“Yes, very well. I knew her family.”
“But you did not know her as a grown woman?”
“No. I knew her mother. I saw Ruth occasionally.”
“Well, you couldn’t imagine Felicity ever growing up to hurt anyone. Could you have imagined the girl you knew growing up to become a stripper? Or a sex worker?”
“Of course not!” said the witness. “That would be impossible.”
“And yet,” said the prosecutor, as if wiping steam from amirror so that it would be possible to see the clearest reflection, “that is exactly what Felicity grew up to be. There’s no contesting that. So, you cannot say for certain that she wouldn’t also grow up to be someone capable of doing someone harm, isn’t that true?”
Sam shook his head and raked his fingers through his hair, at first seeming about to speak but nearly visibly hauling that impulse down, like a kite by the tail.
“I guess I can’t say for sure,” Marta Vincent admitted.
The same scenario was set forth with Felicity’s faculty adviser, but what could it possibly signify? Murder was a predictable destiny for no ordinary middle-class citizen. I supposed that it must be said, but to what end? It was not going to convert anyone. Something had provoked a change in Felicity. I thought back to my friend Ross’s explanation of why people changed for the worse.
This was a trial that was serious, Angela Damiano would later say, but not complicated. There were not very many moving parts. I thought of it like removing an appendix, which could either be a relatively quick and effective operation or a mortal shit show. Both lawyers were excellent and prepared. The witnesses gave witness. All they could do was all they could do. As the final day approached, no one could call it.
Sally Zankow said, “This jury is going to have a lot to talk about. Get your popcorn. Prepare to camp out, folks.”
Sam’s final words with them helped me see why people in previous generations called a lawyer a “pleader.” He wasn’t simply practicing the lawyer’s art; he was truly begging the jury.
“Now you know what I know about these circumstances, and maybe you know everything that anyone knows—except the killer of course. What you have heard over the course of this trial are two possible scenarios. One didn’t happen. Onedid. What did happen was that a young woman who was desperate found the dead body of a man who had been her client, perhaps her friend, and she panicked. She thought she would be blamed. Maybe someone wanted her to be blamed. If Felicity would or could answer these questions, we would all have an easier time. What does it suggest to you, that she will not answer those questions? It suggests to me that she is either in peril for her own life or covering up for someone else. It is frustrating. It is maddening. But is it the same as being guilty of first-degree intentional homicide? It is not.
“Ladies and gentlemen, do you have the proof you need to find Felicity Wild guilty of murder? You know the answer. Should she go to prison for two life terms based on what you have heard? You know the answer to that question. Please. Listen to your conscience. Find the defendant, Felicity Claire Copeland Wild, innocent.”
The next morning, looking like a much older man, a man who moved slower, like a man whose sleep had been scarce and shallow, Israel Ronson rose from his chair. “Here we are. No matter how this case ends, and I think I know how it will end, you will never forget this event.” The jurors would experience happy times, sad times, achievements, and losses. Nothing they did in the future, however, would ever be more important.
“Sam is fighting for Felicity Wild’s freedom. I am fighting for justice for two good men she killed. I must be their voice. You must be their advocates. Their deaths cannot go unpunished. If Wild finds herself here today, it is because she put herself here. The conditions for her arrest were met fairly. The allegations were proven. She had a fair trial.
“All kinds of things have been said to confuse you. Yes, of course the families of Mr. Church and Mr. Gardener also benefited financially from their deaths. Do you believe that these men’sfamily members killed them? Or is this just another made-up obstacle?” Errors occurred, Ronson said. People are not always perfect. These things matter but do not change the truth.
“We know why,” he said. “We know when. We know who.
“There is a single question. Did Felicity Wild kill Cary Church and Emil Gardener? There is a single right answer. Yes, she did. She took their lives and now you must take her freedom. I, too, would rather Miss Wild go free than to make a terrible mistake. But in this case, the grave and terrible mistake would be to let her go free. That mistake would haunt you for the rest of your life.
“She did this. She was caught. She must pay. We ask you to be brave and return a verdict of guilty.”
The judge gave her instructions. The jury filed out. All of us filed out too. I felt the way you feel when you exit a movie theater and it’s still daylight and there is a sort of guilty urgency about time whiled away that could have been better spent.
My mother wanted a nap. She wanted to call home and talk to my father, a reminder that not all the world was bleak and inexpertly balanced. Claire said she’d go to her bed-and-breakfast and do some reading, and they would meet later for a meal.
I couldn’t sit still. I decided to drive to a place Felicity once told me about, to the Wisconsin River below the hydroelectric dam in Prairie du Sac, where eagles dipped and soared.
Not long before we broke up, I’d asked Sam, if Felicity didn’t do it, who did? I remembered the conversation now, reliving, possibly because of the poignant pain of it, how interesting it had been just to talk to Sam.
He and his mother had talked about this often. She thought perhaps it was Ruth, a born-again Christian who lost her marbles and did this to free Felicity from sin. At the time, I’d scoffed. If Sam had ever met Ruth, he’d have known that nothing could have been further from the truth.
The theory, he went on, was that then she went on the lam because she thought the police would be after her. They’d given up on that idea as a little too convenient. The other top candidate was Jack, out of jealousy, but why then when this had been going on for a long time? Maybe Cary killed Emil and then himself. But the timing was wrong: Those insurance policies had been around for nearly a year.
Sam reached for my hand. “But none of those felt right. Felicity quit at the strip club long before any of this. Cary and Emil knew that she didn’t have an exclusive relationship with either of them. They might indeed have been jealous, but why would it all detonate during Christmas break? These were family men. It didn’t compute.”
Sam’s personal theory was that Felicity crossed somebody who was scary or crazy. He said he believed that it was some “nutter” who had a fantasy relationship with a woman he’d spoken to once, at a grocery store, or at a strip club. Both of us could see the merit of the other possibility: If Felicity wouldn’t talk about it, it was because she was scared. Somebody threatened to kill her if she told—or her little brothers, or Ruth. Felicity knew that the likelihood of her being acquitted was good; Sam was shocked that she was even charged based on what they had, which was not much more than that she knew both men well. So, while she probably wouldn’t go to prison, she would rather have faced prison, seven or eight years of her life before she could even apply for parole, than risk talking about whoever she believed was really responsible. That was what Sam sometimes believed. Other times, he thought she just genuinely had no idea.
I sat on a stone bench near the bridge watching the huge eagles ride the air, their great wings like shaggy old coats. I ate the ridiculously thick cheese-and-brown-bread sandwich I’d bought at one of Wisconsin’s ubiquitous roadside cheese “cottages,” along with two bags of taco chips.
Since Sam and I had broken up, I’d been drowning my sorrows in taco chips. Nell said I reminded her of our dad, who, when the bag got close to empty, would tip his head back and funnel chips into his open mouth. “Dad likes to get the chips out of the way,” Nell would invariably say. I’d finally told Nell about what happened with me and Sam, pretending that he was just one of those men who was solitary by nature. She’d never met him but was as sympathetic as a good sister should be, her only qualm that she might have been able to wangle an internship from his firm. Thinking about my father and his chips made me long for him. I wished Patrick were here. I wasn’t sure why. I wanted my dad.
