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    He gave me a weak smile. “Thanks, Mum,” he said.
    Jill held up another tape. “Ready?”
    Angus snapped open the tab on the pop can. “Ready.”
    “This is the trial,” Jill said.
    There were establishing shots of the street outside the courthouse. The sky was blue, and the trees on the courthouse lawn were leafing out into their first green. Two police cars pulled up: Maureen was in the first; Kevin in thesecond. As they stood, blinking in the pale spring sunlight, Maureen and Kevin were almost unrecognizable. She was in a navy dress with a white Peter Pan collar, and her explosion of platinum hair had been tamed into a ponytail. His long blond hair had been trimmed, and he was wearing a dark suit. Miss Chatelaine and her Saturday night date.
    Spectators hurried into the courthouse. I recognized some of them: Mieka’s English teacher; Tess Malone; our next-door neighbours; our minister; Gary Stephens and his wife, Sylvie; Jane O’Keefe with Andy Boychuk, who was dead now too; our dear old friend Dave Micklejohn; Craig and Julie Evanson. Then Howard Dowhanuik with his arm protectively draped around the shoulders of the woman beside him. As they started up the steps, the woman shook off his arm and turned to face the camera. Her mouth was slack and her eyes were as blank as a newborn’s. I shuddered. The woman with the unseeing eyes was me. Angus was right. I had been a zombie.
    I turned to Jill. “Is there another beer?” I asked.
    “Help yourself,” Jill said, and I did.
    The reporting of the trial had its own rhythm. For four days there were shots of the key players arriving at the courthouse, then courtroom sketches of the experts as they gave their testimony. Police officers, forensic specialists, pathologists, two psychiatrists. The faces of these witnesses, skilfully drawn but static, were the perfect counterpoint to the reporter’s voice droning through the endless technical details of expert testimony.
    Then on the fifth day of the trial, there was real news. Kevin Tarpley had confessed he acted alone. No time now for careful sketches; just file footage of Kevin and Maureen as the news anchor’s voice, high-pitched with excitement, relayed the breaking story. Kevin had lied. It hadn’t been Maureen who used the crowbar. She had pleaded with himnot to harm Ian Kilbourn. Her fingerprints were on the crowbar because she had tried to tear it from Kevin’s hands. He was guilty; she was innocent.
    The Friday before Mother’s Day, Maureen Gault walked out of the courtroom for the last time, and the cameras went wild. Maureen’s mother, a mountain of a woman who had been a media star from the moment of her daughter’s arrest, bore down on the press.
    “She’s vindicated,” Shirley Gault said. “Little Mo is vindicated. What more Mother’s Day present could I ask?” Beside her, Maureen stood silent, smirking, her fair hair as insubstantial as dandelion fluff in the May sunshine. As her mother droned on about lawsuits and mental suffering and Little Mo’s good name, Maureen looked off in the distance. Finally she’d had enough. She grabbed her mother’s doughy arm, and headed down the courthouse steps. Before she got into her mother’s car, she flashed the cameras a V-for-victory sign. The screen went dark.
    “And so justice was done,” I said.
    Jill flicked off the console and turned on the lights. “Isn’t it always?” she said mildly.
    She picked up the tapes. “I’ll leave a note with our library that you can requisition these. That way, if you want to come over some night, you can. There’s a lot of stuff you and Angus might feel more comfortable looking at on your own.”
    “Like what?” Angus asked.
    “Like the footage from the Heinbecker funeral, the one your father went to in Swift Current that last day.” Jill turned to me. “Charlie’s widow sent it to me last year. She’s getting on, and she wanted me to have it for our archives. I almost pitched it, then I