Presumed Guilty E-Book

Scott Turow

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 940

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'A superb, sexy sequel to Presumed Innocent' Sunday Times 'A legend of suspense fiction' Steve Cavanagh 'The master of the courtroom drama' Daniel Silva 'A writer with few peers in any genre' David Baldacci Daily Mail Books to Watch 2025 The Times Best Thrillers of 2025 So Far In a sequel to Presumed Innocent, the book that redefined the legal thriller, judge and lawyer Rusty Sabich returns to the courtroom to defend his step-son against a racially-charged murder indictment as the boy's life – and perhaps Rusty's last chance at happiness – hang in the balance. Rusty is a retired judge attempting a third act in life with a loving soon-to-be wife, Bea, with whom he shares both a restful home on an idyllic lake in the rural Midwest and a plaintive hope that this marriage will be his best, and his last. But the peace that's taken Rusty so long to find evaporates when Bea's young adult son, Aaron, living under their supervision while on probation for drug possession, disappears. If Aaron doesn't return soon, he will be sent back to jail. Aaron eventually turns up with a vague story about a camping trip with his troubled girlfriend, Mae, that ended in a fight and a long hitchhike home. Days later, when she still hasn't returned, suspicion falls on Aaron, and when Mae is subsequently discovered dead, Aaron is arrested and set for trial on charges of first degree murder. Faced with few choices and even fewer hopes, Bea begs Rusty to return to court one last time, to defend her son and to save their last best hope for happiness. For Rusty, the question is not whether to defend Aaron, or whether the boy is in fact innocent – it's whether the system to which he has devoted his life can ever provide true justice for those who are presumed guilty. 5* READER REVIEWS 'Absolutely brilliant' 'Scott Turow at his very best' 'A great legal thriller ... Kept me riveted' 'Fantastic. It will draw you in from the first page' 'Scott Turow is the master of the legal, court room drama' 'A masterpiece - one of the best legal thrillers I have read' 'This is what you call a proper legal thriller'

Leseprobe

Also by Scott Turow

SuspectThe Last TrialTestimonyIdenticalInnocentLimitationsOrdinary HeroesUltimate PunishmentReversible ErrorsPersonal InjuriesThe Laws of Our FathersPleading GuiltyThe Burden of ProofPresumed InnocentOne L

For six wonderful parentsBen & RachelLiz & GabeJason & EveWith love and thanks

I.

Gone

1

Gone

September 13, 2023

Aaron has disappeared. It has happened before and, despite my recent hopes, it will probably happen again. Everybody realizes that. Except his mother.

“Do you think he’s okay?” asks Bea, pronounced like the letter B. Thirteen months ago, as a gift of sorts for my seventy-fifth birthday, Bea agreed to marry me, although she’s been reluctant since then to set a date.

Late last night, while we were sleeping, a hellacious storm blew in from the north. The concussive power of the thunder doubled as it ricocheted off Mirror Lake, on whose shore we live. After a boom like an artillery round rattled our windows, I felt Bea rise—and a few minutes later tumble back into bed with a cheerless weight that let me know that Aaron was not home. Up for the morning, she’s just checked again, hope against hope, with the same result.

“Of course,” I answer about Aaron, doing my best to look convincing. “You know him. He’s probably by himself out in the woods.”

“But how did he get there?” Now that she asks, this is a troubling question. Since Aaron’s felony conviction a year and a half ago, after he was arrested with enough cocaine and meth to mean real trouble, his driver’s license has been suspended. More important, the terms of the strict probation he agreed to in order to get out of the Skageon County jail after four months there require him to live in our house and stay in close touch with us. Aaron, we both know, could teach classes at the university level in how to get in your own way. And yet, this is the first time since he moved in that he has ‘gone dark,’ as he likes to put it, turning off his phone and voicemail, relieving himself of what he often finds the most onerous responsibility of civilization, the obligation to communicate.

I ask Bea whether her ex has heard from their son, and she says she hasn’t tried Lloyd yet. She did speak to her own father, but Joe, who is close to Aaron, claimed to have no idea concerning his grandson’s whereabouts.

“Do you believe him?” I ask, and Bea’s face is mobile for an instant with her customary skepticism of her father.

“Probably,” she says. For a second, we ponder one another in silence, until she asks, “We don’t have to call the judge yet, do we?”

‘We,’ as she knows, is euphemistic. The sentencing judge, Morton Sams, thought that I, as a former judge myself, and someone who still needs his license to practice law, would understand my duty to the court if Aaron steps out of line.

“Not yet,” I tell her. “It’s one night. It could be anything. Maybe whoever’s car he was in broke down. He’ll turn up soon.”

Before now, I would have said that Aaron has done well. He attends meetings faithfully, avoids the drug-addled crew who resembled the undead that he was living with before his arrest, and even found a job he loved. He was working for Galore, a party planner in the swanky summer enclave of Como Stop nearby, doing all manner of commercial art, everything from banners to designing invitations. But with the annual retreat of the seasonal residents, he was unexpectedly laid off last week. The support groups Bea attends emphasize how precarious sobriety is for someone like Aaron who is new to it. Now the unspoken probability that he has relapsed, and the dark complications that would invite, including the risk of a significant prison sentence, has turned his mother’s fabulous amber eyes into lakes of misery.

At these moments I am impressed by the occasional cruelty of motherhood with its consuming anxieties that seem to have no expiration date. Bea often admits that until she and Lloyd adopted Aaron at birth, she regarded herself as laid-back. Instead, her worries multiplied at once, as people she would never have suspected drew back at the sight of an infant in her arms who was, by some uncertain proportion, Black.

Until now, the new year that functionally commences in the US after Labor Day had fallen into a satisfying rhythm, after a languorous summer. I had returned my attention to the legal work I’ve done for the last decade, as a mediator and arbitrator—basically a privately paid judge—and Bea had survived the avalanche of administrative crises that befall a grade school principal at the start of every year. Ecclesiastes was not correct when he proclaimed that there is nothing new under the sun, but one of the comforts of this age is that there is less.

