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had a sense of her own tenuous standing as a member of the family. They were still cautious around her. In a few brief moves, she could easily isolate herself—the bitchy city girl, the snob, the troublemaker. Even if Tobe didn’t think this, his family would. She could imagine the way Karissa would use such stuff against her, that perky martyr smile as Wild Bill was remanded to her care, even though she was allergic to bird feathers. “I’ll make do,” Karissa would say. And she would cough, pointedly, daintily, into her hand.
    Cheryl could see clearly where that road would lead.
    •   •   •
    But she couldn’t help thinking about it. Wendell was everywhere—not only in the sayings of Wild Bill, but in the notes and papers Tobe brought home with him from the office, in the broody melancholy he trailed behind him when he was up late, pacing the house. In the various duties she found herself performing for Wendell’s sake—reviewing her own brief testimony at the trial, at Tobe’s request; going with Tobe to the new lawyer’s office on a Saturday morning.
    Sitting in the office, she didn’t know why she had agreed to come along. The lawyer whom Tobe had chosen to replace him, Jerry Wasserman, was a transplanted Chicagoan who seemed even more out of place in Cheyenne than she did, despite the fact that he wore cowboy boots. He had a lilting, iambic voice, and was ready to discuss detail after detail. She frowned, touching her finger to her mouth as Tobe and his brothers leaned forward intently. What was she doing here?
    “I’m extremely pleased by the way the appeal is shaping up,” Wasserman was saying. “It’s clear that the case had some setbacks, but to my mind the evidence is stronger than ever in your brother’s favor.” He cleared his throat. “I’d like to outline three main points for the judge, which I think will be quite—quite!—convincing.”
    Cheryl looked over at Karissa, who was sitting very upright in her chair, with her hands folded and her eyes wide, as if she were about to be interrogated. Carlin shifted irritably.
    “I know we’ve talked about this before,” Carlin said gruffly. “But I still can’t get over the fact that the jury that convicted him was seventy-five percent female. I mean, that’s something we ought to be talking about. It’s just—it’s just wrong, that’s my feeling.”
    “Well,” said Wasserman. “The jury selection is somethingwe need to discuss, but it’s not at the forefront of the agenda. We have to get through the appeals process first.” He shuffled some papers in front of him, guiltily. “Let me turn your attention to the first page of the document I’ve given you, here …”
    How dull he was, Cheryl thought, looking down at the first page, which had been photocopied from a law book. How could he possibly be more passionate or convincing than Tobe had been, in the first trial? Tobe had been so fervent, she thought, so certain of Wendell’s innocence. But perhaps that had not been the best thing.
    Maybe his confidence had worked against him. She remembered the way he had declared himself to the jury, folding his arms. “This is a case without evidence,” he said. “Without
any
physical evidence!” And he had said it with such certainty that it had seemed true. The crime scenes had yielded nothing that had connected Wendell to the crimes; the attacker, whoever he was, had been extremely careful. There was no hair, no blood, no semen. The victims had been made to kneel in the bathtub as the attacker forced them to perform various degrading acts, and afterwards, the attacker had left them there, turning the shower on them as he dusted and vacuumed. There wasn’t a single fingerprint.
    But there was this: In three of the cases, witnesses claimed to have seen Wendell’s pickup parked on a street nearby. A man matching Wendell’s description had been seen hurrying down the fire escape behind the apartment of one of the