When we got the footage of Buck Hammond from the local news station, Harry moved his television and VCR out of his apartment and into the conference room. The next day, the Kydd stocked us with video games. That wasn’t what Harry had in mind, of course. But we made space on a library shelf anyway.

The Kydd and Maggie are engrossed in animated warfare when I get back to the office at ten-thirty. Their eyes are glued to the TV screen, where flashing multicolored lights erupt in the center of the darkened conference room.

Harry is slumped in a chair behind them, watching the action, feet up on the pine conference table and hands behind his head. His baffled expression suggests he might as well be reading hieroglyphics.

“One of you needs to surrender,” I tell them. “Maggie and I have to go.”

The Kydd looks up from his controller, but Maggie doesn’t. “Hah!” she shouts as the sounds of explosions fill the room. “You’re dead!”

“Hey, no fair,” the Kydd whines, his Southern drawl thicker than usual. He stares first at Maggie, then at me. He looks like an eight-year-old who wants his mom to intervene.

“War is an ugly thing,” I tell him.

Maggie dons her little denim jacket, pats the Kydd on the shoulder, and heads out into the winter night. “Rematch tomorrow,” she calls from the doorway, “if you’re not too scared.”

The Kydd frowns at her and shuts down the machine. I head out behind Maggie, Harry on my heels.

“How’d it go?” he asks.

“She says she didn’t do it.”

“Maybe she didn’t.”

“Maybe. I can’t think about it anymore tonight. I need some sleep. Arraignment’s tomorrow morning, before Buck’s trial.”

Harry stops in the shadows on the porch and pulls me toward him, his big arms pressing me close. “Okay,” he says, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

His kiss is soft and long. I’m warmer than I’ve been all day and I’d just as soon not move, but I pull myself away. “My houseguest is waiting.”

Harry laughs. “Good luck with that one,” he says.

She’s already seated in the Thunderbird, her eyes and hoop earrings reflecting the glow from the street lamp. “What should I call you?” she asks as soon as I join her. I realize she hasn’t called me anything all day.

“Marty.”

“Okay. Thanks for doing this, Marty.”

“No problem.”

“I know what would happen if you didn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“Social Services,” she says. “If you didn’t let me stay with you, I’d have to go to Social Services.”

She’s a worldly little thing. “How do you know about Social Services?”

“Howard,” she says. “He’s always threatening to call Social Services, have them come get me.”

She leans toward me, poised to share a secret. “And he tells me about all the terrible things that happen to teenage girls at Social Services.”

Someone should have slapped Howard Davis before he died.

“He’s a real bully, that Howard,” Maggie adds.

Her use of the present tense concerns me. “Maggie, you realize Howard’s dead, don’t you?”

She sits back again, stares at the glove compartment. “Yeah,” she says, “I got that.”

“And you understand your mom is charged with killing him?”

“Yeah,” she repeats. “I got that, too. But she didn’t. I was there. He beat her up, but all she did was run away. She didn’t do anything to him.”

The darkness swallows Maggie’s features as we leave the driveway. “You’ll get her out, won’t you?” she whispers.

“I’ll do everything I can, Maggie, but your mom’s not coming home anytime soon. You need to know that.”

She’s silent.

“It’s been a hard day, Maggie. Tomorrow we’ll talk about the details. For now, just be aware that this process will take months, at best. And it’s not going to be easy. You and your mom are in for some tough times.”

“That’s not how I see it,” she says.

“What?” Maybe I misunderstood. I come to a stop at Main Street’s only traffic light and turn toward her. She meets my eyes with a steady gaze, her tears on the verge of spilling.

“Howard Davis beat my mom whenever he felt like it,” she spits. “On Mondays we knew it was coming. If he didn’t get her before work, he’d get her after.”

Streams of water pour down her face. “Other times it would happen if he had a lousy day in court, or if traffic was bad, or if dinner wasn’t ready when he wanted it.”

She wipes her face with her denim sleeve. “My mom’s in jail and that’s awful. But Howard won’t ever hit her again. So the way I see it, the toughest times are over.”

The light’s green. I face front again but it takes a few moments for my boot to find the gas pedal. I wonder if this young girl is happy about the murder; happy that her mother’s abuser is dead.

Like a mind reader, she answers my unvoiced question. “I’m sorry Howard got killed,” she says. “But I’m not sorry that we’ll never see him again.”

Janet is one law librarian who loves to bend the rules. When I headed toward the library’s copying machine with Mr. Justice Paxson’s lengthy decision, she hurried across the room to stop me. “Take it home,” she said, pointing to the dilapidated book in my hands.

“Are you sure?” I asked. Casebooks aren’t normally available to take home, and that particular casebook looked like it might not survive the trip.

“Yes,” she insisted. “You should read from the old parchment, not a sanitized copy on cheap paper.”

She was right, of course. I pulled the book from my briefcase late that night and centered it in the small circle of light on the desk in my bedroom. The deterioration of the volume lent authority-wisdom, even-to the words within it. And I was desperate for wisdom, desperate to understand, and believe in, the only viable defense the law allows to Buck Hammond.

When I opened to Janet’s bookmark, my eyes fell at once-as if beckoned-on a question posed in the text. It was followed by what would prove to be the first of many attempts by Mr. Justice Paxson to answer it.

What, then, is that form of disease, denominated homicidal mania, which will excuse one for having committed a murder?

Chief Justice Gibson calls it that unseen ligament pressing on the mind and drawing it to consequences which it sees but cannot avoid, and placing it under a coercion which, while its results are clearly perceived, is incapable of resistance-an irresistible inclination to kill.

An irresistible inclination to kill. I found this answer inadequate, unsettling even, and I was disappointed. Because the question, penned more than a century ago by a man long dead and buried, was precisely mine.

Tuesday, December 21

Maggie Baker is a freshman at Chatham High School. My son, Luke, is a senior and a starting member of the varsity basketball team. When Maggie and I got to the cottage it was close to eleven o’clock, and Luke apparently had abandoned all hope of his mother coming home to make dinner. He was outside paying the pizza delivery boy.

Maggie all but fainted. “That’s your son?” She looked stunned.

“That’s him.”

“Your son is Luke Ellis?”

“Last time I checked.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she snapped, fixing her hair in the rearview mirror. When she tore her eyes from the mirror, she fired an exasperated glance in my direction. She was genuinely annoyed. I tried not to laugh.

The next hour was comical. Luke was his usual affable self. He didn’t ask why Maggie was with us; he acted as if we’d been expecting her. He shared his pepperoni pizza as well as his senior-year wisdom. He filled Maggie in on precious details about the upperclassmen in general, the basketball players in particular. She hung on every word.

Heavy winds kept the cottage chilly in spite of a blazing fire in the woodstove. I gave Maggie a pair of baggy flannel pajamas and an old fisherman’s knit sweater. She looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. I made a mental note to arrange to pick up her clothes from Bayview Road.