Alex Cross’s Trial

I rode the bicycle two circuits around the tiny park in front of the Methodist church, took a left at the minister’s house and another left at the scuppernong arbor. At the end of the vine-covered trellis stood a simple white wooden structure that was unsupervised by anyone’s eyes and universally known among the young people of Eudora as the Catch-a-Kiss Gazebo.

It was here that I came with Elizabeth the summer I was fifteen. It was here, on that same wooden bench, that I leaned in to kiss Elizabeth and was startled down to my toes by an open-mouthed kiss in return, full of passion and tongue and spit. At the same moment I felt her hand running smoothly up the side of my thigh. I felt the pressure of her nails. My own hand moved from her waist to her small, rounded bosom.

Then Elizabeth pulled away and shook her head, spilling blond curls onto her shoulders. “Oh, Ben, I want to kiss you and kiss you. And more. I want to do everything, Ben. But I can’t. You know we can’t.”

I had never heard a girl talk like that. Most boys my age were hopeless when it came to discussing such matters-at least, in Eudora they were.

There were tears in Elizabeth ’s eyes. “It’s all right,” I said, but then I grinned. “But we could kiss some more. No harm in that.” So Elizabeth and I kissed, and sometimes we touched each other, but it never went any farther than that, and eventually I went away to Harvard, where I met Meg.

Now I rode that bicycle fast down the lane, leaning into the curve, rounding the corner at the preacher’s house, faster and faster, remembering Elizabeth Begley and the first taste of sex that had ever happened to me anywhere but in my own head.

Chapter 28

I PEDALED THAT BICYCLE all the way from my growing-up years to the present day. And I began to see people I knew, shopkeepers, old neighbors, and I waved and called out “Hi.” A couple of times I stopped and talked with somebody from my school days, and that was fine.

I rode over to Commerce Street, past the Slide Inn Café, past the icehouse where a bucket came flying out of the darkness just in time to trip up poor George Pearson and send him to his death by hanging.

The exhilaration of my first ride through town was fading under the glare of a morning sun that was beating down hard. I was out of training for Mississippi summers. My thirst was demanding attention, and I remembered a pump at the end of the cotton-loading dock at the gin, just down from the depot.

I pedaled down Myrtle Street to the end of the platform that ran from the cotton gin beside the tracks of the Jackson & Northern line. I leaned my machine against the retaining wall and turned to the pump.

As I worked the handle and reveled in the water-half drinking, half splashing my face-I heard a loud voice behind me, an angry voice.

“What the hell makes you nigger boys think you can come high-walkin’ into our town looking for a job? All our jobs belong to white men.”

At the other end of the platform were two large and burly men I recognized as the Purneau brothers, Jocko and Leander, an unpleasant pair of backwoods louts who had been running the cotton gin for Old Man Furnish as long as I could remember. The two of them towered over three scrawny black boys who looked to be fifteen years old, maybe even younger.

“Well, suh, we just thinking with the crop coming you might be needin’ some mo’ help round the gin,” said one of the boys.

“That’s the trouble with you niggers, is when you set in to tryin’ to think,” said Leander Purneau. He spoke in a friendly, jokey voice, which put me, and the boy, off guard. But then he popped him a solid punch on the side of his face and sent the boy down onto his knees.

The other boys skittered away like bugs from a kicked-over log. Suddenly I really was back in the past, and the boy on the ground was in serious trouble, like poor George Pearson had been.

There was one difference now-I was not a timid little boy. I was a grown man. As I wiped my wet hands on my shirt, I considered what I was about to do.

If I caused a commotion, made a scene, called attention to myself, I might endanger my mission even before it started.

But if I did nothing?

Fortunately, the boy on the ground rolled over and jumped up. He sprinted off down the platform, holding his jaw, but at least he was getting away.

And at that very moment, I felt something cold and hard jammed against the side of my neck.

It felt an awful lot like the barrel of a gun.

A deep voice behind me: “Just put your hands in the air. Nice and slow, high, that’s the way to do it.”

Chapter 29

“NOW, I WANT you to turn around real slow, partner. Don’t make any fast moves.”

I did exactly as I was told. Real slow.

And found myself looking straight into the face of Jacob Gill. Jacob and I had been inseparable from as far back as I could remember, until the day I left Eudora for college.

“You son of a bitch!” I shouted at him.