True Colors

“I’ve already signed the pauper’s affidavit and met with the lawyer assigned to my case. You’re not going into debt to save me.”

“But you’re innocent.”

The look he gave her was so cold that for a second he was someone she didn’t know. “And that’s what I’m going to teach you in the end. Cynicism. When this thing is over you won’t know what to believe so you’ll believe in nothing. That will have been my gift to you.”

“I love you, Dallas. That’s what matters. We have to stay strong. Love will get us through.”

“My mom loved my dad until the day he killed her.”

“Don’t even think about comparing yourself to him.”

“You’re going to hear all about it before this thing is over, how he abused me, burned me with cigarettes, locked me up. They’re going to say it made me mean. They’re going to say I had sex with Cat, that I—”

Vivi Ann pressed her hand to the glass. “Touch me, Dallas.”

“I can’t,” he said, and she could see how that admission ate him up inside and made him angry. “Love isn’t a shield, Vivi. It’s time you saw that.”

“Touch my hand.”

Slowly he brought his hand up, pressed his palm against hers. All she could feel was the slickness of the Plexiglas, but she closed her eyes and tried to remember the heat of his skin against hers. When she had the memory close, and could hold it to her chest, she opened her eyes. “I’m your wife,” she said into the receiver. “I don’t know who taught you to run, but it’s too late for that now. We stand and fight. And then you come home. That’s how it’s going to be. You get me?”

“It makes me sick to see you in here, touching this dirty glass, talking into that phone, trying not to cry.”

“Just don’t pull away. I can take anything but that.”

“I’m scared,” he said quietly.

“So am I. But I want you to remember that you’re not alone. You’ve got a wife and a son who adore you.”

“It’s hard to believe that in here.”

“Believe it, Dallas,” she said, swallowing the tears she refused to shed. “I won’t ever give up on you.”

All that winter and for the following spring, the upcoming trial of Dallas Raintree dominated town gossip. It was such a juicy bit of steak, with lots of fatty flavor. There was the big question: Did he do it? But in truth that didn’t get much play. Most folks had made up their minds when he was arrested. Respect for the law ran high in Oyster Shores, and they figured a mistake was unlikely. Besides, they’d known from the minute he walked into the Outlaw Tavern, with his inked-up bicep and shoulder-length hair, and his looking-for-a-fight gaze, that he was trouble. The fact that he’d gone after Vivi Ann was proof enough he didn’t know his place. She’d been suckered in by him, pure and simple. That was the talk anyway.

Winona had spent the last five months in a holding pattern. It was obvious to everyone that her sisters were no longer speaking to her. Dallas’s arrest had broken the once-solid Grey family into two camps: Aurora and Vivi Ann vs. Winona and Henry. Sympathy ran high for all of them. The general consensus was that Dad and Winona had made an uncharacteristic mistake in hiring Dallas in the first place. While no one believed Dad should have paid for a private lawyer (Why throw good money after bad being the most common expression of this point), they believed he was wrong to let his family break up over it.

Winona had carefully planted the seeds of her own defense: that she wasn’t a criminal defense attorney and couldn’t represent Dallas; that she longed to reconcile with Vivi Ann and waited for the day when her baby sister would return to the fold; and most convincingly, that Vivi Ann had always been headstrong and would learn in time that she’d made a terrible mistake in believing in Dallas. On that day, Winona always said, “I’ll be there to dry her tears.”

It was true, too. Every day of her estrangement with her sisters was a nearly unbearable burden on Winona. For the first few months she had tried to bridge the gap, repair the damage, but each of her attempts at reconciliation or explanation had been ignored. Vivi Ann and Aurora would neither speak to her nor listen. They didn’t even sit in the family pew at church anymore.

By mid-May, when the rhododendrons burst into plate-sized blooms and the azaleas in her yard were bright with flowers, she was hanging on by a thread, waiting for the trial to begin. When it was over, and Dallas was convicted, Vivi Ann would finally face the ugly truth. Then she would need her family again. And Winona would be there, arms open, waiting to take care of her.

On the first day of the trial, Winona woke up early, dressed in a suit, and was among the first spectators allowed into the gallery of the courtroom. As she watched the poor defense attorney enter the room, dragging his file boxes toward the defense table, she knew she’d done the right thing in declining to represent Dallas. She could never have handled a trial of this magnitude. Last week she’d watched voir dire and several of the pretrial motions and known without a doubt that she would have been in over her head with this trial. Although, to be honest, she had her doubts about the defense attorney’s competence, too. He’d allowed a couple of local residents on the jury, which didn’t seem smart to Winona.

She went to a place in the third row and sat down, hearing people file in behind her. The gallery filled up in no time. Everyone in town wanted to be here today. The whispering was as loud as a rising tide in the wood-paneled room.

On the right side of the courtroom, at the front table, sat the assistant prosecuting attorney, Sara Hamm, and her bright-faced young assistant. On the left side, at the defense table, sat Roy Lovejoy, the attorney assigned to Dallas’s case. Winona had tried her best to get information out of the prosecuting attorney’s office, but everyone had been closemouthed during the discovery process. All she knew was what everyone knew: that the rape charge had been dropped and the murder charge remained. The media hadn’t been much help, either. The murder of a single woman in a small town in a rural county didn’t warrant much in-depth coverage. Sensationalism about Dallas’s and Cat’s unsavory pasts abounded; true facts were harder to come by.

At eight forty-five, Vivi Ann and Aurora walked into the courtroom, holding hands.

In a loose-fitting black suit, Vivi Ann looked incredibly fragile. Light gilded her ponytailed hair, softened the thinness of her face. She looked like a piece of bone china that would crack at the slightest touch. Aurora looked as grim and determined as a bodyguard. They passed Winona without making eye contact, and took seats two rows in front of her.

Winona fought the urge to go to them. Instead she straightened, folded her cold hands in her lap.

And then two uniformed guards were bringing Dallas into the courtroom.

He wore a pair of creased black pants, a pressed white shirt, and a black tie. The months in jail had left their mark on him; he was thinner, sinewy, and when he looked at Winona, she froze, heart thumping.