Alex Cross's Trial

think, Ben?” Jacob asked as the wagon wheels slogged through the mud. “Is the Klan making a little more sense to you now?”

    If Jacob hadn’t been a friend my whole life, I would have punched him right then. “Listen to yourself, Jacob. You just killed a man. Do you hear me? You killed him. ”

    I thought he was going to snap back at me, but the fire suddenly died in his eyes. He shook his head, in sorrow or disgust. He stared down at his callused hands.

    “You… will… never… understand,” he said. “I’m a fool to even try. You’re not like us anymore. You don’t understand how things have changed.”

    “Let me tell you what else I don’t understand,” I said. “How you—the one I always thought was my friend—how could you do this to me, Jacob? Jacob, I was your friend. ”

    “I did it to help you,” he said. “To keep you alive.” His voice was weak, pathetic.

    The rain was beginning to slacken. The wagon slowed to a stop outside Scully’s barn, where the evening’s festivities had begun.

    “Come on, Ben,” Jacob said in a low voice. “Let’s go home.”

    “I don’t think so.” I turned away and set off walking in the direction of Eudora.

    “Where the hell you going?” he called after me.

    I didn’t answer or even look back.

    Chapter 81

    A SILK BANNER with elegant black letters ran the length of the wall.
    WELCOME HOME, BEN
    This was the banner that had hung in the dining room for the big family celebration the day I returned from my service in Cuba. Half the town turned out to cheer the decorated Spanish-American War veteran who had distinguished himself under the famous Colonel Theodore Roosevelt.

    Now the banner was dingy, the silk stained brown with drips from the leaky roof. I was standing not in my father’s house on Holly Street but in the “long house” out back, a former slave quarters.

    It was to the long house that I had come after I left Jacob. It hadn’t housed an actual slave since well before I was born. At the moment it seemed to be serving as a storage room for every piece of castoff junk my father didn’t want in the house.

    It was also home to the dogs, Duke and Dutchy, the oldest, fattest, laziest bloodhounds in all of Mississippi. They didn’t even bother to bark when I opened the door and stepped inside.

    I lit an old kerosene lantern and watched the mice scurry away into corners. As the shadows retreated, I realized that all the junk piled in here was my junk. My father had turned the long house into a repository of everything related to my childhood.

    The oak desk from my bedroom was shoved against the wall under the welcome banner. Piled on top of the desk were pasteboard cartons and the little desk chair I had used before I was old enough to use a grown-up one.

    I lifted the lid of the topmost carton. A musty smell rose from the books inside. I lifted out a handful: A Boy’s History of the Old South, My First Lessons in Arithmetic, and my favorite book when I was a boy: Brass Knuckles, Or, The Story of a Boy Who Cheated.

    Next to the desk stood my first bed, a narrow spool one decorated by my mother with hand-painted stars. It was hard to believe I’d ever fit on that little bed.

    In the far corner was another pile of Benjamin Corbett’s effects: football, basketball, catcher’s mitt, slide trombone, the boxer’s speed bag that once hung from a rafter in the attic.

    I lifted the corner of a bedsheet draping a large object, and uncovered the most wonderful possession of my entire childhood: a miniature two-seater buggy, made perfectly to scale of white-painted wicker with spoked iron wheels. I remembered the thrill it gave me when our old stable hand Mose would hitch up the old mule, Sarah, to my buggy. He would lift me onto the driver’s seat and lead the mule and me on a walk around the property. I must have been all of six or seven.

    Before I knew what was happening, I was crying. I stood in the middle of that dark, musty room and let the tears come. My shoulders shook violently. I sank down to a chair and buried my head in my hands. I was finally home—and it was awful.

    Chapter 82

    A FAMILIAR VOICE brought me out of a deep sleep. These days I came awake instantly, and always with an edge of fear. It was only when I blinked at the two figures smiling down on me that I was able to relax.

    “Near ’bout time for breakfast,” said Yvella, my father’s cook. Beside her was Dabney, the houseman. Each held a silver tray.

    “Way past time,” said Dabney. “In another