and put the message slip, when she surrendered it, in an evidence envelope he labeled with more
care than the edger had received. Rosa Delgado's name reached Nolan that week by the route Rosa
herself had chosen: not through the Ridge, not through the secretary, but through a letter, in her
own hand, to the Commonwealth's Attorney of Marlowe County, stating that she was the
bookkeeper who kept the Halloway Ridge accounts for Ridgeway Community Management, that
she had retained a personal copy of the fine ledger in the ordinary prudence of her profession, and
that if the Commonwealth wished to see it, she would bring it herself, and answer for it, in her own
name. Nolan read the letter twice, from the bottom up, and wrote on her pad, beneath the sentence
about the sedan, a third: Everybody in this case keeps a second copy of everything. It is the most
hopeful fact in the file.
The grand jury of Marlowe County sat on the first Monday of June, in a room whose paneling
had heard, over sixty years, every species of county trouble, and Patricia Nolan presented the case
the way she had built it: out of eyes. Priya Shah testified for twenty minutes, and sent the jurors,
afterward, the thing her profession calls a chain of custody and her porch called the log. Harold
Abernathy testified for forty, of which the foreman later said — in the parking lot, to his wife, in a
remark that traveled the county by Friday in defiance of every instruction — that the old gentleman
had narrated the morning like the last honest chapter of a textbook. Maya Okafor testified with her
mother seated behind her and her phone in an evidence bag, and answered the only question Nolan
had worried about — whether anyone had told her what to say — with a teenager's annihilating
plainness: "It was on a shoe. Nobody aimed it. That's why it got everything." Deputy Olatunji
described the scene, the edger, the box of glass. The dealership's estimator produced his letterhead
and his number, and was cross-questioned, by a juror who owned a truck, on the price of mirrors,
and answered it the way men answer who price parts for a living: by observing that the
Commonwealth had not chosen the car. Nolan closed with the injunction, signed at nine-twenty that
morning, served at ten-forty that morning, and the sheriff's notebook, in which a defendant's first
defense — the mirror was already damaged — had been recorded verbatim while the glass it
described was still falling. The grand jury was out for less time than lunch. The true bill charged
Gordon Pruitt with one count of felony destruction of property, and named the property, in the
Commonwealth's flat prose, as a motor vehicle mirror assembly and door panel, value seven
thousand eight hundred and forty dollars, the property of Caleb Rowan. It did not name the
association. It did not name the machine. Nolan had drawn it narrow on purpose, and explained the
narrowness to no one, because a charge, like a ledger line, does its best work one item at a time:
what had happened in June was a man and an edger; what had happened for nine years was a
question she intended, in due course, to let other rooms — a civil courtroom, an annual meeting —
ask in their own jurisdictions, with the indictment standing behind her like a fence post while they
asked it.
He surrendered on Wednesday, at ten in the morning, in the company of his lawyer, in a suit,
with the ruler left — a detail Olatunji noted in the log, and the county savored — in the car. The
arrest the sheriff had declined to make on the driveway was accomplished, nineteen days later, by
appointment, in a lobby, with the paperwork of a commonwealth that had arranged, from the first
hour, for Gordon Pruitt's lawyer to have nothing to work with but the facts. He was photographed,
fingerprinted, and released on his own recognizance within the hour, on conditions the court read
aloud and Lasky accepted with a bow: no contact with the Rowan household, direct or through
intermediaries; no entry upon the property at 9 Sycamore Hollow Court; and compliance,
scrupulous and personal, with the injunction of Judge Whitaker, whose extension the court noted as
if it were weather both men already knew. At the arraignment that followed, Gordon pleaded not
guilty in a voice the clerk had no difficulty hearing, and the court, consulting calendars with the
slowness of a tide table, set the case down for trial on Tuesday the fifteenth of July, by jury, in the
circuit courtroom where Judge Whitaker's portrait-less predecessor had once tried a man for
burning the very barn the Ridge's fences were painted to remember. Outside, on the courthouse
steps, Lasky gave the small crowd of reporters — two, one from Richmond with his photographer,
one local — the statement he had composed in the car: that an indictment was an accusation and
nothing more; that the process which had produced it had been attended, from its first hour, by
conflicts of interest that would be examined in the proper forum; and that Mr. Pruitt looked
forward, in July, to a jury of citizens rather than a family of officials. Gordon stood beside him in
the sun and said nothing, which was the wisest sentence available to him, and looked — the local