again.
“…in court that gets criminals…”
“…out of jail.”
She was too high to let go of the chains to put her hands over her ears.
“Shut up, Jeff!” She hollered so loud it made her throat sting.
“It’s the truth,” Jeff yelled right back.
Mary Jane looked the other way when he passed. “I asked my dad,” he said.
She heard his words anyway. The girls she wished were her friends were playing four square on the blacktop. She could hear them calling to each other. And laughing.
“Then your dad lies,” Mary Jane screamed, just fed up with…everything. Human beings were just too hard to know. Putting her feet down in the dirt, she took the initial bump from fast to slow with only a small jerk at the back of her neck.
Jeff was slowing, too. Oh, no. If he was going to follow her around and say stuff that made her mad then she was going to go inside even if she wasn’t allowed to at recess. Maybe she could go to the nurse and get her temperature taken.
Mary Jane’s feet slid in the dirt, sending up a cloud of dust onto her favorite white jeans with the little blue butterflies stitched all over them. She wouldn’t tell the nurse she was sick, because she wasn’t. But she could ask to have her temperature taken.
And if that didn’t work, maybe she’d have to skin her knee on the blacktop. That had gotten her out of recess once at her other school before this one.
“Mary Jane’s mother is a liar!” the mean skinny freckle-faced boy said as they both came to a stop.
Mary Jane stood up, her face hot. “My mother does not lie!” She screamed even though she was stopped now.
“Does too!”
“Does not!”
“Does too!”
“You take that back, Jeff Turner.”
“She lies and lets criminals go free and then they hurt people.”
“Take that back!”
“No way,” the boy said, grinning in a really mean way that made Mary Jane want to hit him in the face. “Your mother lies!”
Stamping her foot, her tennis shoe kicking up more dust, Mary Jane gritted her teeth. “She does not lie.” She had to get away from him. She was afraid she was going to cry.
Because she knew her mother didn’t lie. Ever. But she was very scared there was something her mother wasn’t telling her. Something big and important and bad. She’d been acting weird for days and then got that call the morning before, during breakfast, and then she was even weirder last night.
“She does, and so do you!” Jeff said, putting his face so close to hers, some of his spit landed on her chin.
“Gross! Get away from me,” she hollered at him, pushing at his shoulder.
Jeff’s hand flew out, pushing back. Hard. Mary Jane landed on her bottom, hands out behind her. Jeff walked past just leaving her there, and Mary Jane kicked him. She didn’t mean to. But he was mean, and too close and he was just going to get away with saying all those horrible things.
When he turned around and kicked her back, she grabbed his foot and he fell.
And that was when Mrs. Thacker came out and saw them.
Mary Jane froze, her shin, where Jeff had kicked her, stinging. Waiting in fear, she watched her teacher approach. She was going to be sent to Mrs. Cummings again. Maybe even get kicked out of school. And all she’d wanted to do was swing and have recess be over so she didn’t have to watch those girls play four square.
All she ever wanted to do was be good. So why was she always in so much trouble?
DRESSED IN HER red power suit, as Mary Jane had called it ever since hearing her mother say it one time on the phone to Marcie, Juliet showed up at the California Superior Court Building in San Diego at eight-twenty Friday morning. She’d hoped to be there sooner but had had another meeting with the intimidating Mrs. Cummings.
Surprisingly enough, this visit had not been so one-sided. Mr. Jeffrey Turner had been made to apologize not only to Mary Jane for pushing her down, but to Juliet for the slur on her good name.
And Juliet felt sick. Her once joyful, easygoing daughter had been in a fight at school with a boy. The fact that the boy had been slandering Juliet was no explanation. Mary Jane had always been gifted with an ability to let things slide off her too-skinny shoulders.
The child was holding far too much tension inside, if something as unimportant as an obviously inaccurate slur against her mother could trigger such uncontrollable behavior.
“Hi.” Surprising how he could express such relief with one word. Or maybe it was the look in Blake’s eyes as he approached her in the foyer outside their courtroom that told the story.
“Good. Brown suit, beige shirt, sedate tie, just like I asked,” she said, looking him over from a purely professional standpoint. Brown was an earth color, and instilled feelings of dependability and solidity.
“I shined my shoes, too,” he said, his attempt at a grin falling only a little short.
“And a fine job you did,” she said, taking a breath deep enough to distance herself from the trouble with her daughter, as she stared down at the brown leather wingtips.
Blake sighed, shoved his hands in the pockets of his slacks. “I guess we should go in.”
She squeezed his elbow. “Relax, we’ll be fine. The most important thing is to appear cooperative while emanating confidence in your innocence.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. And then, with a look of quiet concern, “Is there a reason why, if you’re so certain this will go well, you’re so tense yourself? This has to be all in a day’s work for you.”
She was going to have to do better than this. The first day and already he was reading things she didn’t want him to see. “Just came from arguing another case with another judge—so to speak.”
He frowned. “You’ve already been in court this morning?”
“No,” Juliet guided them toward the heavy wooden door of the courtroom. “I was in her office.”
Blake held the door for her, allowing Juliet to enter before him. She passed beneath his arm, close enough to feel the heat from his body, and in that second, the worry of the morning settled into something more manageable.
Which worried Juliet. A lot.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BLAKE TOOK IN the courtroom with one glance. It was smaller than he’d expected. Or perhaps just too close for him.
She’d told him there’d be anywhere from thirty to ninety people—defendants,
