Page 64 of The River We Remember

“We’re a funny lot, you know?” Charlie indulged in another swallow and returned the flask to her purse. “We have this amazing ability to communicate. And what do we say to one another? ‘No’ or ‘Nothing.’ Not much more than the grunts of lesser beasts. ‘This above all: to thine own self be true.’ Know who said that, Noah?”

“Shakespeare.”

“What I’m thinking is that your nos and your nothings are simply less eloquent rephrasing of Shakespeare. So this is what I’m going to do. At your arraignment tomorrow morning, I’m going to plead you not guilty.”

“I don’t want to plead one way or the other.”

“You wish to remain mute when you face the ogre we call justice?”

“Yes.”

“All right then. How about this? You don’t plead. I will plead on your behalf. The response will come not from you, but from me.”

“What’s the point?”

“I’d like to have a chance to defend you. A plea has to be entered for that to happen. I could plead nolo contendere, which means that you don’t want to contest the charge. It’s looked upon as an admission of guilt without actually having to say it.”

“That’s not what I want.”

“I figured as much. So if I enter a plea of not guilty on your behalf and am clear that this is coming from me, not you, you will have neither admitted your guilt nor denied it, but you will have your day in court.”

“I don’t want my day in court. I want this to be done with as quickly as possible.”

“Then plead guilty.”

“No.”

“Or nolo contendere. Which, as I said, will be seen as the same as guilty, but will get all this over with.”

“No.”

“Then let me tell you what might happen with a day in court. I might be able to get a jury to think about the kind of man Jimmy Quinn was. I might be able to remind them of all the harm he’s done across the course of his life here in Black Earth County. I might even be able to get them to understand a scenario of self-defense, which just might get them to acquit you and set you free. Is that something you’d like?”

His eyes, which throughout the interview had been so intent on that little square of sky at the end of the cellblock, turned to Charlie. They were dark and narrowed to squinty, sun-beaten slits with deep lines at the corners, but she saw in them the first glimpse of something hopeful, something she could use. Noah Bluestone wanted to be free.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

IT WAS EVENING in Jewel. All that day the sun had drawn up from the earth the wetness left by last night’s storm, and the air had been full of a scent that made Scott Madison restless. Although he didn’t have a name to pin on it, the smell seemed one of promise, of possibility. He felt as if there were an important thing that had to be discovered, to be experienced. All day he’d been waiting for something to happen.

He’d just put a bag of trash into one of the cans behind the Wagon Wheel when he heard the growl of Delbert Wolfe’s motorbike and watched his friend swing around the corner and into the yard, and lay the little machine on the grass next to the lashed-together lean-to.

Del greeted him with “On KP duty?”

“Yeah. And grounded.”

“But it was worth it, Madman,” Del said with a grin. “We talked to a murderer. You heard, right?”

“Heard what?”

“That Indian. Bluestone. They arrested him.”

“I didn’t hear,” Scott said.

“Creasy told me Bluestone lit out from the Quinn place yesterday like a bat out of hell. He didn’t come in to work today. And the Quinns got a call from the sheriff saying that the Indian had been arrested for the murder of their old man, for killing him in cold blood.”

Noah Bluestone had sat at the Wagon Wheel’s counter. Scott had spoken to him, not much, but pleasantly. This same man had blown a hole in James Quinn, had spilled all that blood on the ground next to the Alabaster River, had scared the bejesus out of him and Del as they sat by the fire on Inkpaduta Bend. Now he was a prisoner in the jailhouse. Black Earth County, which had always seemed to Scott one very particular, familiar thing, had quickly become something entirely different. He wondered, was this what he’d sensed, what he’d been waiting for?

“What’s with the black eye, Wolfman?” Scott asked, because Del’s left eye carried the shadow of a bruise.