I have resided up here in what is called the Skageon Region for fourteen years. We are a bit more than one hundred miles north-northwest of Kindle County, where I had always lived before: Son. Student. Husband. Father. Prosecutor. Judge. A dutiful and generally successful existence. But that life collapsed under the impact of a series of numbing calamities that began with the death of my wife and culminated in a prison term for me, which ended unexpectedly when the prosecutor suddenly conceded I was innocent.

After my release, I planned to hide out up here for a year or so. I had no wish to explain myself to anyone and figured I’d wait long enough that people would forget to ask. Instead, I realized that aside from my son and granddaughters, whom I see once or twice a month, there was nothing in Kindle calling me back. The prospect of a new start in a very different place, where remaining solitary seemed more natural than antisocial, was appealing. Here I could recover at my own pace.

The Skageon Region contains a sort of variety pack of American life. At the western end is the magnificent Como Lake, whose clear waters run seven miles long and three across and more than two hundred feet deep. On its shore, every summer since the late nineteenth century, the rich at leisure have gathered, baronial families who would arrive by train from as far away as New York City to spend a few idyllic months in the vast mansions that hulked along the lake. The nearby place, where the railroad came to a halt, was called Como Stop, a name that stuck as the town developed. Today Como Stop has roughly ten thousand full-time residents, and maintains a distinctly upscale vibe, with coffee shops and brew pubs and the kind of stylish stores selling brightly colored ladies’ wear and home décor items familiar to welltodo suburbs. Sixty miles east, in Carroll County, the old worn-out city of Kweagon, which was once the home to a US Motors plant, holds block after block of empty storefronts and dilapidated housing for the struggling communities of color.

Between the extremes of those two towns is where Bea and I and fifty thousand other people dwell. Outside Como Stop, shopping centers and townhouse developments have sprung up, principally serving those who toil in the many large warehouses and distribution centers along the interstate. Moving east, the rich land in the Skageon River Valley is given over to family farms, where dairy cows swish their tails, and corn, soybeans and alfalfa, as well as several kinds of fruits and vegetables, rise and fall. Here and there the large fields are broken up by the few remaining swaths of primary growth forest. On our side of the county, the footprints of the glaciers pushed the land into rocky formations with ponds and small lakes forming in the low spots.

It was the dream of a second home in that area, a place where we could swim and boat with our son, that first brought me and Barbara, my deceased wife, up here almost forty years ago. These days, fertilizer runoff leaves many of the local bodies of water eutrophic and rimmed in green algae, but we discovered Mirror Lake, sourced by subterranean creeks that percolate up through cleansing layers of limestone. The business of being a prosecutor, as I was then, gives you a proctologist’s view of humanity. I wanted a haven for my family, away from the turmoil of the city and the anxieties of my job. For once, Barbara and I agreed, and we bought a small cabin at the rear of the property I now live on. (There’s a story there, too, but I’ll take them one at a time.) From May to late September, whenever I had a break between trials, we’d come up on the weekend, living in our bathing suits and striking up comfortable friendships with our neighbors.

I enjoyed the sense of reprieve and over time looked forward especially to Sunday mornings, when Nat and Barbara usually slept in, and I could ride my bike the three miles to Mirror, the little town nearby, where I was able to find a copy of the Kindle County Tribune at a local gas station. A billionaire commodities trader had purchased the Trib, determined to turn it into a national paper. The Sunday edition now had the heft of a phone book, and provided a whole day’s reading with its expansive coverage of news and culture.

After my exile up here, I continued that habit but eventually found that periodically the station was sold out. Eventually, Ravi, the proprietor, told me that despite his protests, his distributor was delivering only a single copy of the Sunday Tribune. I started getting up earlier and earlier to snag it.

One Sunday, I walked in a little before seven a.m., and there was a shorter woman in front of the cashier. Her back was to me, her springy black hair banded in a ponytail, but I could see that she had ‘my’ copy of the paper in her hand, while she awaited change from Dema at the register. When the woman turned, I was deeply struck—yes, she was very attractive, at least by my lights, with those yellowish eyes that stood out like beacons in her darker complexion. But it was what passed through her face instantly that took hold of me, a bolt of intelligence, self-confidence and humor. Of course, she could tell at once from my crestfallen look why I was there.

She hesitated only a second and then asked, ‘What’s your favorite section?’ I was startled, but said, if I had to pick, it would be the front pages, featuring world and national news.

Later in the day, I came back from fishing to find that section of the paper stuffed into my mailbox. The fact that she recognized me was not all that surprising. Since my life had once made headlines, I was fairly notorious around Skageon, and my address was in the phone book.

The next weekend I left her a note at the gas station that thanked her for her generosity, but informed her I was henceforth conceding the paper to her, having now taught myself how to access the digital edition (which apparently was the billionaire’s new strategy to turn a profit). After my release from prison, I had started a largely clandestine relationship with the widow, Lorna Murphy, who lived in the large lakeside house that fronted my cabin, but we had both moved on by then. I was dating occasionally, and considered whether it was wise to add another flirty line or two, asking my competitor, for instance, about her favorite section—but I decided against it. A woman with that kind of natural spark was almost certainly married or attached, and even if that weren’t the case, I was, from the looks of it, about thirty years older than she was. More to the point, I decided, was the fact that she had delivered the front section to my mailbox without a note or card, a clear signal that she was not inviting further contact.

Now and then, when I was filling up at Ravi’s, or visiting Mirror’s one sparse grocery store, she’d cross my mind, but there were no further sightings. I accepted the judgment of fate, realizing that, as so often happens, she would likely turn out to be not half as interesting as she’d appeared in that initial moment.

2

Mansy Potter

Mansy Potter—Mansfield Potter IV—is the best friend I have in these parts. We met when we were both appellate court judges, and once I ran into big trouble, he was a stalwart, who denounced the charges against me, purely on faith. We have lunch together every Wednesday, usually at Trixie’s, a stylish café with excellent food, on the eastern edge of Como Stop.

