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I looked up the Sewards’ phone number. Sara had introduced me to Pete and Melody the previous morning; she’d gone jogging with Melody before sunrise, then invited the two of them over for coffee afterward. We’d all seemed to get along fine, certainly well enough that I felt comfortable looking up their number and dialing it.

“Hello?”

“Melody,” I said. “This is Paul Callaway.”

“Oh! Hi, Paul. I just sent Brit to your place. Is she not there yet?”

“No, she made it,” I said. “Thanks for the disc.”

“We thought you might like to have a copy.”

I didn’t need a copy, and I doubted Sara did either, but it seemed like a thoughtful gesture. “We appreciate it. Thank Pete for me, will you?”

“I sure will.” A four- year- old voice clamored for attention in the background; Melody’s voice disappeared, then returned. “Sorry, it’s a little nuts here, as usual. Say, Paul, when did Brit leave?”

“Actually, she’s here now.”

“Really? Still?”

“That’s why I’m calling.” I moved a few paces into the kitchen, out of sight of the dining room, and quickly recounted our
Wuthering Heights
conversation. “She’s a big reader?”

Melody chuckled on the other end of the line. “We went to the Grand Canyon last summer, but I doubt she could tell you what it looked like. She had her nose in a book the whole trip.”

She’d just described me as a teenager. “Well, talking about books,” I said, “I’ve got a couple thousand of my own that still need unpacking over here.”

“Did you say thousand?”

“A couple thousand, yeah.”

“Wow.”

“She’s been browsing titles for the past ten minutes or so.”

“Paul, I’m sorry. She’s not exactly shy. Just tell her I said to come home, will you?”

“No, not at all, it’s perfectly fine, I was just going to ask. Does she have a summer job?”

“She watches her little sister in the mornings,” Melody said. “And she sits Trish and Barry’s twins whenever they ask. But that’s about it. Why?”

“Well, I was thinking I’d be willing to pay her if she wanted to help shelve this mess. That is, if you and Pete think it would be okay.”

“Really?”

“I’m sure she’s got better things to do with her summer.”

“Not this week, she doesn’t. She’s grounded.”

“So I heard. Maybe it’s a bad idea?”

“I think it’s a great idea, Paul. We’re pulling each other’s hair out over here.
I
should pay
you.”

After hanging up, I ran the idea past Brittany, who said, “You’d pay me?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

“How much?”

“How much do you charge?”

She seemed to think about it. “Twenty bucks an hour.”

“I was thinking more like five.”

Brittany narrowed her eyes. “Five bucks an hour, and I get to borrow whatever I want.”

“Done.”

She had a pretty smile. “Cool.”

As she was leaving, I said, “Hey, Brittany. Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

“Brit,” she said. “What’s the question?”

“How come you’re grounded, anyway?”

She waved her hand in the air like the whole thing was too boring for words. “I bought this bikini with my allowance. Dad and Melody told me to take it back, but I didn’t. Melody caught me wearing it at the pool.”

Melody,
I thought. As in, not
Mom.
I said, “Oh.”

“Yeah. What’s the big deal, right?”

It didn’t seem like an especially big deal, but I wasn’t the one to say.

“Melody thinks I can’t wear a two- piece until I’m sixteen. It’s super- cute, too. They’re so uptight.”

That made me pause. I said, “Can I ask you another question?”

“Sure.”

“When do you turn sixteen?”

“In forever,” she said. “I’ll be fourteen in January.”

Jesus,
I remember thinking.
Poor Pete.

My mother would have called Brit Seward an early bloomer. Bikinigate suddenly made a whole new kind of sense. I’d already noticed the way the Sentinel One guys had traded grins and glances when Brit arrived, her sun- lightened hair up in a ponytail. She’d been dressed for hot weather that day: denim cutoffs, flip- flop sandals, a snug- fitting tank top which stretched in ways that create problems for everyone. I’d noticed the way the workers kept stealing glances.

Had I stolen a couple myself?

