Alex Cross's Trial

by the pain in my knees. When I bent my leg to take a step, the knee shot a white-hot arrow of pain to my hip. My neck was still raw from the rope, and the mangled fingers of my right hand were twisted and so blackish blue they might yet go gangrenous and have to come off. The sweat rolled down my back, into the swollen whip welts, stinging like fire ants.

    But I kept on, hobbling down the muddy board walkway. I knew I was damned lucky to have survived, with no broken bones. My pain was nothing. It would be gone in a few days, or weeks at the worst. I could deal with that.

    But inside, I felt another, more disturbing pain. I had been beaten and left for dead. I had disappeared from the world, and hardly anyone had come looking for me. I mattered to virtually no one. Meg. Elizabeth. My father. My daughters. Jacob, my childhood best friend. The entire town of Eudora. I had mostly been forgotten. A few people from town had come, good, kind folks. L. J. Stringer had actually visited a few times. But my own father hadn’t come once.

    “Abraham,” I said. “Could I ask a favor?”

    “Ask it,” he said.

    “Can you stop by Maybelle’s and see if she’s got any letters for me?”

    He shook his head. “I went by this morning. Nothing there.” Then he added, “Nothing for you from the White House, either.”

    I kept on, but the pressure of the crutches under my arms was getting to be too much to bear. Everything from my neck down was one big aching mass of bruises.

    “Does Maybelle know what happened to me?” I asked.

    “Mr. Corbett, everybody in Eudora knows what happened to you. I’ll tell you something I believe. There’s good and bad in Eudora Quarters, good and bad in the town of Eudora—probably in equal numbers. Problem is, there’s cowards in both places. That’s why the bullies can have their way, Mr. Corbett.”

    “Abraham,” I said with a sigh. “For God’s sake. We’ve been through a good bit together. Would you please call me Ben?”

    He patted my shoulder. “All right, Ben.”

    “Thank you.”

    “You welcome.” He smiled. “But now you got to call me Mr. Cross.” Abraham laughed out loud at that.

    As I picked my way past the door of Gumbo Joe’s, two old ladies looked up and waved at me. “I pray for you, sir,” one of them said to me.

    “Thank you, ma’am.”

    We went on a few more yards. “The colored folks appreciate what you was trying to do, Mist—Ben,” he said. “We know your heart is not the same as some the rest.”

    Moody spoke up. “Yeah, and the white folks know it too. That’s why they goin’ to kill him.”

    Chapter 72

    “YOU JUST PLAIN don’t need me no more.” Aunt Henry said it straight out as she dabbed at the wounds on my back with one of her secret potions.

    “Fact is, Mist’ Corbett, you hardly even got any scabs left on you,” she said. “These is all healed up real good.”

    I twisted around on my chair to pull on my shirt, wincing from the pain.

    “Now don’t you be foolin’ with me,” Aunt Henry said. “You walkin’ good with no crutch.”

    I knew she was right. Aside from the occasional shock of pain in my neck, or in my knees, I was feeling almost human again. I had no further need for Aunt Henry’s fussing and babying, which I had come to enjoy.

    And it was time for me to go back to Eudora.

    Frankly, I felt a bit reluctant to leave. There was something good about life as it happened in this modest little house. Certainly, the opportunity to see Moody every day was something I had enjoyed. But as much as that, I had enjoyed getting to know Abraham. With everything going against him—the death of his grandson, the increasing fear in the colored community, the lifetime of bigotry he had endured—Abraham was a man at peace with himself.

    Just the night before, on a warm rainy evening when the mosquitoes were at their droning worst, we sat on a bench underneath the overhang of the porch.

    We were working our way through a basket of hot corn muffins Moody had just brought out of the oven. I smiled up at her. She ignored me and turned back inside.

    “Sometimes a man can sense something,” Abraham said. “Something small that can blossom up into trouble.”

    “You mean, because we haven’t heard from Roosevelt?” I asked. “I don’t understand that at all. I almost got hanged for him.”

    “This got nothing to do with the president,” he said, gazing off into the darkness. “I’m talking about another kind of business. Right here in my house.”

    I swallowed the rest of the