For the half-hour drive, I shortcut down a series of two-lane roads. Time, in the country, passes differently. In Kindle County, for decades I commuted by bus or ferry and began my workday at once, concentrating on the briefs and motions I carried in my briefcase. Now, although I often drive considerable distances, I’m more at leisure. Sometimes there are phone calls with my son, Nat, sometimes a podcast, or an audiobook, or conference calls regarding an arbitration. But more often I enjoy the meditative zone I find myself in on a straight road with little traffic, where I can relish the liberty of existing in open space, absorbing the simple poetry of the country landscape. The land rolls gently and the farm fields, rising against the horizon, look like a quilt. The soybeans are going from green to gold, the feed corn is still standing, its withering leaves looking like arms lowered in disappointment, and the early harvest of other crops has left either yellow stubble or, where the earth has already been turned, the rich black of the loam that somehow looks almost good enough to eat. Sometimes on a high point, a substantial farmhouse will command the distance, often a trilevel McMansion, in contrast to the five-room clapboard bungalows the locals bought from the Sears catalog a century ago.

My visits with Lorna aside, I was keeping to myself when I moved up here. I first accepted Mansy’s invitation for lunch as an act of loyalty. I assumed—correctly—that he needed company in the wake of the death of Kathleen, after fifty-three years of marriage. As time went on, however, it was Mansy who became the person with a mission, determined to lure me back into the practice of law.

When I arrived in Skageon, I viewed the law the way the lapsed regard their forsaken faith. But with Mansy’s prodding, I became intrigued with the idea of accepting court appointments as the lawyer for criminal defendants too poor to pay an attorney. I thought I’d bring a unique perspective, as someone who’d been the accused, and a piece of me enjoyed the ironic prospect of achieving a kind of repertory role in the criminal justice system. Prosecutor. Judge. Defendant. And now defense lawyer. Except for the clerk who calls out ‘Hear ye’ to start each session, I would have played every speaking part in the courtroom.

Mansy, who still exerts considerable political power in Skageon County, was quick to help, but I liked the work less than I had anticipated. My clients were all guilty, which I had expected, but their plights did nothing to lift my spirits. They had stumbled through life, each of them. Their crimes were one more thing at which they’d failed in the course of an existence in which hindrance and struggle were constant themes.

‘I have another idea for you,’ Mansy said several months later when I sheepishly reported my disappointment. Since leaving the state supreme court, he’d been working as an arbitrator and mediator, through a big outfit down in Kindle County. He had more work than he wanted and thought he could direct the overflow to me. Thanks to the start Mansy gave me, I’m now able to handpick my cases.

When I arrive at Trixie’s, I am surprised to see Mansy standing beside a two-top, in the midst of what looks to be an intense conversation with his second son, Harrison, who is called Hardy everywhere but on his official letterhead. Like his father a generation before him, Hardy is the Skageon County Prosecuting Attorney. My first guess, given the look of gravity between the two men, is that Hardy has encountered a substantial obstacle in his campaign for reelection next year, a problem which requires his father’s seasoned advice. Almost a head taller than his dad, with dark hair and eyes in a family of blonds, Hardy is holding his lunch check, so I take it that he bumped into his dad after dining with other companions.

Standing by the glass case that holds the cash register, I look around the restaurant aimlessly, rather than seeming to spy on the Potters’ conversation. Trixie’s has the peppy feel of a chain, new construction with exposed rafters and skylights, but the food is strictly home cooked. Every week now the crowd is thinner. The weather remains mild, but most of the folks with houses in Como Stop have kids and grandkids back in school and have resumed their usual routines in Kindle County or Milwaukee.

Mansy finally notices me. He waves me forward while Hardy heads out, brushing past me with a somewhat reluctant smile that suggests he remains deeply preoccupied or is even less pleased than usual to see me.

“Sorry,” Mansy says, taking his seat and motioning me toward mine. “Family issues.”

Like his son, Mansy, even at the age of eighty-three, remains a handsome fellow. I have often tried to figure out why the WASP elite in this country look so good. To some extent, I think, it must reflect their long hold on power, meaning they set—or were taken to embody—aesthetic standards in their own image—tall, blond, blue-eyed, athletic. And of course, for generations they married their own kind, so that the towheaded children seem to come forth like they were issued from a stamping plant. Whatever the reason, Mansy is a Rockwell figure, with a full mane of white hair parted to the side and going just a trifle yellow near his scalp. Below his thick white eyebrows, a somewhat prominent nose dominates his well-proportioned features. His cool-blue eyes still hold the light of a fierce intelligence.

“No intention of prying,” I say, “but is Charmaine all right?” Hardy’s wife has MS and uses a wheelchair these days at times.

“Fine,” Mansy answers. “The MS is stable, but Charmaine doesn’t need a lot of stress, and my screw-loose granddaughter is providing plenty, as usual.”

I decide ‘What now?’ is a trifle impolite. Mansy’s manners are flawless and I’m always trying to emulate his genteel manner. When he speaks, his voice modulates like a radio announcer’s and he exhibits artful tact, a sort of perfect pitch for knowing what can be well expressed and what can’t, what people will hear and take to heart, rather than ignore.

“Mae has disappeared,” he says. “She said something about camping, but slipped out of the house and is on radio silence. Won’t pick up her phone or answer messages.”

I’m sure my face betrays me, and Mansy’s expression darkens.

“Aaron too?” he asks. When I answer yes, he takes a second to ponder and then says what we’re both thinking: “Too coincidental.”

Neither family will receive this as good news. Bea regards Mae as the principal cause of Aaron’s troubles. It’s certainly true that on his last arrest, the one that landed him in jail for four months, he was holding drugs Mae had purchased. It infuriated Bea that Mae wasn’t even questioned, but the sheriff’s deputies here, like cops in many other places, extend some professional courtesy to the elected prosecutor and his family. Besides, as Aaron pointed out to his mother, he was the one who was driving loaded.

Aaron and Mae have been an item since junior high, with fiery breakups and quick reunions becoming frequent toward the end of high school. After he was released from jail, I thought Aaron had sworn not to see her.

“We hadn’t even heard they were back together,” I tell Mansy. Aaron, especially since he’s gotten sober, is generally honest. He prefers not to answer, rather than lie. But with him, Mae is a tender subject.

