True Colors

“No.”

“I couldn’t keep this from her.”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

She didn’t see how she could say no. It was so little to ask, and once she had an answer for him, maybe he could finally—finally—let this go. God knew that would be best for Vivi Ann, for Noah. And besides, she knew for a fact that Dallas wouldn’t go along with it. “Fine. I’ll read the article and look through the record. But no promises.”

He smiled so brightly she had to turn away. How many times and in how many ways was Dallas Raintree going to hurt the people who cared about him?

More firmly she said, “No promises.”

A week later, as autumn leaves fell in a flurry outside her window, Winona closed her office door, told Lisa to hold all her calls, and settled down to read the transcript she’d ordered. Drawing the seventeen-hundred-page document onto her lap, she put on the drugstore magnifying glasses she’d recently begun to need and began the slow, arduous task of reading the testimony given at his trial.

It was like opening a door on the past. The words brought the whole experience back to her, the sensation of sitting there, hearing one damning fact after another, of watching Vivi Ann try so hard to be strong, and listening to the prosecutor, so certain she had truth on her side of the courtroom.

Winona didn’t need to take notes. It was all exactly as she remembered—the foundation of Cat and Dallas’s friendship, the naïveté Vivi Ann showed in letting that relationship continue, the convenience of Dallas’s so-called fever hitting on the exact night Cat was murdered. And then there was the forensic evidence apart from the DNA: the hairs found in Cat’s bed, microscopically consistent with Dallas’s, and his fingerprints on the gun. There had been no doubt left after all of that, reasonable or otherwise.

Noah didn’t understand. Dallas hadn’t been railroaded or subjected to prosecutorial misconduct or improper police technique. A jury of his peers had found him guilty based on the totality of the evidence presented. It wasn’t some small-town miscarriage of justice. It was a verdict rooted in fact, and of the evidence, certainly Myrtle’s eyewitness testimony had been the most compelling.

Winona reread that section of the transcript, although she remembered it pretty clearly.

HAMM: And where is the ice-cream shop in relation to Catherine Morgan’s home?

MICHAELIAN: Down the alley. You go right past us to get to her place.

HAMM: Please speak up, Ms. Michaelian.

MICHAELIAN: Oh. Yes. Sorry.

HAMM: Were you working at the ice-cream shop on Christmas Eve of last year?

MICHAELIAN: I was. I wanted to make a special ice-cream cake for the evening service. I was running late, as usual.

Winona skipped down.

HAMM: Did you see anyone that night?

MICHAELIAN: It was about eight-ten. I was almost ready to go. I was putting the finishing touches on the frosting when I looked up and saw . . . saw Dallas Raintree coming out of the alley that leads to Cat’s house.

HAMM: Did he see you?

MICHAELIAN: No.

HAMM: And how did you know it was the defendant?

MICHAELIAN: I saw his profile when he passed under the streetlamp, and I recognized his tattoo. But I already knew it was him. I’d seen him there before at night. Lots of times. I’d even told Vivi Ann about it. It was him. I’m sorry, Vivi Ann.

Winona put the doorstop-sized pile of paper aside and got up from the couch, stretching to work out the kinks in her back. “Thank God.”

No DNA test was going to save Dallas Raintree at this late date. That was for innocent men.

Feeling better (she hated to admit it, but Noah had planted a tiny seed of doubt and that didn’t sit well with her), she wandered back into the kitchen and stared into her fridge. There was plenty of food there, but none of it appealed to her. A quick glance at the clock on the stove told her it was eight o’clock.

Maybe she should walk down to the ice-cream shop. The idea of Myrtle’s famous Neapolitan cake had whetted her appetite.

On this early evening, it was quiet in town. Labor Day was the official end of summer around here, the day tourists packed up their motor homes and drove away. Without their loud voices, you could hear the water again, and the mournful call of the wind through the trees. Locals loved these first weeks of September best of all: the sun was still shining, the days were still hot, and the Canal was theirs again.

Winona went up to the window at the ice-cream shop and ordered a piece of Myrtle’s Neapolitan ice-cream cake from the pimply-faced girl working the take-out counter.