Crime Spells

Three drops of Regret. I guard my breath.

“Have you ever wondered on the brown of Maybelle’s hair?” The floorboards settle as the dairy building shifts in the wind.

Three drops of Realization. The burn touches me deep within my face.

“Your child’s eyes are most gray, though your own are oaken dark.” Something rattles on the roof. A few stray hailstones, perhaps, or the claws of a mighty wingéd creature.

Caleb Witherspoon begins to shiver. Rage, fear, the chill of mortality. Cromie stirs behind me.

“A prick of your finger, Mister Cromie.” His breath hisses his surprise. Amid a sweaty stink of fear, he struggles to answer me. “I…”

Reaching out without looking, my fingers find the judge’s wrist limp and dangling. I tug him toward my mixture and stab him carelessly with a silver needle. This does not have to hurt, if I do it better than I have bothered for him.

Three drops of an angry man’s boiling blood, reeking hot and metallic.

“Caleb, where is her mother?” Though his long-lost wife is said to have died in childbirth, this time the preacher groans as though freshly stabbed.

A drop of Vision. A tiny gust of forest scent.

“Who cries on the wind?” I am answered only by silence.

A drop of Culpability. Airs from the grave.

I dip my brush and begin to paint.

I know even before I begin that I will paint the portrait of a woman. I have already seen her on the wind. She is not who I might have expected. Witherspoon’s reach was long.

The bones of her face, the curve of cheek and jaw, are an older echo of Maybelle. Her hair falls differently, lighter in hue. This shows on the wet birch bark even though I do not work in colors beyond what my mixture gives me. Their hairline is not the same-despite my speculations about the beadle, Maybelle’s is more the shape of Cromie’s.

The eyes come to me, half-lidded and bright with standing tears. The secret of portraits is in the eyes. If people can see themselves and those they love peering back from the scribing, they will be convinced.

The outlines now, as if she is growing from a center. She becomes real. This has only taken minutes, with the passion and power that makes the room crackle as electric as the hot, hard wind outside.

It is about a woman. It is almost always about a woman.

“That is Alton Miller’s widow Chastity,” mutters the beadle behind me. “What lives up behind Corn-crib Hill.”

The words choke from Caleb Witherspoon’s mouth as if dragged on chains. “She is my daughter’s mother.”

“No,” Maybelle begins. She bites off whatever words were to come next.

Cromie’s voice is bitter with hollow satisfaction. “Was. Now we know who Otis Blunt saw floating in the river today.”

“You knew all along,” Caleb Witherspoon says.

A woman no one would have mentioned had gone missing, even here in Neverance. Not their grass widow. Who would want to claim to have noticed her? I wonder whose back door the preacher had seen her stepping away from, checking the buttons of her dress.

Does it matter?

I finish the portrait of Maybelle’s mother. Caleb Witherspoon’s young love. Cromie’s conquest, whom Alton Miller had taken as a castoff after she’d borne her child in secret. Well before my time here, but even I knew that the preacher put out that his absent wife had died while the daughter was being sent on to be raised by him. All these men should be in the picture, as well, staring over her shoulder, daring their neighbors to sin.

There must have been a ruse, a carriage or a rider in the dark, in the last moment of friendship between the preacher and the judge before the child took the stage at the center of their lives.

It is a hurt nearly two decades old now but never really done with. Especially not for Chastity Miller.

I look at Caleb Witherspoon. There is no need to ask him why. The reason has been written on his daughter’s face every day of her life in the lines of another man’s jaw and cheeks. Still, it does matter, I realize. If only for the sake of her memory, which no one wanted to account for now. “Why now?”

“The wind makes madmen of us all,” he says.

“Hardly,” mutters the beadle.

I think back on the song of the bottles, my vision of a crying baby. “You saw her hurrying, to Mister Cromie once more perhaps?”

Caleb Witherspoon clears his throat. “From Cromie’s back step, actually.” He turns his face away from Maybelle, whose breath hitches in her throat.

I have it right, I realize. This is a thing to be finished.

Cromie appears uncomfortable, as if he now wishes for silence.

“Was there to be another child?” I ask him. He does seem short on daughters these days, and the widow Miller was not so old.

“It doesn’t matter now.” The judge’s voice is blurred with tears.

So there were two murders today. Did Witherspoon know? There is nothing else to say. The wind pushes at the building, sending dust spiraling down mote by mote from the grubby ceiling. I pack my inkwells one by one in my satchel, carefully avoiding Maybelle’s distress.

“Mister Cromie?” It is Clanton, the beadle, practically creaking in his excitement. “Might be a good idea if I preach this Sunday’s sermon, don’t you think?”

I take my leave, wondering as I go where the river has taken Chastity Miller and her quickened child. Perhaps I should follow them away from this place. Beneath my arm, the bottles shiver a little hymn that I lack the wit or courage to understand.

The Best Defense by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

They tell me time has no meaning here. I sit in cross-legged in a glade, surrounded by willow trees and strong oak and all sorts of green plants I don’t recognize. Flowers bloom out of season-roses next to tulips next to mums. The air is warm, the breeze is fresh, and I have never felt more trapped in my life.

Except when I was in law school.

Third year, sitting in my carrel in the law library, various teas stacked around the top, hiding me from the other students. I’d spend a few hours digging through some musty old tomes to find one little nugget of information that might help my hypothetical client or, failing that, impress some stupid professor, all the while wondering if I should just drop out.

Escape.

Pretend the past three years of Aristotelian logic and Socratic debate had never happened at all.

Now I have tea at my fingertips-all I have to do is snap them and some scantily clad nymph pours me a cup-and all the food I want (oh, yeah, that’s the thing they don’t tell you: never eat the food), and it doesn’t matter.

I’m still digging through tomes, trying to find something to get my client off. He’s not so hypothetical any more. Although I am going to have to impress a few people.

People I don’t really want to impress.

People who may not be people at all.

I only caught the case because I didn’t escape quickly enough from Judge Lewandowski’s courtroom. I’d been there to argue against remand for a repeater, even though I knew all of Chicagoland would be better off if he went to prison for life.

That’s what I do. I defend the defenseless. At least, that’s what I tell the newspapers when they ask, or that schmo at a cocktail party who thinks he’ll get the better of a seasoned public defender.

Mostly I do it because I like to argue, and I like to win against impossible odds. I’m not one of the liberal-hippie types who gravitates to the PD’s office to save the planet; I’m not even sure I believe everyone is entitled to a fair trial.

What I do believe is that everyone is entitled to the best defense I can provide-given that I have hundreds of other active cases, only twenty-four hours in my day, and no real budget to hire a legal assistant.