“Do me a favor,” I said.

“Sure, maybe.”

“Don’t buy any swimsuits with the money I pay you, okay?”

She laughed. “Are you serious?”

“Your dad looks like the kind of guy I wouldn’t want mad at me.”

She rolled her eyes. “He’s totally harmless.”

“If you say so.”

“Melody’s the one you don’t want mad at you.”

“I don’t want either of them mad at me.”

“Fine,” she said. “I promise I’ll only use the money you pay me to buy drugs.”

“Terrific,” I said.

“And condoms if I run out.”

“I appreciate that.”

She grinned. I grinned. We seemed to understand each other. Brittany went home, and I went back to work.

By the time Sara returned from her meeting on campus, Sentinel One had finished installing the new alarm system, which included magnetic strips on all the windows, pressure plates on all the doors, keypads wired directly to the Sentinel One response center, and motion- activated exterior lighting all the way around the house. Which now seemed, we both agreed, like a much safer place than it had before.

I WAKE UP IN A PANIC, disoriented, unsure where I am. I’ve been startled by a noise, but I don’t know what I heard.

For a moment, I sit paralyzed by the vague yet urgent sensation that I’m in immediate physical danger. When my chest begins to ache, I realize that I’m holding my breath.

On exhale, the fog in my head begins to dissipate. Little by little, my pulse recedes, and as my surroundings slowly bleed into focus, I become aware of the hard iron bunk frame behind my knees. I’m awake. I recognize, my sense of irony apparently intact, that in terms of immediate physical danger I really couldn’t be safer.

My cell looks just the way I remember it. Actually, that’s not true. A deposit has been made. This must have been what woke me up: the sound of the hinged plate covering the food
slot in the door pushing open, dropping closed again. I see a gray plastic tray waiting for me on the shelf.

I feel like I’ve slept on a sidewalk. There’s a hot stitch in my neck, a deadened nerve in my hip, muscles knotted in the middle of my back. My bladder is bursting, but I also smell food. Aiming my stream into the steel bowl of the toilet feels a little bit like taking a whiz at the breakfast table. I haven’t eaten anything since lunch yesterday, and even over the rising smell of warm frothy urine, the smell of breakfast makes my stomach growl.

Breakfast turns out to be a fried egg sandwich that comes in a grease- spotted take- out sack from Petrow’s, a ‘ 30s- style train car diner across the square from the courthouse.

Something about this amuses me, even lifts my spirits. What are they eating for breakfast at the big county facility north of town? Briefly I imagine sweaty guards dragging tin cups along jail cell bars. I imagine bleary- eyed men in denim shirts shuffling into a chow line at dawn. It doesn’t matter that I’m picturing something straight out of
Cool Hand Luke;
the point is, they must not even have a kitchen here. This isn’t where they keep the real prisoners. I’m only at the temporary jail.

I can’t remember a fried egg sandwich ever tasting as good as this one. In the bottom of the sack there’s a hash brown potato patty shaped like a football. It’s cold by the time I get to it, and a little on the stale side. I could eat four more just like it.

Next to the sack is a lidded paper cup filled with lukewarm orange juice, still foamy on top. After using the toilet I’m inclined to leave the juice where it sits. I could use a cup of black coffee instead, or a gallon bucketful.

But things are looking up.

It’s morning. A brand- new day. I’ve got a regular pit bull for a lawyer, and he’s on his way now to get me out of here. Pretty soon I’ll be able to see Sara. We’re going to fix this.

•    •    •

Because the city jail and the courthouse are connected, travel to my arraignment involves a semiconvoluted indoor walk through a gradual shift in surrounding décor. A uniformed guard leads me along a gritty tile corridor, up a concrete stairwell, through a steel door, down a polished marble corridor, up a wrought iron stairwell, and through another door made of dark old wood, retrofitted with a modern security card reader.