Mae is both brilliant and uncommonly beautiful, even by the standards of her fine-looking family. A white blonde, tall and slender, she has the angelic features of the kind of young women who were on shampoo bottles in my youth. She actually tried for a while to make it as a model in Manhattan after she dropped out of college. Long before this summer’s cinematic extravaganza, her hair and figure inspired comparisons to that iconic doll.

“Think they’re eloping?” Mansy asks out of nowhere.

“Jesus. Eloping?” I had immediately assumed that the two of them were in a tent, enjoying an ecstatic orgy of sex and drugs. “Does Mae talk about that?”

“No, it just came into my head,” Mansy says, although I suspect he is being discreet. “It’s the kind of crazy impulsive thing they both would do. Certainly her.”

“That marriage wouldn’t last a month,” I declare. “And I sure wouldn’t send china as a wedding gift. It would all end up shattered against the walls.”

I’m not completely positive how Mansy would react to a Black grandsoninlaw. I suspect he’d need a second to hitch up his britches and then accept it in stride. Charmaine and Hardy would be another matter. They would never ascribe their reservations to skin color, but the racehorse breeding of the Potter family has been impeccable, and I imagine they tried to inculcate the idea of ‘marrying well’ since Mae was at a young age. In Skageon County, the Potters are accepted as one of the few dynastic families, and have long played the role of benevolent aristocrats. The original family fortune was made in the nineteenth century by digging sphagnum moss, and was expanded into forestry, real estate and banking. The children have gone off to elite educations in the East or Midwest and then returned here, where they attend church with everybody else and do their business honorably.

“Would it be an imposition, Mansy, if I asked you not to say anything about Aaron to Hardy just yet?” Hardy’s attitude toward Aaron is similar to Bea’s feelings for Mae, but the power of his elected position makes him far more threatening. Whenever Aaron has had his scuffles with the law, Hardy has claimed to have removed himself from deciding his daughter’s boyfriend’s fate. But Hardy is in many ways his father’s polar opposite, and seems to make up for his lesser abilities by adhering to lower scruples. It would not be unlike him to offer some kind of winking direction to his chief deputy, who now would be the one to decide whether to move to revoke Aaron’s probation, if he’s violated its many strict terms. “I’d like to give him a day or two and see what kind of shape he’s in when he gets back here.”

Mansy lowers an eyebrow and asks, “You think he’s using again?”

“I hope not,” I say. The fact is that substances seem to have been a large part of Mae and Aaron’s relationship from the start. Even at thirteen, they were drinking Hardy’s vodka and watering the bottles, and occasionally stealing some of Charmaine’s pills.

“He’s been sober quite some time now, hasn’t he?” Mansy, who comments often about his unsuccessful effort to discipline himself with alcohol, regards sobriety as a substantial achievement, as do I.

“I thought he’s been doing fabulously,” I answer. “He’s got a sponsor in Kweagon, Reverend Spruce, he really admires.”

“Oh yeah. Donall Spruce. Never said a good thing about me, but he’s an honest man.” Mansy gives his head a shake at the thought of the Reverend. “Has Joe heard from Aaron?” he asks, referring to Bea’s father.

“Bea says he’s denied it to her, but she never really believes him. I think I better lay eyes on Joe,” I tell Mansy. “If push comes to shove, he’ll lie to me anyway, but it’s harder for him to do it facetoface.”

With the worrying subject of Mae and Aaron pretty much exhausted, we find, after another couple of minutes, that we’ve fallen back into the usual meandering flow of our luncheon conversations. Since each of us held public office for years—Mansy was a state senator, then served three terms as the elected PA for Skageon County, before running for the bench—politics is an inevitable topic, especially since we get the opportunity to joust with one another. We don’t agree about some national issues, like how to address climate change or tax policy, but our discussions are tempered by the recognition that these are matters far beyond the control of either of us. Our views have no more impact than a fan shouting instructions to the batter at a baseball game.

We also share a lot of local information, which, truthfully, is not much more than gossip. These are small towns, where people’s lives tend to intersect in multiple ways. Frequently, the news is about who has moved away, especially the young people, who often go off for college and find themselves educated beyond the level of available local employment. Bea also often comes home from the teachers’ lounge with tales of sexual intrigues, but Mansy is too gentlemanly to get into extended discussion of those topics. And certain other subjects are generally banned as well, since we have adopted the same three rules Mansy says he follows with his golf buddies. One, no discussion of physical ailments. A few years older than I, Mansy has a slightly longer list of complaints, but the truth is that both of us have enough friends who’ve passed by the wayside that we count ourselves among the blessed. Two, no grousing about the women in our lives. Mansy now has two female friends he sees regularly. Naturally, I have some curiosity about how this arrangement works in practice, but Mansy is not the kind to welcome any inquiry into the details. Third, no more than five minutes on grandchildren, including bragging—a rule observed in the breach today with our extended talk of Mae.

That news remains enough in mind that it requires no transition as we are winding up for me to return to it.

“And you’ll keep the stuff about Aaron between us for a day or two?” I ask again.

“Of course,” Mansy answers. “Speaking to Hardy wouldn’t be productive anyway. You could probably see he goes off like a Roman candle whenever Mae gets out of hand. And frankly, he needs to focus on his campaign. He’s gotten a late start as far as I’m concerned.”

Hardy has a primary opponent for the first time, a state senator named Madison van Ohne, who is running at him from the right.

Out in the parking lot, Mansy and I are smiling as we part, promising to be in touch if either of us gets further word about the missing pair. But I have no doubt we’re each leaving far more worried than we were when we arrived.

3

Text Aaron

September 13–14

As I expected, the news I deliver when Bea returns from school—that Aaron is probably with Mae—induces a pained reflex. She leans forward with her slender hand gripping her forehead and shielding her eyes.

“Her mission in life is to bring him down, it really is,” she says. This is a clear exaggeration. Mae’s antic behavior most often strikes me as intended to harm herself more than anybody else. And it was Aaron who became an actual addict. But that does not prevent Bea from declaring, “Honestly, sometimes I just wish the earth would open and swallow that girl.”

After dinner, I can hear Bea on the phone with a couple of Aaron’s closest friends. She taught virtually every kid who grew up in the Mirror district while they were in grade school, and no matter how insolent they’ve become—and a lot of these kids still seem to need a solid smack—they answer her respectfully. But nobody knows much, with the exception of Cassity Benisch, Aaron’s bestie, who plays her cards close but, after a long pause, answers yes when Bea asks if Aaron is with Mae.

