Free The Best Defense by Kate Wilhelm Page B

the devils are saying about you,” he said, entering.
    “How are you, Barbara? Good picture of you there, I thought.” Bessie would outlive them all, everyone agreed, and although he had not been in court for fifteen years, he was still respected as a smart attorney who knew a thing or two.
    “Makes me think censorship might be a good idea, after all,” Barbara said with disgust.
    “You know what they say, homophobia, hatred of all government, misogyny, you name it, might be bad, even evil, but it’s not a crime. Not yet. The Dodgsons have perfected every aspect of voicing hatred for the other.”
    Barbara nodded, putting the newspapers back in their bin. Reading them like this, one after another, covering a six-month period all that Bessie kept at any one time was like seeing particularly evil souls exposed to a harsh light that left few secrets. Evil, she repeated.
    Evil people who hated women, hated gays, hated liberals humanists. Democrats, most Republicans, feminists, agnostics, atheists … “Why did they take out after Paula Kennerman like that?” she asked.
    “Prom day one, they tried her, convicted her, and now they’re yowling for the death sentence for mothers who ‘kill’ their babies in any way abortion, actual murder, manslaughter, neglect of the child, prenatal neglect….”
    “That’s their style,” Bessie said simply.
    “You mixed up in that?”
    “No!” she snapped. She straightened up from restoring the newspapers to their proper place. Bessie’s office was large, like her father’s, with the same kind of desk, big and durable, and a round table with two straight chairs, other comfortable chairs. His office had one wall taken up with big windows, one wall with bookcases, and two walls with bins for the newspapers he collected fifteen different papers, at least. She glanced at them.
    “Bessie, are others picking up that same message? Death sentence, baby killer already convicted, all that?”
    “Some are.” He waved at the bins.
    “Do you good to spend a day or two with them, see what they’re really saying out there in the boonies.”
    She nodded slowly.
    “I might do that, if you don’t mind. Thanks. I’ll give you a call. Now, I need a shower.”
    He grinned amiably and waddled to his desk. His chair was custom-made, oversized, well padded. He sank into it with a little sigh that could have signified pleasure.
    She had just missed her father, Pam, the receptionist, said: he had been in and left again. Good, Barbara thought.
    But she wasn’t ready to go home, she knew, as she headed west on Sixth, toward Highway 126, the major road to the coast in this area. It was said that from any point in downtown Eugene a fifteen-minute drive would take one out to the country, and for the most part that was true. She had bypassed most of the commercial strip, had driven past industrial strips, skirted Fern Ridge Reservoir, dotted with bobbing small boats, and was in open country within minutes. A few minutes later the land became hillier at the start of the eruption of the Coast Range of mountains that sheltered the broad valley from the Pacific storms. Her next turn would be onto Spring Bay Road, where the Dodgsons lived, next door to the Canby Ranch, where someone had killed Lori Kennerman and burned down the Canby house.
    The Dodgsons had made a statement that no one could have passed them to get to the Canby house that morning without being seen. They had convicted Paula Kennerman in their newspaper. Their son had come for ward to supply a motive, and altogether they just might convict her in court.
     
    have on her right the land was mesa like while on her left forest-covered low hills came to the edge of the road, retreated, forming deep narrow valleys, advanced again, and beyond lay the paroxysm of the Coast Range with its rain forest. Orchards—cherries, apples, peaches-strawberry fields, pastures, fields of wheat gleaming in the sunlight, fields of grasses grown for the seed