Chapter 21: Seth on the Stand

Seth's POV

The witness box in Courtroom Three had a microphone on a bent neck and a Bible so worn the gold had come off the edges.

I put my right hand on it.

My left hand I kept on my knee, so no one could see it shake.

My ribs had healed enough to sit straight.

I'd pleaded guilty to unlawful restraint and complicity on the first morning, against my lawyer's advice, and I'd asked for nothing in return.

The prosecutor, a tired woman with reading glasses on a chain, had offered me probation if I testified.

I told her I'd testify either way.

Chad Wingate sat at the defense table in a suit that fit him worse than it used to.

He had lost weight in county.

Two chairs down, the mortuary man had his broken nose in a bandage and his eyes on the floor.

Blythe sat beside her lawyer with her hair pulled back.

She was looking straight at me.

I didn't.

In the second row sat the Penfield family: the mother, the brother, the red-haired nurse.

And beside them sat a thin woman in a gray cardigan, with a silver ring on her thumb, who had walked in that morning without a word to me.

I did not look at her yet.

"Mr. Draper," the prosecutor said. "Where were you the night Millicent Penfield was taken?"

"A cabin on Quarry Road," I said. "Sitting in a folding chair."

"What were you doing there?"

"Guarding a door."

The courtroom shifted.

"What was behind the door?"

"A woman named Millicent Penfield," I said. "Chained by the wrists to a pipe."

My voice sounded steady, and I was glad of it.

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