Bea passes another restless night. In the morning, I can see that the agony of being the parent of an addict, which she has not felt for close to a year and a half, has returned with its harrowing effect. The numbers say that most teen addicts eventually become productive adults. The problem is keeping them alive long enough; the year after rehab is the most tenuous. Aaron already failed once, after his first arrest while he was a college freshman, but having gotten this far now, he supposedly has a solid chance. Thus there is a special agony in finding that all the hopes raised by months of disciplined behavior may now be wasted, bringing us to the brink of disaster.

As she’s headed out to school, Bea stops by the garage door.

“Will you text Aaron, please, and warn him?” she asks. “Tell him you’re going to have to call the judge if we don’t hear from him.”

The point of this is lost on me, since none of her own messages have been delivered, all seemingly pending somewhere in the cloud.

“I’ll take that under advisement,” I say, trying to avoid an outright no. “But Mansy did make the point that we ought to talk to Joe. If anybody knows anything, your father does. If we haven’t heard from Aaron by tonight, we should probably go over to the VFW to have a word with him.”

“Me too?” Bea generally prefers to deal with her father only in Aaron’s company. When they are alone, she sometimes cannot contain her rage. Throughout her childhood, he was an abusive drunk who battered her mother and terrified his children.

“I just think if he knows where Aaron is, he’d have a harder time looking both of us in the eye and lying.”

Bea seems to accept my logic, but still issues a shudder before heading out the door.

I work until lunch, enjoying a half sandwich of gravlax we cured ourselves with a salmon I caught last week during the spawning run. I’ve just finished when the house phone rings. It’s the landline that comes free with our Internet.

“It’s Gert,” the woman says, a voice always enlarged by the rattle of phlegm from years of smoking. Gertrude Gevorgian is Aaron’s probation officer. “Where’s Aaron? I’ve been calling his cell for an hour.”

Now I’m in a spot. Addicts often take their families down with them, and so I know better than to lie for Aaron. But saying he’s AWOL will only create a crisis—for him, because that might jeopardize his probation, and also for me, since I’m supposed to be his keeper for the court.

“He’s camping. Gloria laid him off last week, so I think he’s trying to get some headspace.”

“Camping? How’d he get there?”

“I think he went with Mae Potter.” Gert knows what this means as well as anybody else, but she takes an unexpectedly long time to react.

“Yeah, someone said that,” she answers finally. “But I need to see him. I want him to come in now.”

That can only mean she wants a random drug test.

“He knows he has a meeting with you Monday,” I answer.

“Before that,” she responds.

“He doesn’t seem to have cell coverage right now.”

“He didn’t leave the county, did he?”

“He knows the rules, Gert. I’m sure they’re just up north. It’s a black hole when you get close to Marenago County.”

Gert is normally laid-back—too laid-back if you ask a former prosecutor—and so her insistence is strange. I promise I’ll text him.

Afterwards, I sit in the living room, facing the rock fireplace, chunks of local granite that rise impressively to an eighteen-foot ceiling, while I try to decode this call. In the sixteen months since Aaron’s release, this is the first random Gert’s imposed, at least so far as I know. But that fact joins in significance with Gert’s acknowledgment that she had heard that Aaron was with Mae. After another instant for reflection, I realize that Mansy gave me the low end of what I’d asked for yesterday, twenty-four hours—but not a moment more. Then he told Hardy and Charmaine. And Hardy, even though he supposedly has nothing to do with Aaron’s case, immediately got Gert to jerk Aaron in. I don’t know if by drug-testing Aaron, Hardy means to test his daughter, too, or if, more likely, he’s looking for a way to put Aaron back inside and keep him away from Mae.

But I honor my promise to Gert—and Bea. I pick up my phone.

‘Aaron,’ my text says. ‘Please. If I don’t hear from you today, I’ll have no choice about contacting Judge Sams.’

Unfortunately, this is not an idle threat. Gert will tell the judge shortly what is going on, so I can’t fall far behind her in carrying out the promise I gave him sixteen months ago.

Unless Aaron shows up shortly, tomorrow will be a very unhappy day.

4

Dr. Housley

It was Mansy who decided that I should sit on a public body that was basically his brainchild, called the School Policy Legal Review Council. Even then, in 2016, there were serious scraps that were basically political over what kids should and shouldn’t learn. Up in Glenville, which is right across the river from Wisconsin State, and is in temperament not all that different from Berkeley, there was a campaign to reform the teaching of US history by barring all laudatory reference to slaveholders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, as well as hardcore racists like Woodrow Wilson. The critics wanted any text or library book, no matter how old, that did not mention these deprecating facts about those former presidents to be removed from the shelves.

In our neck of the woods, an insidious fellow named Aloysius aka Ralph Proctor, who was the pastor of a vast evangelical congregation just outside of Mirror, which Aaron’s dad, Lloyd, and his new family attended, had initiated yet another of his whispering campaigns. Pastor Proctor had the outward manner of Fred Rogers and refused to associate himself publicly with anything that might foster controversy. But a small cohort of his most devoted acolytes were demanding the removal of ‘smut’ from local school libraries, meaning any book that made even a remote reference to people having sex outside of marriage or to queer life.

Mansy, a moderate to the core, had gotten his many old friends on the county board to pass an ordinance requiring the review councils to examine all these proposed changes before they could be implemented. The councils would be composed of three retired judges who would simply render an opinion on whether any proposed change ‘complied with existing law,’ which was code for the First Amendment. To ensure the doctrinal neutrality of the councils, at least one of the three members was supposed to come from the opposite political party of the other two. Since Democrats are in short supply in Skageon County, Mansy was eager to press me into service.

‘People don’t want a convict on their school board,’ I told him.

‘Convict my ass,’ said Mansy. ‘You’ll need a better excuse than that. The only thing about your case that people here remember is that Sandy Stern got the Kindle County Board to pay you four million dollars to settle your civil suit after you were exonerated, which is about two million dollars a month for the time you spent inside. Most folks here say they would have done it for half that price.’

