Read Online Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment by D. W. Buffa - Free Book Online

watching you, convinced you did it. Your friends—the ones who still come around—tell you they believe you, but you’re not sure they really do; you’re not sure they don’t look upon themselves as victims, caught between their obligation to you and the embarrassment they start to feel every time they come near you.
    No one believes you, and you begin to wonder whether you should believe yourself. Could you have done this thing, and then, because it was such an awful thing to do, blacked it out as if it had never happened? You don’t really believe that, but you have to admit that, impossible as it seems, it could conceivably be true.
    Does anyone really know when they first begin to go mad?
    “Janet Larkin had been living with thoughts like these for nearly a year. It was a miracle that she had any sanity left. When I called her name as the first witness for the defense, she had the look of someone not quite awake, not quite certain that this was not still part of a bad dream.
    “She did everything wrong. When she answered a question, she looked at me instead of at the jury. When she denied that she had ever done anything improper with her son, she spoke in a timid, quiet voice that instead of carrying the kind of outrage you might expect from someone wrongfully accused, made her sound as if she herself was not quite sure.
    “At first, she would not answer the question. I had to put it to her directly. ‘Mrs. Larkin, did you at any time have sexual intercourse or sexual relations of any kind with your son, Gerald Larkin?’
    “The courtroom was mobbed. The benches were crowded tight.
    Without objection from Jeffries, those who could not find a seat had been allowed to stand along the wall at the back. All those eyes staring at her frightened her, and from the moment she took the stand she refused to look anywhere except at me. Until, that is, I asked her that question. A look of utter hopelessness came into her eyes. Her shoulders sagged forward and she gazed down at her hands. She began to rub them together as if she was trying to wash them clean. It was only when I repeated the question that she stopped and looked up again.
    ” ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head back and forth. Her sad eyes were wide open. ‘I never hurt my children.’
    “I had to remove any possible ambiguity. ‘You never had sexual intercourse with your son?’
    “She bit her lip and a shudder passed through her. ‘No.’
    “I took her back through all of it, what her husband had done to her daughter and when she had first learned about it. I had her describe what she did to help her daughter and how she tried to help her son.
    ” ‘He told me one day that he didn’t think his father should have to live alone. I told him he could visit, but he needed to live at home.’
    ” ‘After he made this accusation, he was taken out of your home and allowed to live with his father, correct?’
    “We went on like that for hours, explaining everything that had happened until, finally, we were at the end of it, and I had only one question left to ask.
    ” ‘You think it’s your fault, don’t you? What happened to your daughter, and then what happened to your son to make him tell a story like this?’
    “I do not know how much time or how many different days we had spent together, going over every detail of her married life, but we had never talked about this. Not once. I asked it now because suddenly it seemed the only question that made sense. She looked at me as if I had just betrayed a secret. Her mouth began to quiver and tears came into her eyes. She had to force herself to answer.
    ” ‘Yes, I do. I should have known,’ she said as she buried her face in her hands. ‘It’s my fault. I should have known.’
    “Because he had believed the boy from the beginning, Spencer Goldman had no sympathy for the boy’s mother.
    ” ‘Are you trying to tell us that your husband was having sex with your daughter, that it went on for