years of good memories outweighed a night’s worth of bad, and it was just easier to have Bunny rip out a bloody carpet than build new memories. Dill would accuse me of High-Beam thinking here, but it was, for Lottie, a fairly typical response.

Lottie would talk only to me, not to anyone else in the clans. She said she owed explanations to no one but the friends and neighbors here whom she’d troubled. I would stand in for them, ask the questions they would ask and tell them what she said. As someone who was not born here and therefore would always be an outsider, I was touched by her trust. I thought it counted for something valuable. Not at all.

“Your sins,” Marley said, “were that you knew too much, held onto what you knew too long, and made decisions about what we print and don’t print that were not yours to make.”

Bob spoke not to absolve but to can me. I knew it as soon as he opened his mouth. The syntax, the color on his otherwise pale cheeks, and his inability to meet my eyes told me he’d written his words and memorized them well before we met across his desk after hours for the last time.

The timing was the odd. With Lottie’s interview, we’d finally wrapped up the story, and we were ready to move on. In the meantime, I’d made a point of behaving myself.

But then I remembered that Moze had pulled the General Manager over and charged him with drunk driving a week or so after the Lottie interview ran. And that Crandall, a first-order hardballer with a crystalline memory, had called the GM at the paper a day or two later. And that the terms of the GM’s plea agreement, which we published above the fold for credibility’s sake, were remarkably light for a second strike.

In light of those circumstances, I’ll appreciate if you don’t call me cynical when I thought now that my employer had sucked everything it wanted out of me I might be part payment of the GM’s fines and fees.

When I’d worked it through, I said, “Too much knowledge. In our business? That’s a sin?”

Anger torched Marley’s embarrassment. His eyes jumped off the desk and grabbed mine.

“You thought you knew more than we did—than I did—about what we were going to do with what you knew. It wasn’t your job to solve the case. It wasn’t your job to try and convict the culprit. You’re ungovernable.”

“Your word?” I said. “Or the GM’s?”

That doused the ire. He bit his lip, looked way, and sighed.

“Clay, damn it, if you hadn’t gone into the damned trailer and then crawled so far under the covers with Moze, we wouldn’t be here.”

Tempted as I was to point out to Marley that what Moze, Wood, Crandall, and even he had chosen to do or not do with their own knowledge and suspicions was on them, there was still, as always, the Program. Honestly? Marley had me, as I suspect the GM had had him before me.

That’s why we shook hands, and I left. That’s why I was mostly wistful and only occasionally irate that somebody—my bet rides on the GM—blackballed me as unmanageable among the 28 newspapers I applied to.

And that’s why—along with the fact there’s not much else available for someone with my skill set in these country places—I wound up deep in a warehouse where I spend my days picking products off shelves, packing them in boxes, and talking to no one. It’s cost me an affordable pound or two and turned an otherwise sunny disposition partly cloudy, but there’s been more than enough time to think and write.

And him?

Him I have not named and will not do so now.

To leave him unnamed, I know, contradicts the most fundamental rule of what used to be my business. With all their implicit associations, names are like ions that plate gold. Merely dropping a name into a set of few facts is often enough to tell a full story. Think about names on honor-roll lists.

But I will not now. I named him the first time. Naming him now, naming him again, would make him more human than he is and me less so than I am.

Further, I will not comment. Except to tell one last story. About why I wrote this. About why, despite what most think, a verdict is never the final word.

Readers, usually with a certain vindictive tone, are always pleased to point out that the paper and I got it wrong when we ran that interview and analysis before the verdict came back. Just another example of the press not getting things right, they like to say, printing just bad things, even about good people, like Crandall and Wood.

Well, Wood is a good man, and he called me the night before Secrist sentenced the Defendant to enough consecutive life sentences to assure the public he would die alone in a crate. Wood said the Defendant had asked me to ride along with Moze and him to the state prison system’s processing center to do another interview.

I said I would pass. It was Marley’s call to make and I probably should’ve told him about it, but I had been there and I had done that and I could not think of a single way talking to him again would benefit readers or me.

I told Wood, though, I knew a reporter who would jump at the chance and look better doing it. I gave him Janelle’s number, and she wrote a pretty good story, a point-counterpoint, in which she followed each long quote from him with a long, italicized quote from the testimony of Lottie or Jake or some other State witness.

The best remedy for foul speech is more speech, so First Amendment fans say, in other contexts, of course. Wish I’d thought of it.

I saw Moze when he got back. After things settled and time healed a wound here and there, Moze let me watch him eat French toast again. Dreamer that he is, Moze asked me if I knew Janelle’s number, maybe he’d look her up. And kid deputy that he remained, despite the entire experience, he wiped syrup from his face, and he said he listened to every word the Defendant told Janelle in the car, and now he just had to wonder, did that jury get it right?

“From what I heard, I just don’t know,” Moze said. “Maybe he’s not guilty.”

Sweet Jesus.

So call this a prayer. For the wisdom of juries. And maybe—just maybe—for a fat boy redeemed.