‘But they still remember.’

‘Listen, everybody on that board is going to have the same first name: Judge. Nobody will get beyond that. Just give me a freaking year to get all the hooha settled down. After that, everybody who comes off the bench will be happy to do a job with a nice title and no work.’

I was too indebted to Mansy to refuse, and so when I showed up for the first meeting of the Council for Districts 64 and 65, meaning eastern Skageon County, I was startled and amused when the principal of Mirror Elementary School stood to introduce herself. Beatrix Mena Housley, PhD, whose school was under frequent attack, was my winning rival in the Sunday newspaper competition at Ravi’s. I thought there was a sly smile the first time she looked my way. Knowing my name all along, she had been far ahead of me.

The council met four times a year, and Dr. Housley was required to respond frequently. In a perverse way, I was disappointed to discover that she seemed to be exactly the person I had imagined in the service station. She was poised and nimble-witted, and a study in patience with the small cadre of objectors, the same three people, who had several new books to denounce in each meeting. Bea adhered to a simple standard, namely whether any change would encourage or limit a child’s curiosity. She had done her research and could show that every one of the challenged books was in a majority of the school libraries around the state, not to mention thousands across the country. And she had initiated a system in her school by which any parents could present the school librarian with a list of books they didn’t want their child to browse or borrow.

There was no denying that Dr. Housley was attractive with a capital A. But in addition to everything that had discouraged me a few years before at Ravi’s, there was now an insuperable barrier: As a member of the council, I exercised clear supervisory authority over her, which obliged me to act as if she were no more alluring than a doorstop.

Nonetheless, I listened carefully when people talked about her. As a principal, she had a large fan club, and was viewed as energetic, imaginative and dedicated. From the occasional remarks about her personal life that arose in passing, I gleaned that she was divorced, and heard no reference to a current partner, for what little that might mean. A few times, because this is America, people also mentioned that she was the single woman with a Black son, which was passed on as something interesting or revealing.

I kept my distance from her normally, afraid of what I might betray, but I did make small talk with her a couple of times before meetings and found her relaxed and witty. I once asked if she was possibly named Beatrix after the author of Peter Rabbit, which I thought would be oddly fitting for a grade school principal. I got a big laugh, but she said her mom, a German immigrant, dead for more than fifteen years, had christened Bea with her own mother’s name.

The council served on a calendar-year basis. My last meeting in January of 2017 included introducing the three judges Mansy had corralled to replace us. When we adjourned, I found that Dr. Housley had left her purse and coat next to my parka. I no longer believe that was an accident.

‘So you’re done,’ she said, as she put on her parka, which, God save me, required briefly projecting her chest. ‘I’m sure you’re relieved.’

‘You made the job easy,’ I told her.

‘And I’m really grateful for your support. I felt like you always got it.’ She smiled. ‘Stay in touch,’ she said, and then, after a thoughtful instant, added quietly, ‘Call me sometime.’

Her tone was matteroffact, but those gemstone eyes of hers, the color of citrines, fixed on me directly. I was impressed by her finesse, which was leagues beyond me. I could tell that in high school she’d been one of those cute, flirty girls who was completely devastating and who still knew where she stood on the ladder of desire. I was stopped cold by the reality that this moment that had been no more than a futile fantasy had unexpectedly arrived. I could do no better than to stammer out, ‘Really?’ and then nearly sank to the floor in shame.

She laughed out loud, but at least she seemed to take my disbelief as a compliment of sorts. ‘Yes, really,’ she answered.

I’ve always been a sucker for self-confident females, perhaps because they leave less work to me, and I recovered quickly enough to ask if she had time for a drink then. We walked together to the center of town a couple of blocks, down to the Cummin Inn, where we found seats at a high-top and each ordered a light beer.

I told her how well I thought she’d done all year, killing her antagonists with kindness, and she laughed at the thought.

‘That’s because I’m forty-seven years old,’ she said, ‘and I’m still trying to figure out how to be confrontational.’

At the mention of her age, I squinted a bit.

‘You know, I’m going to be seventy soon.’

She squinted back, well-intended mocking.

‘You look like you’re still in good shape.’

I was, I thought. I was in my canoe every morning, even when the temperature required a wetsuit. When the lake iced over, I cross-country skied in the nearby forests. I felled trees and chopped wood, and handled all the hauling that a boat and dock required. I’d kept my mid-length prison beard, which had gone mostly grey, like my hair, which was now a good deal longer than in my judging days. Physically, I was doing well. It was just my soul that still required repair.

‘No telling how long it stays that way,’ I said. ‘I’m probably past my bestby date.’

She laughed heartily. She laughed a lot, I could see, a generous, unhindered sound I found hugely appealing.

‘Well, I’m not looking to purchase, Rusty. I haven’t done very well as a long-term customer. But I’ve lived here all my life, not that I always wanted to, but I pretty much know everybody—at least everybody I want to know. And there aren’t a lot of guys around who’d ride their bike six miles back and forth just so they could read the Sunday paper. Which might be interesting for a change.’

I asked what she meant about not always wanting to live here.

‘I think I’m kind of a city girl who never got around to leaving the country.’

‘And how did that happen?’

‘Well, you know, you’re twenty-one, you don’t know what’s right. After graduation, my sorority sisters all wanted to get jobs in the Tri-Cities so they could hit the bars four times a week and meet guys. I knew how old that would get. I always adored my mom, and was afraid to leave her alone with my father, which, frankly, had nearly kept me from going away for college. And I loved Lloyd in a young-love kind of way. He was nice and kind. He was the nicest boy I’d ever met, which was a big contrast to the guy I’d dated through most of high school, who was gorgeous but moody and sometimes actually mean. Lloyd was ready to get married. His parents are super religious so there was no thought of just moving in together.’

I actually knew Lloyd Housley. He was a former deputy county sheriff who’d given up police work and become an HVAC contractor. I was one of his customers, but despite the same last name, it had never crossed my mind that Bea and he had ever been together. In my view, they weren’t a natural match. I learned in time that the high school boyfriend she was referring to was Hardy.

‘You can do worse than kind,’ I said.

