Small Things You Promised novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: The Twenty-Seventh

Wiley sat down on the bumper of somebody's sedan in that garage and put his head in his hands.

I stood in front of him in my green dress, the way I'd stood in front of him in the ambulance bay.

"Then we go in on the twenty-seventh," I said.

"Carlie."

"With everything. With the truth. You said it upstairs. The other way."

He lifted his head.

"Say it again," he said.

"We go in."

On Thursday, August twenty-seventh, we went in.

Courtroom three was small and paneled and freezing.

The air conditioning was so high that Missy had brought a cardigan.

She was sitting at the little desk below the judge's bench, with her steno writer open.

The court's own reporter was out sick, and the clerk had called down the freelance list until somebody said yes.

Missy had said yes before the clerk finished the sentence.

"Don't look at me," she whispered as I passed. "I'm impartial. I'm furniture."

Lacy sat at the other table in a navy dress with a white collar.

No curls. No pearls.

She'd been out on bond for eleven days.

Theft over ten thousand dollars, the paper said. Her father's duplexes had been fined by the city on Monday.

Her daddy's firm had sent the same lawyer with the same binder.

He'd called one witness about Wiley.

Ty.

He came in at nine fifteen in his gray Waddell polo, with pink insulation stuck to one sleeve.

The judge looked at the sleeve.

"Mr. Waddell, did you come from a job?"

"Yes, ma'am. Dodds Avenue."

He sat down in the witness chair. "We're putting in the thirty-one the donors paid for. The real ones. At cost. We started Monday."

Lacy's lawyer cleared his throat.

"Mr. Waddell, you told my office in July that Mr. Burch forgets things. That he forgot his daughter at school."

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