Page 69 of The River We Remember

“In order to defend him, I need to know everything I can about Quinn’s relationship with you and your husband.”

“He was my husband’s employer,” she said, as if that was the end of it.

“He fired your husband.”

“Yes.”

“Did that make Noah angry?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“A wise sailor gets used to the stormy sea.”

“Quinn accused Noah of stealing from him,” Charlie said.

“My husband didn’t steal from James Quinn.”

“And it didn’t anger him to be accused of being a thief?”

“He was accused by a man who himself could be accused of things much worse. It didn’t trouble him.”

“The complaint against Noah states that he killed James Quinn here on your farm, took his body to Inkpaduta Bend, and staged what was supposed to look like a suicide.”

Bluestone’s wife didn’t respond but sat with her hands folded on her lap, relaxed, as if this were simply an evening tea and her husband was not at that moment behind bars with his freedom very much in peril. Charlie stared at those hands, saw how small and delicate they were, and considered how a sapphire ring might look on one of those fingers.

“Could you tell me what happened that night?” Charlie said.

“My husband, in his note, asked me to say nothing to you about James Quinn’s death.”

“I can’t defend him if I don’t know the truth of what happened, Mrs. Bluestone.”

“My name is Kyoko. You may call me that,” she said.

Charlie lifted her cup and sipped her tea. The cup was Japanese, fragile-looking, hand-painted, with no handle. She had drunk tea from similar cups years earlier in Northern California when, following the end of the Second World War, she’d worked on behalf of a number of Japanese-American families whose possessions—their land, their savings, their whole livelihoods—were taken from them while they were forced to live behind the barbed wire of internment camps.

“Your husband told me that he’s unwilling to offer a plea to the charge against him. He won’t say that he’s guilty or not guilty. But he also won’t agree to what we call a plea of nolo contendere.”

“No contest,” Kyoko said, then nodded as if her husband’s response, inexplicable to Charlie, was perfectly understandable to her.

“Kyoko, why would he want to do that?”

“I can’t say anything more.”

Charlie pressed her, which was uncomfortable because Kyoko was so polite in all her refusals. When she knew it was useless to proceed, Charlie said, “News people may come out here and harass you. Say nothing to them. Say nothing to anyone about your husband’s situation unless I’m with you. And I’d like you in court tomorrow when your husband is arraigned. Will you do that?”

“Yes,” she said. Then she said, “I don’t drive.”

“I’ll pick you up.” And they settled on a time.

Before she left, Charlie offered Kyoko a caution about another danger, one the lawyer was only too familiar with over all her years fighting for what she thought of in those days as justice. She said, “Alone out here, you may not be safe.”

Kyoko gazed at her calmly, and Charlie wasn’t sure that she’d made herself clear.

“People, they get upset about things, about Jimmy Quinn’s death, and some of them may be tempted to come here and give you trouble.” Charlie took a breath and said the other part of this because it needed saying. “And you’re Japanese, Kyoko. The war is still being fought in the minds of some folks here.”

“I understand.”