‘Right. You can. Maybe if the rest of life is great, that’s enough. But ten years later, frankly, we had nothing in common. I mean, I don’t want to bore you talking about my divorce. The point is that I was happier alone. I loved the part of the day after I got Aaron in bed when I could feel myself for a little bit, roam the Internet or read. When Lloyd and I split, I was convinced I was going to move down to Kindle County. But Lloyd got together with Camille, his new wife, pretty quickly, and I could see he was already feeling challenged to spend the time he wanted to with Aaron. Joe, my dad, was—shock of my life—a great grandfather. I didn’t want to take Aaron away from either of them.’

So she was stuck and unfulfilled. That would be nearly twenty years now. I chose the brief silence that followed as the time to add another discouraging detail.

‘I’ve been in prison. Did you know that?’ I wondered if she was thinking that an excon might provide a little of the taste of urban life she felt she was missing.

She reared back, squinting again.

‘Is this like a negative sell?’ she asked.

‘Hardly,’ I answered. ‘I’m just trying to avoid any unpleasant surprises.’

‘Rusty, this is a small town. You think there’s anybody in Mirror who doesn’t know your background? Mansy says you were framed. Like they actually made up evidence because the prosecutor had some lifelong grudge against you.’

My large settlement from Kindle County has cemented that impression, which is why my lawyer, Sandy Stern, encouraged me to sue in the first place. I told her, like anyone else who’s ever asked, that Mansy’s story was, in the largest sense, true. Beyond that, I have nothing to say. One question leads to the next, and some I will never answer.

With the new mood and the low light, I took an instant to scrutinize her. She was definitely pretty, which is always a good start. She had her Native grandmother’s high cheekbones, but she kept herself in an unstudied way, with sparse makeup, and her springy black hair spreading around her face. I’d already noticed that her curves had been a little softened by age, but her shape remained appealing. And there were those devastating eyes that I loved studying at close range, an outer circle that was almost yellow, with an orange ring surrounding her irises.

When we parted back at the school parking lot, she seemed very pleased with herself. Knowing her as I do now, I’ve realized that it required more gumption than I’d understood at the time for her to approach me. I’m sure she had armored her heart for some kind of rebuff, but she understood why I might forever hesitate on my own.

When I got home, I lay in bed with a book and discovered I couldn’t sleep. There was no anxiety, but it was as if I was attached to some hot-air balloon that wouldn’t let me sink below consciousness. I dozed only a little and was up to watch the sun rise on the lake. Knowing she had to rise early for school, I texted her at six thirty to ask about dinner on Saturday night.

Unlike our talk at Cummin Inn, where we got the serious stuff out of the way, we spent the evening laughing. She told me more about Aaron. I knew Mae, of course, through Mansy, and I’d seen her with her boyfriend. He had purple hair at that stage and rings in both nostrils and was almost as beautiful as she was. But it was late in the conversation before I squared that circle.

At that time, Aaron was almost sixteen and Bea talked about him with the shrewd irony that suits the parent of any teenager. Yes, he was a pain in the ass a lot of the time, but sooner or later the light bulb would turn on and he would realize that he was not the first human being ever to be young. I told her that Nat had been plenty of trouble growing up, depression and drugs, not the background you might necessarily guess for a man who’s now a highly regarded law professor and a dedicated husband and father. That night, Bea talked about everybody in her life—Aaron and Joe and Lloyd—with a sane humor, which like so much else about her, I found completely beguiling. We weren’t even halfway through our entrées when I looked up at her and said, apropos of nothing, ‘I’m having a wonderful time.’

She stopped, her glass of Chardonnay aloft, before she quietly answered, ‘Me too.’

She was so much more attractive than any woman I had met up here that I couldn’t understand why some man hadn’t planted himself on her front porch like a foundling, begging her to take him in. I’d already been through enough first dates with women who seemed great and who, with a few more meetings, proved to have serious issues. A warning voice within told me to keep my heart on a leash, but the truth is that I was already lost to her by then.

We talked until they were beginning to put the chairs up on the tables. Afterwards, I walked her to her car in the lot behind the restaurant. When we arrived, I leaned down and kissed her. No matter how old-fashioned it makes me, I had found in my sporadic dating life that there is a shocking intimacy to a first kiss, to erasing the physical boundary that normally exists between two humans. She received the caress with a huge smile, grabbed my coat and kissed me once again, before disappearing behind her car door.

The aftermath of that kind of evening, the excitement of the felt connection, left me feeling like a steak coming off the grill, the radiance and high heat lingering even in the cold. But that kiss had resolved itself into a more single-minded reaction. I was close to seventy years old and turned on like a teen. The winter cold had no effect. Instead, my reaction was so emphatic that I needed a minute before I could comfortably take a seat behind the wheel of my Tundra.

Driving home, I reviewed the evening and tried to calculate my next move, cautioning myself about letting the physical hunger that now engulfed me lead to an unwise forwardness. But that, as it turned out, was not a needed worry.

The next morning, I received a text. ‘Want to read the paper?’

She was at my door in ten minutes. She had the Tribune under her arm, but no clothes at all under her long puffer coat. When she left, so she could prepare dinner for Aaron after he’d spent Sunday with his father, it already pained me to say goodbye to her.

5

Joe

September 14

By dinnertime, there is still no word from Aaron. Bea texted around two to say she had been dragooned for a dinner meeting of the county Principals’ Roundtable, which is debating, again, whether the proper solution for trans kids is to build a separate restroom. I am left to make dinner for myself. These days, Bea favors a vegetable-heavy diet, so I take advantage of her absence to grill a pork chop on the Kamado oven on the back deck, which is a fancy-ass barbecue with a thick ceramic shell, on which I like to believe I am some kind of master.

At 8 p.m., I have not heard from Bea yet, which is not completely surprising. The restroom issue is always turbulent, since even the few fifth or sixth graders wondering about their gender don’t agree with one another on this question. Accepting the need to locate Aaron by tomorrow, I head off on my own to get a word with Bea’s father.

I tend to join my future fatherinlaw for a beer every few weeks. Bea and Joe frequently can’t get through a brief phone call without fireworks, so I accept the obligation to make a status check on an eighty-four-year-old man who insists on living alone, despite a terminal illness. As only Bea has license to say, Joe has been promising to die of cancer within the next three months for close to four years now.

