Serena's POV
The trial of Augustus Brandt lasts nineteen days.
I sit through all of them.
I sit in the second row of Courtroom 3 in the federal courthouse at Foley Square, in a grey wool dress and flat shoes, with my hands folded in my lap and a pad of paper on my knee that I never write on. Dominic sits beside me. Tessa and Caleb sit on my other side. Behind us, row on row, are the dockworkers: old men in union jackets, old women in hats, who have come in coaches from Brooklyn and Newark and Staten Island, with sandwiches in foil, and sit silent and upright in the pews like a congregation.
Brandt sits at the defence table in a navy suit.
His hands are healed. His hair has grown back white. He looks well. He looks, God help me, like a man who is about to be presented with an award.
He has chosen to represent himself.
They listen.
That's what frightens me.
Twelve ordinary people, in a box. A pharmacist. A schoolbus driver. A very young man with a beard, and a retired nurse in a lilac cardigan. They listen to him as you listen to a favourite uncle, with their heads on one side and a faint warm smile. When he says poor Charles, the nurse's eyes fill.
I sit very still.
They're going to believe him.
I can feel it, a cold small stone, in my stomach.
***
On the eighth day, Dominic takes the stand.
I've never been so afraid.
He walks to the box with his head up, in a black suit and a white shirt and the grey tie my father would've liked. He puts his hand on the book. He gives his name. He sits.
"Mr Hale," says Torres. "Tell the jury about your father."
He does.
He tells them everything. I knew he would, and still, as the words come, I feel the breath leave the room. He tells them about a brown envelope in a drawer. A letter. A signature on a bridge facility, in 2008. I'd signed the first transfer order myself. He tells them about a silence that lasted twelve years.
He doesn't spare himself.
"I should have opened it sooner," he says. "I told myself I wasn't ready. I think I was afraid of finding out that I was his son."
A murmur.
"Did you ever suspect Mr Brandt?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Thank you."
"I'm not done."
"I'm sorry?"
"I'd like the jury to know one more thing." He turns, and looks at them, twelve plain faces, and his own is very pale. "My father wasn't a murderer. He was a weak man who did a shameful thing, and spent the rest of his life trying to set it right, and failed. I loved him. I'm ashamed of him. I think both of those are true."
The nurse in the lilac cardigan has put a hand to her mouth.
Brandt, at the defence table, has stopped smiling.
"Mr Brandt?" says Judge Okonkwo. "Cross-examination?"
He rises.
He buttons his jacket. He crosses to the box with the slight, careful limp of an old man. He stops a yard from Dominic and looks up at him, kindly, sadly, like a priest.
"Dominic," he says. "My dear boy."
"Mr Brandt."
"You loved your father."
"Yes."
"You'd do a good deal to protect his name."
"I'd do a good deal to protect the truth."
"I wonder." The mild blue eyes search his face. "You'd say anything, I think, to make this stop."
"No."
"Even that your own father was poisoned?"
A stir goes through the court.
"Mr Brandt," says Torres, rising, "if the defendant wishes to introduce evidence on the cause of Charles Hale's death..."
"I should be glad to."
"Then so should we."
She turns to the clerk.
"Exhibit forty-one, Your Honour. Toxicology report on the exhumed remains of Charles Alistair Hale. Conducted by the Maine Medical Examiner, in the presence of counsel for the defendant." She holds up a single sheet. "Digitoxin in the tissue, at a concentration eleven times the therapeutic level."
Brandt's face doesn't move.
"Consistent," says Torres, "with a single large dose. In the last hours of life. Not with years of pills."
The room is absolutely silent.
"I never said it was years," says Augustus gently.
"You said Charles asked you to do it."
"Did I?"
"On the recording, Mr Brandt. Taken at Knox County jail, on the sixth of November." Torres lifts a second paper. "In the presence of Mrs Hale, Mr Hale, and your own attorney. May I?"
"I'll withdraw the question," says Brandt.
"No." Judge Okonkwo's voice is very dry. "I think we'll hear it."
***
It takes the rest of the afternoon.
They play the recording from the boathouse. I've heard it before, in Torres's office, in a room with the blinds drawn, and I thought I was ready.
I'm not.
I'd prefer to say I helped him on his way.
It comes out of the courtroom speakers, warm and rich and unhurried, over the heads of four hundred people, in the voice of a man ordering dessert. A faint chink of china. A long, soft sigh.
Because he was good. He was the best of us.
I couldn't bear it.
When it ends, nobody moves.
On the jury bench, the schoolbus driver has gone grey. The pharmacist's mouth is open. The young man with the beard has put his hand on the shoulder of his neighbour, as if to steady himself.
The retired nurse in the lilac cardigan is crying.
She isn't crying for Charles Hale.
She's looking at Augustus Brandt, and her face is full of a kind of dull, sick horror, like a woman who's let a stranger into her house.
I let out my breath.
It's the first time in nineteen days that I've felt it.
They know.
***
The jury is out for four hours.
I spend them in the corridor on a wooden bench, with Tessa's head on one shoulder and Dominic's hand in mine. Nobody talks. Caleb paces. Marcus stands against the wall with his arms folded. Odile has come from Queens and sits very upright with a flask of soup, which she pours, silently, into everyone's paper cups.
At ten past five, the door opens.
"They're back."
We go in.
"We have, Your Honour."
The foreperson is the retired nurse.
She stands up. She's holding a slip of paper in both hands, and it trembles. She looks across the court, at a white-haired man in a navy suit, and then she looks, quite deliberately, away.
"On the first count, conspiracy to commit murder. How do you find?"
"Guilty."
A long sigh goes through the room.
"On the second, the murder of Walter Quinn."
"Guilty."
I hear a sound at my shoulder.
Tessa. She's put her fist against her mouth.
"On the third, the murder of Charles Hale."
"Guilty."
"On the fourth..."
It goes on.
Seventeen times she says it. Seventeen times, in a clear steady voice, with a pause between each, like the tolling of a bell. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. It doesn't feel like triumph. It feels like something being set down very gently, after a very long carry.
When she says Guilty for the last time, and sits, the whole courtroom breathes out.
"Mr Brandt," says Judge Okonkwo, "is there anything you wish to say before sentence?"
He rises.
He looks round, with his old, pleasant, tired face. At the dockworkers in the pews. At the jury. At Tessa, and Caleb, and Dominic.
At me.
For a long moment he looks at me.
I look back.
There's no triumph in me, and no hatred. There's only a great, clear, level calm, as at the end of a long day's work.
His lips move.
I read them.
Goodnight, Birdie.
I smile.
I shape my own answer, silently, across thirty feet of floor.
Goodnight, Augustus.
"Life," says the judge, "without possibility of parole."
***
We come down the courthouse steps into snow.
It's the first of the year. It's falling thick and slow out of a low, white sky, softening the streets, hushing the traffic. The dockworkers stand along the sidewalk in their coats, cheering. Someone has brought a banner. Somebody is crying.
I stop on the top step.
I turn my face up.
A snowflake lands on my eyelash.
"Serena," says Dominic.
"Mm."
"Come with me."
"Where?"
He's smiling.
It's a smile I haven't seen in three years. It's young and shy and a little frightened, the smile of a man at the beginning of something.
"There's somewhere," he says, "I'd like to take you."