“Bad cases make bad law, right?”

“Yeah. And she had the juice, her family was connected. She could have done it. That’s why we were forced to compromise.”

“How so?”

“At the time, the law held that juveniles couldn’t serve more than three years for any one crime. The other girl’s lawyer and I crafted a plea that allowed the state to give them seven years on three counts-homicide, kidnapping, and felony theft. For the baby carriage,” she added, anticipating his question. “I don’t remember the brand, but it was one of those things that was expensive because it was so light.”

“Like a laptop,” Kutchner said. “Or a cell phone. The smaller it is, the more you pay.”

Sharon nodded, annoyed at the interruption. “So they went away until they were eighteen, and the victim’s mother calmed down. Eventually.” She swirled the Baileys in her glass, watched the creamy pale brown liquid flow over the ice. “Truthfully, I’ve always thought my client would have been better off if I could have taken the case into an adult court, with a jury and the public’s full oversight.”

“How can that be?”

“She told me she was innocent. That she wasn’t there when it happened. She was with Ron-the other girl-when they took the baby, but it was a kid thing. They thought the girl had been left alone, they were trying to do the right thing. They didn’t set out to be criminals, to do something violent. Something went wrong.”

“How did-I mean-”

“Suffocation. That was another thing. The child’s death wasn’t inconsistent with SIDS. I could have argued that.”

“Isn’t that paradoxical? Arguing that your client wasn’t there, arguing that your client might have been there but the death was due to natural causes.” Daniel Kutchner was an accountant.

“A good defense doesn’t have to be consistent.”

No sound came from Daniel Kutchner’s side of the bed, except for the ice in his glass, a small swallow, a slight creak in the springs as he shifted his weight. An accountant sitting in judgment on a lawyer. Sharon decided not to mention what accountants had wrought in recent years.

“In a way, I’ve always felt Alice was sacrificed.” Sharon did not even notice she had given up the name she was usually so vigilant about protecting.

“Sacrificed?”

“There was so much…bad feeling about what happened. The victim was black, the accused girls were white. As you can see. And the media harped on the case so. People wanted to feel that something had been done. They wanted guarantees that it would never happen again. Which is impossible. Look, there are cases of young killers going back hundreds of years. And I don’t mean sociopaths, or some stupid bad seed scenario. Kids kill. To me, the amazing thing is that they don’t kill more often. Because they don’t really get it, you know? Death, I mean.”

She did not share with him her fantasy of trying Alice before a jury of her true peers, a dozen little big-eyed girls who knew what it was to make mistakes out of no larger sin than the desire to go along and get along. She imagined twelve little gamma girls-or was Alice a beta, according to the terms set out in the flurry of literature on “mean girls”-watching her solemnly as she laid out the facts, described Ronnie’s sway over her client. It would have taken such a jury less than an hour to acquit Alice.

“Except-you don’t think your client did kill.” Daniel Kutchner had leaned against the headboard, but his left leg dangled over the side of the bed, still in contact with the floor, like an actor trying to make love according to the old Hays Code. He wasn’t the type to stay overnight, which was fine with Sharon, the best of all possible worlds. As long as they didn’t rush into the night or escape into sleep immediately after sex, she didn’t care what they did.

“No, she didn’t.”

“Then why would you let her serve seven years? Why didn’t she draw less time than the other girl?”

“The evidence was…somewhat contradictory. And the girls’ statements were diametrically opposed. She said-she said. The judge who presided couldn’t see any fair way to sort it out.”

“Sounds like your client got screwed.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

The band had tried to quit at 1 A.M., but Andy-tie undone, jacket shorn-had seized the microphone and demanded that the wedding guests open their wallets and pay for another set. Nancy, filled with liquid goodwill, beamed at her husband. This was the man she had fallen in love with, boisterous and confident. The feds did not encourage such personalities, and he had to keep himself so tamped down at work that his broad shoulders had rounded a little and his head seemed to hang at times, heavy on his neck. She hoped the law, once he finished school and entered a practice, would restore some of Andy’s self back to him.

Now, dropped to one knee on the dance floor, bills clenched in his fist, he was every bit the boy she had known since junior high and loved since high school. “More,” he bellowed. “More, more, more. We will have music. And the bar will stay open. A Polish wedding can’t end this early. It would be shameful.”

Eventually the reception ended, and neither Nancy nor Andy was really in any shape to drive. But neither was anyone else, so they ambled to the Double-T Diner out on Route 40, albeit on the opposite end from New York Fried Chicken. There, her latest diet long forgotten, Nancy dragged french fries through gravy with her left hand and held on to Andy with her right. With his free hand, he flipped through the tabletop jukebox, but it was a bit of a gyp, for the restaurant’s sound system was dominated by whoever had the fastest quarter. A Bon Jovi song bounced through the night, and she couldn’t tell if it was one of their old ones or one of their new ones that sounded like one of their old ones. She could have been eighteen again, it could have been the night of her senior prom. Her brides-maid’s dress, a yellow horror, would have fit right in at the Kenwood High School prom.

Nancy was one of the few people she knew who admitted to being happy in high school. Why was that such a badge of shame for others? She didn’t see it as some Glory Days high point, but it had been fun, and she had been conscious of the fact that life wouldn’t always be fun, or easy. And it was for this very reason that she had gloried in eighteen, hadn’t wasted a minute of it. True, she had worried about her weight even then, but what she wouldn’t give to have back her teenage body. Even the low points-the brief breakups with Andy, the science classes that had almost sunk her completely-had made her appreciate the effortless fun, day in and day out.

Andy was trying to put a french fry in his coffee.

“I am so driving home,” she told him, not minding that he was wasted. He worked hard; he had earned this.

“Let’s”-it came out a little slurred, but nowhere near as bad as it might have been-“let’s drive up to Gunpowder Falls.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now. Why not now? Like we used to.”

“Like we-” Then she got it.

Within forty-five minutes, she was on top of him in the bucket seat of his Jeep Cherokee, part of her mind grateful for the room these SUVs provided, another part thinking how funny it would be if some county patrol cop came tap, tap, tapping at their window with his flashlight, then saw Nancy astride Andy, the yellow horror pushed above her hips and below her breasts, revealing the wretched strapless bra that had been digging into her all night. Andy couldn’t have gotten that off with a knife, the shape he was in.

“Evening, Officer,” she imagined herself saying, holding up her badge to the window. “I’m Homicide Detective Porter and this is Federal Agent Porter, from the local ATF field office.”

But they were left alone, so Nancy settled for the efficient, shuddering pleasures her husband provided. At the last minute, he asked if she wanted him to pull out, as he hadn’t brought anything with him, but she just held him hard inside her, shaking her head. Later, she wondered why she hadn’t minded taking the chance. Certainly it wasn’t because she was worried about the dress.