After a lifetime of abuse, Joe has stopped drinking. He likes to say he did it to be a role model for Aaron, but Bea is quick to point out that abstinence was virtually required after several fainting episodes caused by the interaction between alcohol and lomustine, which has been administered from time to time for his lung cancer. A few months back, we lit a candle to celebrate Aaron’s first year of sobriety, and Bea cooked a nice dinner. Joe was invited and Aaron asked innocently about how they’d celebrated landmark events in his mother’s household. She immediately recalled the bender Joe was on that caused him to miss her high school graduation.

Joe has been Aaron’s transportation when he attends NA meetings in Kweagon, and Joe seems to have absorbed some of the lingo.

‘That’s because I was an alcoholic,’ he said in quick answer to Bea, ‘and so I was an asshole.’ Joe had trotted out that line a couple of times before in response to accounts of other outrages decades ago—his beatings of Willi, Bea’s mom; his DWIs; the paychecks he squandered. He tosses off the words as glibly as an advertising slogan. This time Bea could not contain herself.

‘Dad,’ she said, ‘you got the tense wrong. You’re supposed to say, “I am an alcoholic.” ’ She paused. ‘And “I am an asshole.” ’

Wrath was not a good look for Bea, and completely out of keeping with her steady kindness to everybody else. Aaron murmured, ‘Come on, Mom,’ in evident disappointment, while she was completely flattened by the sight of a weak old man departing from the table close to tears. Bea sat there with her face in her hands, realizing yet again the intense emotional hazards presented by her relationship with her father. It’s like one of those hideous medieval torture devices in which each arm was shackled to horses that then galloped in opposite directions: venting her rage versus feeling choked by it.

I’m sure a psychologist would see my bond with Bea as seethed in the same stew of fury, longing and regret we each grew up with as the child of a violent alcoholic. From the time I was six or seven, I spent at least one night a week locked with my mother in the bedroom she no longer shared with my father, while he toured the rest of the apartment screaming drunken curses at the enemies he’d left in Serbia. Inevitably that led, by a logic apparent only to him, to his destruction of some keepsake my mother prized—a small china figure, a shawl of her grandmother’s. Yet unlike my father, whom I had not seen for years before he died in a mobile home in Arizona, Joe ultimately developed a redeeming quality: He has turned out to be a remarkably attentive grandfather to Aaron. That in turn has forced Bea to maintain a steadier relationship with him than she’d otherwise prefer, monitoring her father’s medical care and enduring dinner with him once a week.

No reasonable person who knows Joe would dispute his daughter’s view that he is a completely impossible human being. Cantankerous and wildly opinionated, he evidences little loyalty to the truth. He finds it demeaning to say thank you for even a great kindness, and displays little interest in any conversation that isn’t about him. But unlike his daughter, who has spent a lifetime suffering Joe’s limitless shortcomings, I cannot keep myself from a grudging admiration of the man.

Joe grew up tough. His dad was a Mexican migrant who came to the Skageon River Valley every summer to pick—strawberries first, then, in succession, cucumbers, tomatoes, raspberries, apples, and finally pumpkins. In one of those fields, he met Joe’s mom, a full-blooded member of the Winnebago Nation. (In recent decades, the HoChunk, as they’ve rebranded themselves, have become the proprietors of a chain of hugely successful casino-based resorts. Anyone who has at least one HoChunk grandparent is eligible to receive an annual stipend from the gaming profits, more than $14,000 last year. Joe, whom no one had ever heard acknowledge his ancestry, signed up eagerly, then, in his usual dodgy way, claimed to have done it only so Bea, a cash-strapped single mom, would receive a grant too.)

The oldest of his parents’ six children, Joe moved around the country harvesting with the rest of the family until he was eight or nine. Then Skageon County insisted that the migrant kids here after Labor Day—the time of the raspberry crop—had to be enrolled in school. Joe was placed in foster care when his parents moved on later in the fall to Louisiana to pick pecans. After reuniting for a few summers, Joe maintains he lost complete track of them. Bea’s mom believed that Joe, characteristically, had outraged his family somehow.

Sturdily built but never taller than five four, Joe was an all-state wrestler in the 113-pound weight class at Skageon Consolidated High, but in those days no one ever talked about scholarships or college for kids like him. He eventually enlisted in the army, rather than get drafted, and was sent to Germany, where he met Bea’s mother, Wilhelmina. Willi, a curly-haired dishwater blonde, was a full head taller than her husband. He reupped, expecting to stay with his wife and newborn son in Mainz, and instead was shipped to Vietnam, where he became one of the first tunnel rats, smaller men who cleared the underground networks that had been dug by the Vietcong over decades. Encounters down below with the enemy often required handtohand combat to the death. Joe returned with a Bronze Star, but it’s long been hidden away. Instead, Joe will tell anyone who asks how much he hates the US military. ‘They poisoned me, the army. Forcing young men to kill or be killed while you can feel the other fella’s breath on your face? What happens to you after that?’ Out of complete contempt for their father, Bea’s only sibling, her older brother Fritz, made a career with the army.

When Joe returned from service in 1967, he found a job on the line at US Motors in Kweagon. He had become a leader in the union in 1987 when US was bought by Chrysler, which decided to close Joe’s plant. Joe led a series of wildcat actions. Depending on who you talk to, Joe is either a hero, for forcing Chrysler to grant wide-ranging benefits to all employees, or a villain because the senior guys, Joe included, retired early with full pensions. After that, Joe, who’d always farmed a small piece, bought the 100-acre farm he’s worked since 2005, which was where Bea and Aaron lived after her divorce.

Joe’s favorite watering hole is here at the VFW outside Mirror. I too am a member, by virtue of my time in the Army Reserves, although I am basically an impostor, since I chose the Reserves years later to avoid the same traumas Joe experienced in Nam. Given that Joe no longer drinks, and despises the military, it might seem peculiar to show up at the VFW almost every night, but he’s here to argue with anybody who praises our armed forces, even if he has to face down the entire room on his own. It’s just Joe.