The Evangeline (34 page)

With the crowd swirling all around them, and reporters shouting questions about what it meant and if there was going to be another trial, Darnell fought his way outside. He thought Marlowe was right behind him, but when he turned around the only familiar face he saw was that of Summer Blaine, trying to catch up.

She took hold of his hand. ‘What does it mean?’ she asked.

‘It means it’s over,’ said Darnell.

He glanced across at Michael Roberts standing on the courthouse steps talking to a crowd of eager reporters. Summer turned around just in time to hear Roberts say that he would not second guess what the jury had done.

‘I imagine they came to the same conclusion most people would have come to after listening to everything that was said in that trial: that Vincent Marlowe has been punished enough,’ said Roberts.

‘Does that mean there won’t be another trial?’ someone called from the back of the crowd.

With a weary smile, Roberts shook his head. He looked beyond the circle of faces waiting with blank anticipation to where William Darnell stood with Summer Blaine.

‘I was told at the very beginning that taking this case to trial would ruin the lives of people who had already suffered enough. But there was never a choice—a crime had been committed, people had been killed; we had to prosecute.We had to bring what happened out into the open; we could not let it stay a secret. We could not allow murder to become a question of someone’s private judgment; it had to be brought to a public trial. And now it has. The jury has spoken, and their verdict should be binding on us all. So, no, there will not be another trial. Vincent Marlowe is a free man, and if anyone thinks that this is improper or unfair— if anyone thinks we should keep after him until we find a jury that might be persuaded to convict him—ask yourself this question: do you know anyone who thinks that Vincent Marlowe is a lucky man?’

Summer took Darnell by the arm. ‘What will happen to Marlowe now?’ she asked as they started down the steps.

With a dismal look, Darnell shrugged his shoulders. Suddenly, he caught sight of a man and woman on the corner half a block ahead. The man held the woman with his arm while she sobbed against his chest.

‘That’s Marlowe,’ said Darnell in a voice as sad as Summer had ever heard. ‘The woman is Marlowe’s sister.’

Summer took Darnell home, and for the next few weeks, while he slowly recovered from the heart attack that had come so close to killing him, never left his side. She insisted that he have perfect quiet, and did everything she could to keep the world away. The telephone calls from reporters—desperate to have a comment about the trial and what the jury had done—she handled with a series of stories that, without quite lying, skirted the edges of the truth. It was easy to say that he was not available; it was more difficult to say when he would be. All she really knew was that, before he had any business doing it, he would be back in a court of law.

She had come to the conclusion that he was right when he said that his work, even if it had almost killed him, was the only thing that kept him alive. The promise that the Marlowe trial would be his last, that he would go quietly into retirement, had been only provisional, a goal set, an objective to be achieved. Its accomplishment meant only the necessity for another provisional promise, another trial that would give him a reason to live. It was something both he and Marlowe understood, something that she now understood as well, that precisely because it was inevitable, you never surrendered to death.

It was not long before the calls stopped coming, not long before the world’s attention turned to other things. The famous people whose lives had been lost or changed forever by the tragedy of the
Evangeline
were forgotten as other people became famous in their place. But Darnell would never forget any of them. The faces of the survivors, the faces of the witnesses who testified at the trial, remained as vivid and as real to him as they had become when he first saw them, struggling to make sense of what had happened to them—doubting, some of them, that it made any sense at all.

Some evenings Darnell would sit by the window, looking out at the bay as a ship passed under the Golden Gate. He would watch it disappear into the thick, purple night, wondering if Marlowe might be on it, seeking oblivion in the only work he knew. He never heard from Marlowe, not a word; but then he had not expected that he would. Marlowe was the very meaning of solitude.

It was nearly a year after the trial when Darnell received a letter, not from Marlowe, but from Marlowe’s sister. It was written in a fine, modest hand on a single sheet of stationery. She thanked him for what he had done for her brother; told him that though a mother’s grief was bottomless, she had known when he had first told her what he had done, that he suffered even more than she. Then she told him that she was writing now to tell him that her brother was dead, that he had been reported missing from a freighter on which had taken work as a member of the crew. He had apparently fallen overboard and was lost at sea. The ship had been in the south Atlantic, she added, close to the very spot where her son had been lost. The name of the ship was the
White Rose
.

Darnell put down the letter and got up from his desk. He stood at the window, staring down at the busy city street, at everyone going about their busy lives. He could see Marlowe standing alone on a moonlit night, the ocean vast and miraculous, the way it must have looked when God first touched it and gave it life. He could almost hear the quiet splash of Marlowe’s body as the sea welcomed him home.

ALSO FROM ALLEN & UNWIN

Trial by Fire
D.W. Buffa

Joseph Antonelli has never lost a case he should have won … until now.

Julian Sinclair is a brilliant young man on the path to greatness, but he is also a man with powerful emotions he tries to keep in check. When a beautiful woman, a married district attorney, is murdered, Sinclair is accused of killing her in a fit of jealous rage. He claims that she was the victim of her sadistic husband, but the media, especially television, wildly condemn Sinclair, and whip the public into a frenzy.

Antonelli does not doubt for a minute that the idealistic Sinclair is innocent. But the victim’s widowed husband, a man of wealth and privilege and a master of manipulation, is determined to destroy both this remarkable defendant and the shrewd Antonelli. This is one case Antonelli can’t win by playing fair. He has to bait the real killer out of hiding, force him to confess his crimes, even if it means putting himself in danger.

Trial by Fire
is about the power of television and how an innocent man can be convicted when the media insist he is guilty.

From the author of the acclaimed Joseph Antonelli novels,
Trial by Fire
is D W Buffa’s seventh book in the series.

ISBN 1 74114 508 2