An hour later, Rita still hasn’t come home. I pace the living room, trying to come up with an explanation for those thousand-dollar checks. If Rita did have an affair with Coach, who’s she seeing now? I never ask. I never want to know.
I have to do something, so I search Jeremy’s room for his batting gloves. Then I check Rita’s room for her old high school yearbooks.
Zilch. Nothing.
After another restless hour, I stretch out on the couch to see if I can catch a few minutes’ sleep. But when I shut my eyes, I see Caroline Johnson standing at the window, watching. Or I see Coach Johnson curled up on the barn floor.
A few minutes before six, I can’t wait a second longer. I have to call Raymond and tell him about the new evidence.
The phone rings and rings until the answering machine picks up. While I’m waiting for the beep, I try to figure out how to word what I want to say.
But before I can leave my message, Raymond answers. “Hello?”
“Raymond?” The machine finishes telling me to leave a message, then squawks out a beep. “Raymond, I’m sorry if I woke you up.”
“Hope?”
“Yeah. Listen, I have to tell you some stuff, but I don’t want to tell you how I got the information.”
“Just a minute.” He sounds like he’s underwater. I hear the receiver clunk. A minute later Raymond is back. “This better be good, Hope.”
I fill him in as much as I can without telling him about breaking and entering the crime scene and Coach’s office.
“Wait now,” he says. “How did you…? No. Never mind.” His sigh carries over the phone wires. “What does your mother say about the checks?”
“I haven’t asked her yet.” I don’t add that I haven’t had a chance to ask because she’s stayed out all night.
“Well, it might not matter.”
“Are you kidding?” I shout. “Raymond, how could that not matter? Don’t tell me I broke into Coach’s office for nothing!”
“I didn’t hear that,” Raymond says, not shocked or surprised, like he’s already figured out that much. “I don’t know about the checks, Hope. But the other things, the loan apps and the bills, nobody’s said anything about Coach’s finances. Where there’s debt, there’s motive. How many loan refusals were there?”
“I’m not sure. Three or four, at least. T.J. could tell you.”
“T.J.?”
Rats! I shouldn’t have brought him into it. Such a long silence follows that I’m not sure if Raymond is still on the line. “Raymond?”
“Hmmm? Sorry. I’m thinking…” More silence. “Okay. I’ll level with you, Hope. Your testimony didn’t help our insanity plea any.”
“I’m sorry, Raymond.” I get a flashback of that second in court when I realized I’d walked right into the prosecution’s trap. Keller looked at me like I’d single-handedly won him his ticket to Washington, D.C., and bigger fish to fry. I can see his nose hair in his left nostril, the bead of sweat on his curled upper lip.
“It’s not just your testimony,” Raymond continues. “My expert witness didn’t do much for us either. Insanity is a hard sell around here. People are too practical.”
“Too insane, if you ask me.”
“Could be,” he admits.
“So what do we do?”
“I think I’m starting to agree with you, to tell the truth,” Raymond says.
“Really?” I’m not sure what I expected. Maybe that this was going to be a much harder sell to Raymond. “That’s great!”
Raymond keeps going, and I think he’s talking to himself more than to me. But I don’t mind. “We need to begin creating doubt, give the jury a few reasons to find Jeremy not guilty.” He sighs. “Thank God for the double plea-not guilty by reason of insanity, and not guilty.”
Maybe Raymond is right. Maybe that really is something to thank God for. I haven’t done much thanking lately. I have a feeling that even in jail, Jeremy isn’t forgetting to thank God. I can almost hear him: God, thanks for these bars that make cool shadows. And thanks for my roommate, Bubba, and the pretty tattoos on his arms… and legs, and shoulders, and head.
“Hope, did you hear me?”
“What?”
“I said, I’m going to issue a subpoena to have Caroline Johnson testify in person. If there’s an objection, the judge will have to rule. We could establish motive. And that’s more than Keller has done with Jeremy. They haven’t even suggested a motive.”
“Yes! Raymond, would it help if you had two people who’ve seen Mrs. Johnson standing on her own and staring out her window?”
“Not if those circumstances would put the two people in prison for breaking and entering.”
“Got it. It will be so great to watch her squirm on the witness stand, though.” Sometime during our conversation, the phone cord got wrapped around my arm. I work on unwrapping it now. “Don’t forget to ask her if she can get out of the wheelchair on her own. And ask about money. And the loans. And those canceled checks to Rita.”
“Easy, Hope,” he interrupts. “I don’t even know if the court will allow this. And if they do, we could be too late. Trial is winding down, whether we want it to or not. My witness list isn’t that long.”
“What about Rita? What about her testimony? Are you still going to make her tell all those stories about Jeremy, the ones that make him sound crazy?” I hate those stories. Rita tells them to strangers in bars and grocery stores: about the winter Jeremy wandered off without his shoes or coat and ended up with frostbite; about the time he walked up to the screen at the movie theater and punched a hole in it; or the day he grabbed a kid in his stroller and ran and ran until the police stopped him-Jeremy had seen the mother hit the little boy, slap him on the cheek.
“I’ll put Rita on hold and see if we still need her,” Raymond says.
“Great!” I’m glad Rita’s not testifying.
“There are a lot of variables here, Hope. I might not get permission to bring in Mrs. Johnson. And if I do put her on the stand, she may not be a good witness for us.”
“I know. Chase told me she’s not a big fan of my brother.”
“Chase? Chase Wells?”
“Y-yeah.” I shouldn’t have brought him into it either.
“Well, it’s true. Mrs. Johnson did some damage,” Raymond admits.
“Why would she say she was scared of Jeremy? People ignore my brother. They don’t understand him. They’re uneasy around him. But they’re not afraid of him.”
“Maybe she’s not scared of him,” Raymond says. “Maybe she just wants the jury to be scared of him.”
All right, Raymond! It’s the first time I’ve felt that Raymond believes Jer might be innocent. “You have to get the jury to see through that woman,” I tell him. I think about her dark figure watching T.J. and me leave the barn. “Um… you know those two people who saw her standing at her window?”
“I do. I know one of them rather well.” Raymond’s voice has a little smile to it.
“Well, they saw her tonight… And I’m pretty sure she saw them too.”
“Hope!”
“Plus, if Mrs. Johnson owns a white pickup truck, or knows somebody who has one, it would explain a lot of things.”
“Do I want to know about this pickup truck?” Raymond asks.
Whether he wants to know or not, I tell him. And I tell him about the phone calls.
“I don’t like this,” Raymond says. I’ve been so afraid he wouldn’t believe me. Instead, I’m pretty sure he sounds… worried. “Have you told anybody about this?”
“I told Sheriff Wells, and he said he’d drive by the house at night, even though I know he didn’t take me seriously.”
“You need to call him, or dial 911, if anything like that happens again. I mean it, Hope. Or call me.”
I like having Raymond worry about me. A giant yawn comes up from nowhere, making me exhale into the phone.
“See if you can get some sleep,” Raymond says. “I need to get going on that petition to the court.”
“Good luck, Raymond.” I yawn again.
Before I can hang up, Raymond shouts, “Hope! You be careful, okay?”
In spite of everything, I feel myself smile. “Thanks, Raymond.”