Because the courthouse is a historic building that presides over a historic town square, I’m mildly surprised by the remodeled, carpeted, vaguely corporate look of the courtroom. Be cause it’s Saturday—which means, as Douglas Bennett already informed me, that felonies and misdemeanors are heard in the same session—I’m the only person in the room with handcuffs and an armed escort.

I count perhaps a dozen people scattered around the general seating area, which consists of several rows of auditorium-style chairs separated from the front of the courtroom by a waist- high partition. On my entrance, all eyes turn toward me. It’s equally easy to imagine that I’m walking in to teach an early- morning class on campus, or that I’m Hannibal Lecter being wheeled in on a handcart.

I spot Sara immediately, seated in the front row, just behind the partition. The look on her face when she sees me—un-shaved, shackled, led in by the arm—isn’t one I’m likely to forget. Almost as quickly her eyes cloud, then register confusion.

I try to communicate in some way, but I don’t know how. Somewhere on the periphery, I hear the sound of my own name called out by the bailiff. The guard leads me to the nearest of two tables facing the judge’s bench. I see a man in a dark brown suit already waiting at the other table, file folders stacked in front of him. While all of this is happening, my desperation mounts.

An hour ago, I couldn’t wait for this moment. Now here I am.

Where the hell is my lawyer?

The judge looks down at the docket in front of her, then looks down from the bench at me. Like the courtroom itself, she’s not what I expect, insofar as I’ve been led to expect anything. She’s blonde, late middle- aged, attractive, and though she appraises me over the top of a pair of bifocal reading glasses, the frames are fashionable, making her look more stylish than stern. She may well be the mother of young teenage daughters, as Douglas Bennett has told me, but she exhibits no outward evidence of a leniency disorder.

“Good morning, Mr. Callaway. Am I to assume you’ll be standing without representation?”

“No,” I say. The word hops out of my throat like a yelp. “I mean no, Your Honor. I have an attorney.”

She glances at the officer standing next to me. She glances to the man in the suit at the other table, who I gather must be the county prosecutor. She looks at me again and raises her eyebrows. “Is your attorney present?”

I’m grasping, craning for a look over my shoulder, as if my attorney might be hiding behind the potted ficus in the back. “I guess I don’t see him.”

“I guess I’ll take that as a no.”

“He said he’d be here.” My voice sounds feeble even to me.

He said he’d be here early,
I want to tell her.
We were supposed to go over our game plan.
Now I don’t have a game plan. This is just some guard from the jail beside me, not my pit bull lawyer. I’m not ready. “Is there any possibility for a recess?”

The judge sighs in the manner I imagine she reserves for people who have watched too many courtroom dramas on television. “If this were a trial or a grade school,” she tells me, “I might consider recess. Since this is your arraignment, I’ll ask if the People object to an informal continuance until the end of the misdemeanor docket. Perhaps that will give defending counsel time to change his tire or come out of the bathroom or whatever it is that seems to be keeping him.”

For a moment, when she says
the People,
I think of the audience
behind me and wonder why the hell it should matter whether they object or not. Are they standing here in handcuffs with no game plan?

Then the county prosecutor speaks up from the other table. “The People have no issue with that, Judge.”

“Fine. Mr. Callaway, we’ll give your attorney some more time. If he hasn’t arrived before the conclusion of the session, you’ll be remanded to the custody of the county and this proceeding will be rescheduled for Monday morning. Do you have any questions?”

I have so many questions that I can’t decide which to ask first. Just then, the doors open at the back of the courtroom. My heart does a flip and relief floods my chest at the sight of Douglas Bennett hurrying up the aisle, carrying his leather satchel by the handle, his overcoat rippling behind him like a cape.

“My apologies, Your Honor,” he says. “Good morning.”

“Good morning to you, Mr. Bennett.” The judge glances at the large round clock on the wall directly above the bailiff’s head. “Cutting it a little close, wouldn’t you say?”

The jail guard turns over his post to Douglas Bennett, who takes his place beside me at the table. “Yes, Your Honor. Un in tentionally so.”