Free Cry Me A River by Ernest Hill Page A

“Now we need unequivocal certainty.”
    “And you don’t think it’s here.”
    “If it is,” she said, “I haven’t seen it. And between Mr. Johnson and me, we’ve looked through the information in that box a thousand times.”
    “Well,” he said, “I’m still going to look for myself.”
    “As you should,” she said.
    Tyrone lifted the box and turned to leave, then stopped. In his mind loomed a memory of the deli: he was seeing the woman again; he was hearing her words, feeling her anger, remembering the tension that had hung in the room like a thick cloud of dark, billowing smoke lingering over a hot, blazing fire. He set the box back on the desk and turned and faced Janell.
    “Can I ask you a question?”
    “Yes, sir,” she said.
    “You said things got bad around here, right?”
    “Right,” she said.
    “How bad did they get?”
    She hesitated before answering, and he sensed that his question had spurred in her images or memories that she had long since suppressed. Her beautiful brown eyes glossed with a moist, vacant tint, and he was sure that she was remembering.
    “I can tell you only what I’ve heard,” she said, still not looking at him. “Like I said before, Mr. Stokes, I wasn’t working here when the case was tried.”
    “I understand,” Tyrone told her. “Just tell me what you heard.”
    “There was no violence, or bomb threats, or anything like that.” Her words were slow, precise, methodical. “But there was a lot of anger, most of it directed toward your son; but some of it was also directed toward your wife, and Mr. Johnson, and anyone else who associated with the Stokes family.”
    “What kind of anger?” Tyrone asked.
    “Verbal taunts, mostly,” she said. “The way I understand it, people started riding past your wife’s house at all hours of the night, swearing and cursing, and keeping up all kinds of racket.”
    “Did anybody touch my wife?”
    “No, sir,” she said. “At least not that I know of. But it still got to be too much for her to deal with. So she moved—”
    “Up to her parents’ house,” Tyrone said. A light went on, and now he understood. She had not willingly moved to her parents’ house; she had been forced out of her own home.
    “Yes, sir,” Janell said. “At least off and on. She stays at her house sometimes. And she came by the office every now and then. But, by and large, she rarely leaves her parents’ house. If we need her, we go to her; she does not come to us. She said that she just can’t take the uglystares and the whispering anymore. So, we try to accommodate her as best we can.”
    “So the town turned on her before he had even been tried.”
    “Yes, sir,” she said. “From my understanding, it was before the trial.” Then she paused, thinking. “Yeah, it was before,” she said with assurance, then began again. “Because once the trial started, things escalated.”
    “Escalated how?” Tyrone asked.
    “Well, according to Mr. Johnson, two days before the trial, large groups of people began holding all-night vigils outside the courthouse.”
    “White people?” Tyrone asked.
    “Probably,” she said.
    “A mob?”
    “More like demonstrators, or protestors,” she said. “Not a mob. From my understanding of things, they were peaceful. They burned candles and sang, prayed and chanted, and displayed crime scene pictures of the victim. There was a lot of anger,” she said. “But there was no violence.”
    “Just good old-fashioned jury intimidation, right?” Tyrone said.
    “That’s what we argued on appeal,” she told him.
    “And,” Tyrone said.
    “We lost,” she said.
    “Were the jurors sequestered?”
    “No,” she said, slowly shaking her head. “Mr. Johnson petitioned the court, but that petition was denied as well.”
    Tyrone grew tense, and he felt his slumping spirits sink as the reality of his son’s twisted ordeal registered in his weary mind and fueled the anger in his raging heart. In his mind,