Chapter 21: Four Hundred Witnesses

The ballroom was gold and crystal again, and four hundred people turned to watch us come in.

Phones went up along the tables.

Sybil walked ahead of us down the center aisle in her red gown, with her bare hands loose at her sides, and took the microphone from the host.

"Friends," she said. "Thank you for coming on a difficult night."

Her voice was warm and perfectly level.

"Many of you have seen the cruelty of the last week."

She let her voice break a little.

"A grieving family has been used, and a sick young woman has been led astray."

She turned and held out a hand toward me.

"Lydia is here tonight, and she has something to say. I think we can all be generous."

She stepped aside, and the room waited for me to crawl.

I walked up to the podium, and Stefan walked up beside me.

He didn't touch me.

He stood one pace to my left with his hands at his sides, a man with no title and no pin.

"Thank you, Sybil," I said into the microphone.

"A few weeks ago, in this room, I made you a promise."

I waited a second.

"I said I would find out the truth and come back and tell it, whatever it was."

The ballroom had gone quiet.

"I've found out. Here it is."

"Lydia," Sybil said, softly.

"Eleven years ago, Anne Garrick was killed on Route 9 by a silver Mercedes. Mrs. Kingsland was driving it. She did not stop."

A woman at the nearest table put her hand over her mouth.

"You have heard her say so, on television, in her own voice. What you haven't heard is what happened next."

I nodded to the back of the room.

Roscoe came down the side aisle with a stack of papers under his arm and began to hand them out, table by table.

"That's a signed statement from the family's driver, taken the week of the crash," I said.

"She sent him home at nine-forty that night."

I let them read.

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