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jurors. The eager, salivating representatives of the press. The porn-star defendant and his ally, the Ugly Duckling Sister. The case had everything—money, drama, sex.
    "Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is the sister, Penny Berring , whose motives we must suspect. She claims she saw the elusive 'intruder' though it was the middle of the night, the fog was thick, and she was dozing beside a window a hundred-fifty feet away. She claims she saw a 'flashlight beam' though no flashlight was ever found. She tells us she just 'happened' to be watching at the exact moment when the 'intruder' just happened to appear. What we have here is a jealous young woman, still smarting from the rejection of the defendant, who now comes forward with a farfetched story in an hysterical attempt to win him back. But what is so sick in all of this is that she does it after the vicious murder of her sister, whom she always hated, and still does hate, despite the fact that Susan Berring is now dead, carved up, slashed to pieces, no longer in a position to compete with her for paramours—"
    She found herself nodding to his rhythms. It was as if Robinson were speaking about someone else, a terrible lying envious girl who had nothing to do with her at all. She found him persuasive. She began to hate this Penny Berring , too. What sort of person was she to have done all those wicked things and then to have conspired with a homicidal fiend to tip the scales of Justice with her lies?
    But when Schrader stood up and began to talk she found him convincing, too. His rhythms were much less emotional than Robinson's, more rational and mathematical, and his phrasings were cool and precise. They suggested he had no interest in rhetoric, in anything but the truth. The Bar Harbor police, he showed, were amateurs who'd bungled their investigation and destroyed crucial evidence. A mad killer was now loose in the country while an innocent young man, whose story was fully corroborated, was being hounded by a prosecutor out for blood.
    "As for Penny Berring ," Schrader said, "contrary to what Mr. Robinson has told you, she has every reason to hate the defendant, no possible motive to help him now. But from the start she's never wavered from her story, which, it so happens, fits perfectly with his. Despite attempts to confuse her and break her down, she's been consistent about what she saw. She has emerged from a brutal cross-examination as a totally credible eyewitness who, at the very least, raises reasonable doubt about events which at first seemed so clear, but which now we see aren't clear at all."
    Which version, she wondered, would the jurors believe? She wasn't sure which she'd believe herself. As the hours went by and she waited for the verdict, she knew they were discussing her, whether she'd lied or told the truth.
    Her father waited with her. They didn't speak much, just sat together side by side. He'd come to the courthouse every day, taken the same seat in the front row as if he were daring the jury not to give him justice, defying them to refuse him his revenge. His grimness, the certainty on his face, was silent testimony. Would that stern paternal silence be more convincing than her words? There was a side of her that hoped it would, that wanted to see him satisfied.
    "You've showed a lot of class through this, kiddo," he said. "Must have gotten that from your mother's side." A couple minutes later he turned to her again. "They say 'class will out,' you know, but I haven't usually found that to be the case."
    She could find no answer for him, couldn't imagine what was in his mind. The two of them had come to Maine for the trial—her mother had been left behind in Greenwich under psychiatric care. In Maine they had been drenched in sadness. Their tragedy seemed reflected in the ruined birds' nests in the bare-limbed trees around the house, the angry brown seas of late autumn, the chilly, pallid skies.
    And they had stuck to their respective views.