Part 5
Pike’s card stayed facedown until Ben called about testimony in that same case. Evan had returned to his house, although he kept the motel key in his jacket for two days after checking out. Preparation took months. The new defendants also received Ames’s disclosure; after private consultation, both men and their lawyers joined the prosecution in a written waiver, and the judge agreed to remain. The recovery facts were established through the deputy and technician, who would answer the challenges to their own work. Ben wanted Evan prepared to do the same. On the phone, Evan rubbed the motel key against his thumb and asked when he needed to come in.
At their meeting, Ben asked him to begin with the last day Lily had been at the house. Evan could picture the glass she had left in his kitchen. The neighbor had washed it and put it away while he was in jail. He knew that had been meant as a kindness, but he had to ask Ben to repeat the question.
When Evan came to testify, two other families sat near the Dawsons. He learned their faces before he could make himself learn the girls’ names. He did not want to reduce them to what he had been told was on the card, but every introduction seemed to carry a question he could not bear to ask. Ben left him at the courtroom door for a moment, and he stayed there with his hand on the brass plate, letting a family pass him before he went inside.
His own testimony was brief. He described the missing pistol, the search for Lily, and Boone’s pull toward the ridge. A defense lawyer asked why a former deputy had failed to report a stolen gun, and Evan answered without pretending he had a good reason. He had put it off, hoping he had misplaced it, until putting it off became something he did not want to admit.
Crowe watched him with the beginning of a smile. Evan rested his hands on the witness stand and looked at the lawyer instead. He was not going to give Crowe another thing to take home from that room.
Boone waited in a quiet office with the deputy who had brought him to the release hearing. During recesses Evan sat on the floor beside him, loosened his tie, and let the dog lay his head across his thigh. Once the deputy left a cup of water within reach and went out without asking whether Evan was all right.
The recordings, confirmed DNA, bracelet, and traces on the pistol supported the case begun with the arrests. Fibers and tire comparisons connected the men to the sites without being claimed as unique identifications. The technician and laboratory specialist answered the challenges from their records; under cross-examination, the technician read the dated entry and waited for the next question. Evan listened for the questions Pike had once stopped asking him, and heard the lawyers ask them.
On the fourth day of testimony, the specialist described a sequence involving Lily. Frank got up so abruptly that his knees struck the bench. Ruth reached for him, missed his sleeve, and stayed where she was with both hands pressed together in her lap.
Evan found Frank in the hallway beside the vending machines. He was staring at a row of crackers behind glass. Years earlier they had stood in Evan’s driveway drinking bad coffee after cutting up a tree that a storm had dropped across it. Evan had known how to talk to him then.
“I kept thinking,” Frank said, “if I could make somebody pay, I could do one thing for her.” He looked at Evan’s hands. “I picked you, and after that I listened for whatever would let me keep picking you.”
Evan leaned against the opposite wall. Behind the courtroom doors, somebody laughed at a small, ordinary mistake, then stopped. He could not tell whether Frank was waiting for an answer or trying to find enough breath to go on.
“I’m sorry,” Frank said. “For what I said. For helping them do that to you.”
Frank took a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it against his mouth. Evan had seen that same small, embarrassed movement at Lily’s elementary-school concerts, when he used to work the door in uniform. He reached toward the empty cup on the vending-machine ledge, meaning to move it out of Frank’s way, then left it where it was.
“You were wrong about me.” Evan made himself leave the sentence there for a moment. “You weren’t wrong to worry about her.”
Frank shut his eyes. Evan could still see the message on his own phone, the hurried words he had sent instead of asking Lily to call when she got into town. He had imagined deleting it a thousand times in his cell. Standing here beside her father, he wished he could have taken a breath before writing it.
When the bailiff opened the doors, Evan stepped away from the wall. Frank asked if he could walk back with him. Evan nodded, and they returned with enough space between them that neither man had to decide what to do with his hands.
The jury convicted Crowe and Voss on the major counts. A separate sentencing proceeding followed, with more waiting and more testimony. Ruth brought a statement she had rewritten until the folds in the paper were nearly worn through. Across her lap lay the sweater Lily had left on a kitchen chair.
Ames asked her to move closer to the microphone, and she adjusted it herself. Her voice was quiet, and people who had shifted and whispered through legal arguments sat still to hear her describe a daughter who sang while looking for her keys and borrowed things without asking. Evan had been invited to speak. He declined; Ruth had more that she needed them to hear.
The jury recommended death for both men, and Ames imposed the sentences. There was no applause. Outside, reporters asked Evan whether justice had finally been done, but Boone licked his wrist, and Evan knelt to check the healed paw before taking him to the truck.
Back at the house, Evan tried to carry the evidence boxes from the spare room to the shed. He stopped with one balanced on his hip when a neighbor’s truck slowed outside; a hand lifted uncertainly behind the windshield, and Evan looked down at the number written on the cardboard. Another truck passed without its driver turning. He finished the trip to the shed after the road was empty, but left the remaining boxes where they were.
Sleep came unevenly. He woke hearing Lily say his name impatiently, as though he were holding up a trip to the store, and reached for his phone before remembering. Boone began sleeping across the bedroom doorway. When a siren passed on the county road, the dog got up and stood close enough for Evan to feel the tremor in his shoulder.
They still walked in Northpine Woods, but Boone would no longer range far ahead. Evan let him choose the distance and turned back when the dog did. He had wanted the house to become home again simply because the right key still opened it; by late winter he had stopped postponing a call to an agent. He asked what it would take to sell.
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