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said.
    That had been her single heroic moment. Even now she looked back on it with pride. It made up, she thought, for all the awful things, the headlines that had brought her to tears ( SLAIN HEIRESS'S FATHER GRIM AS UGLY DUCKLING SISTER TESTIFIES ), the terrifying chases by the camera crews as they tried to outrun her to her car. The savage unsigned letters, the ghoulish stories in the national newsprint weeklies, the lurid ones about Jared and Suzie and herself, the one which speculated that she was the killer and Jared was sacrificing himself to save her from prison—even these, somehow, seemed balanced off by that time she'd stood up to Robinson.
    It had been a turning point. Her father had acknowledged it. "You're doing good, kiddo," he told her. "I still think that boy's guilty as hell but I like the way you handled yourself today."
    She hated the crowds, the stares, the flashbulbs popping in her eyes, the hyped-up press reports that played upon the wealth and status of her family, the sordid gossip about a "deal"—her testimony in return for Schrader's promise not to expose Susan Berring's "nymphomania."
    It was one of those cases, people agreed, the ones that catch the country's imagination every several years. "A fancy- schmancy murder trial," Schrader called it, though to her it seemed more like a carnival in which she played the geek. People were fascinated by her position: sister of the victim acting as witness for the boy who everyone was certain had stabbed Suzie with the shears.
    "Does defense counsel really expect us to believe," asked Robinson in his summation, "that the defendant, having engaged in numerous sexual acts with Susan Berring , and then heavily drugged, asleep out on the diving board, suddenly was awakened by her cries for help, swam to the poolhouse , burst in upon an 'intruder' in the act of stabbing her, and then simply stood there while this 'intruder' blinded him with a flashlight, threw him to the floor, and then just" —he flung out his hands—"disappeared? Does he expect us to believe this corny intruder-with-the-flashlight story even though the police found no trace of any 'intruder'—not a footprint, a fingerprint, a sign of a break-in, any sign at all—and when the defendant was himself seen by at least five other people stumbling out of the murder room with the murder weapon in his hand?
    "No, Mr. Schrader wouldn't dare ask us to believe a word of this if it weren't for the so-called 'corroborating testimony' of Penny Berring . It's her testimony that's at the crux of this case. The question is: Can we believe Penny Berring ? I submit that there are at least five good reasons why we cannot."
    Had there really been five? She couldn't remember now. She could only remember how she shuddered as Robinson strove to show how the lonely, unattractive sister who lived pathetically in a world of imaginary characters out of books had finally managed to catch herself a boyfriend, only to have her sister steal him away.
    "And what a boyfriend," Robinson said, "a slick, good-looking, clever actor who'd taken a summer job up here to, as he put it to Penny, 'hone my actor's craft.' He told her he'd acted in films, but he didn't mention what kind—disgusting, degenerate hard-core smut which I haven't been allowed to show—"
    "Objection!" Schrader stood up, the tufts of gray hair on either side of his head quivering with fury. "Mr. Robinson's trying to enflame—"
    As she watched and listened she pretended she was an observer, outside the case rather than at its core. It was the only way she knew to distance herself, keep from crying out.
    Good characters, she thought, a classic confrontation of personalities and styles. Robinson, young and tough, playing the sarcastic brute. Schrader, subtle and urbane, the veteran warrior reveling in a hopeless cause. The judge seemed made of granite, the very personification of the State of Maine. The grim father. The opaque