THE LEAVES were starting to change. It felt too soon. In my head it was still summer. It was still the summer my friends had been murdered. This would be my first autumn without them, the first autumn they wouldn’t see. I wasn’t ready for that yet.
Mr. Haywood’s office had a south-facing window in a limestone building in East Bayside, out of which one could see a lovely view of a little green park but not the water. You could smell it, though, the salty smell-taste of water close by. It permeated the fabrics and the wallpaper of the office building and made everything feel perpetually damp, though you know that it isn’t actually.
I sat in a chair that faced the window. Mr. Haywood’s desk was immediately in front of it, facing the door. His office was lined with bookcases holding important-looking leather-bound volumes of considerable size and weight. One shelf had a bend in the middle, a crooked smile of too-heavy book teeth. On his desk was an emerald-colored plaque that read HARRY HAYWOOD, ESQUIRE, in boldface white lettering, which he straightened after my mother and I sat down.
His pale gray suit made his skin look sickly and pallid, nearly the same colorless quality that his hair had, gray but maybe blond, and his eyes, gray but maybe blue. In his office of dark woods, crimson carpet, and taupe and olive wallpaper, he looked like a ghost.
“Thank you for coming today,” he said, and his voice was not the ghostly murmur I expected, but a lively tenor of musical quality. I relaxed a little in the fat, olive armchair. “Clearly, there’s been an unexpected change in proceedings, and we’re starting from scratch in building a case fit for trial.”
“How can they do this?” my mother demanded, ferocious on a Monday afternoon. “How is this legal?”
“Adams’s attorneys have probably been planning this all along,” Haywood admitted. “He confessed before his mother could get him a lawyer, accepted a deal he didn’t really understand. His lawyers have probably convinced him that to testify against his former bosses would mean certain death for him, and he’s not eligible for witness protection because of his pending case. He waits until the case has been set aside and then breaks his agreement with the district attorney, claims coercion—it’s not a bad tactic. It’ll confuse a jury.”
“So there’s going to be a trial, then?” I cut in, adding, “With a jury and everything? Like on Law & Order?” I felt young and stupid the moment I said it, but it was too late to take it back.
Haywood laughed. “If he enters a plea of not guilty at his hearing next week, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Though I’m not sure how accurate a portrayal a television program can provide.” He began flipping through a thin file, pulling from it a photocopy of the written statement I’d provided for the police after Dustin’s arrest. “We don’t have much to go on for a criminal trial. In fact, without your statement, the case is pretty much built on circumstantial evidence. I would blame shoddy police work, but in a small town, there’s not much more that can be done but outsource.”
“So what you’re saying is, if my daughter doesn’t testify, the Adams boy has a real shot at exoneration?” my mother asked, shaking her head. “Why?”
“Well, it took several days for Adams to be taken into custody. During that time he probably destroyed a great deal of evidence that could have been used to convict him,” Haywood admitted. “They didn’t find the murder weapon or the boots he had been wearing. Shoe size points to him, but you can’t arrest a man for being a size eleven. The clothes you saw him wearing were not among the things found in the Barrett home after the arrest. There were no usable fingerprints left at the scene….”
“So basically, we’ve got nothing,” I said, my heart sinking.
“No, we do,” Haywood assured me. He reached across the desk and grabbed me by both of my hands. Squeezing them between his own two hands, which were warm and solid, he added, “We’ve got you.”