Beauty’s a stretch.

Luke hands one mug up to Maggie, who’s seated on the top rung of a ladder, crooning with Bing about a white Christmas and stringing unlit bulbs around the highest branches. He holds the other one out toward me, but I shake my head. Hot chocolate is not my drink of choice with Szechuan shrimp. Luke shrugs and inhales half of it in one swallow.

Maggie stops crooning long enough to take a gulp from her mug. She comes up with a whipped-cream mustache. “Check out your bedroom,” she says. “We’ve got a surprise for you.”

These days, surprises make me nervous. I head for the bedroom door with Luke on my heels, Maggie scrambling down the ladder to follow. There’s a faint glow in the darkened room, the kind thrown by the last embers burning in a fireplace.

My stomach knots again. I don’t have a fireplace.

Danny Boy’s bed, normally in Luke’s room, is here instead. A wicker oval lined with an old pad and worn blankets, it’s pressed against the wall beside my bed. And a night-light-one I haven’t seen since Luke was a toddler-is plugged in above it. A yellow, giddy dish dashes over the outlet with an equally enthusiastic spoon.

Danny Boy isn’t in his bed, though. He’s curled on the braided rug beside it, his eyes alert and focused on a small, dark-brown bundle inside. His tail thumps to greet us, but his steady gaze doesn’t move. The bundle lifts its head and opens moist, chocolate-colored eyes. A puppy.

Maggie bends and scoops up the small dog. “We found him in the woods,” she says. “Someone must have dropped him off at the edge of the highway, and he wandered into the woods, away from the traffic. He was scampering around from tree to tree, all alone, whimpering.”

“We couldn’t just leave him there,” Luke adds. “He’d have frozen.”

More likely he’d have been a coyote’s dinner. Better keep that thought to myself.

“We named him Charles,” Maggie says, scratching the puppy’s floppy ears.

Charles? A mental picture of the Prince of Wales pops into my head, uninvited.

“He looks like a Charles, don’t you think?” Maggie hands the prince’s namesake to me.

Charles looks up, as if awaiting my opinion of his christening. He drops his lower jaw, and his long tongue falls over one side of it. He looks like he’s smiling. And he’s far more charming than the prince.

“He does,” I agree. “He looks like a Charles.”

“Danny Boy has been taking care of him since we got home,” Maggie says, bending again to pat the old dog. “Like a mother hen.”

This news is somewhat surprising. “Maggie, Danny Boy is-well-he’s a boy.”

“I don’t care,” she says. “He’s been acting like a mother hen.”

Charles raises his face toward mine, his smile widening, confirming Maggie’s account of Danny Boy’s maternal attentions.

“Watch out,” Luke warns. “He’s got a wicked case of dog breath.”

“He’s a dog,” I tell him. “He’s supposed to have dog breath.”

“Anyway,” Maggie says, “we thought Charles should sleep with Danny Boy, but not upstairs. Charles can’t handle the steps yet.”

I examine the warm bundle in my arms. He has sizable paws. He’ll handle the steps in no time.

“So we moved them in here,” Maggie continues. “But it’s temporary. When I go home, Charles can live with Mom and me.”

Charles smiles again. He approves.

Maggie’s face brightens and her eyebrows arch, an idea dawning. “And Luke and Danny Boy can visit.”

Danny Boy’s ears perk up and his tail thumps the floor again at the mention of his name. He doesn’t realize he’s a mere pawn in this plan.

“I was never allowed to have a pet before,” Maggie says. “Howard hates animals. But now”-she shrugs, reaching over to scratch Charles’s ears-“I can.”

Howard Davis for Charles. A good trade if ever there was one. I bite my tongue.

Maggie and Luke head back to their tree trimming, and Danny Boy follows, leaving Charles and me to get acquainted. I sink into the old rocker at my bedside and nestle Charles, still smiling, in my lap. In the space of three days, we’ve added a teenager and a dog to the household. Maybe it’s time to build an addition.

By the time Buck’s trial was a week away, I had almost convinced myself that my own misgivings about the temporary insanity plea were irrelevant. The only meaningful thoughts on the matter, I told myself, are those of the experts: members of the medical and psychiatric community. Surely, I thought, Mr. Justice Paxson would agree.

He didn’t.

Physicians, especially those having charge of the insane, generally, it would seem, have come to the conclusion that all wicked men are mad, and many of the judges have so far fallen into the same error as to render it possible for any man to escape the penalty which the law affixes to crime.

We do not intend to be understood as expressing the opinion that in some instances human beings are not afflicted with a homicidal mania, but we do intend to say that a defense consisting exclusively of this species of insanity has frequently been made the means by which a notorious offender has escaped punishment.

One thing seemed certain the night I read those words. Harry should handle the experts.

Thursday, December 23

The judge is missing. Buck Hammond is seated and the attorneys are ready. Today’s witnesses are present and the press is hyperactive. The jurors aren’t here yet, though. There’s no judge to call for them.

Joey Kelsey, the newly hired bailiff, is antsy. He was just getting comfortable with the morning routine; he doesn’t like this wrinkle. He’s consulted his cheat sheet more than once, rehearsing, I guess. But it’s almost nine-thirty, and the bench is empty.

Stanley is agitated. He must have arrived later than usual this morning; his hair is still wet from his morning shower. Even so, he beat Harry and me to the courtroom. And he checked his watch when we arrived.

The crowd in the gallery has grown impatient and noisy. Harry and I are seated at the defense table, leaning back in our chairs and laughing. Stanley fires an admonishing stare in our direction, mouthing “you people” before averting his eyes. It seems J. Stanley Edgarton the Third disapproves of our lack of decorum.

But Harry and I have good reason to laugh. We know where Judge Leon Long is. It’s Thursday morning before Christmas. He’s in traffic court, ripping up parking tickets, bestowing his annual gift upon the citizens of Barnstable County. And Geraldine, no doubt, is enduring the festivities. Too bad Stanley couldn’t join them.

Stanley did, though, receive a small surprise of his own this morning. When Harry and I set up at the defense table, Stanley was visibly flustered. He informed us that he had arrived early, though not as early as usual, and had found the courtroom dark, as it always is when he arrives. But when he flipped the switch that lights the old courtroom’s four ornate chandeliers, he found Nicky Patterson already seated on the front bench. He’d been waiting in the darkness.

Stanley apparently didn’t like the idea that someone beat him to the courtroom-even someone not involved in his case. “He made himself right at home,” Stanley complained. “You’d think he owned the place.”

I wondered who Stanley thinks does own the place.

“It’s okay,” Harry consoled him. “He doesn’t look like he’s having a good time.”

And he doesn’t. Nicky is still seated on the front bench, alternately biting his nails and pulling an envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket, checking its contents. The Kydd isn’t here yet, and it’s clear from the darting of Nicky’s eyes-from the clock to the back doors to the clock again-that he doesn’t want to face Judge Leon Long alone. Whatever he’s got in that envelope, it isn’t enough.