Trial by Headline

Three weeks later we moved into an apartment on the fourth floor of a building I had chosen for its lack of a lobby.

It was a plain brick walk-up on a street of plain brick walk-ups, in a part of the city where nobody had a reason to look at anybody. Dunleavy had found it. The landlord was a retired bailiff who owed him a favor and asked no questions. There were two bedrooms and a kitchen with a window onto an alley, and a radiator that clanked, and a view of a fire escape. I paid the first month in cash. I carried our six boxes up the stairs myself, one at a time, with my wrists still tender and the rib-bruise on my side flaring at every landing, and I thought, with a kind of grim triumph: no one will find us here.

They found us on the ninth day.

I should say how it started, because it started small. It started with a woman at the grocery store.

I was in the cereal aisle with a basket on my arm, reading a label, and a woman with a stroller stopped beside me and stared. She was perhaps thirty. She had a pleasant tired face and a ponytail. I smiled at her, as one does. She did not smile back. She leaned toward me, with a kind of reverent, appalled intensity, and said in a whisper, "You're her mother."

I put down the box.

"I'm sorry?"

"You're the mother. From the news." Her eyes were wet. "I wanted to say. God bless you. And her. She's so brave. Is she—" She hesitated. "Is it true what they say? That she came back?"

I didn't know what she meant. I said so. She looked at me with such pity, such shining, avid, tender pity, and said gently, "Oh, honey. You haven't seen it, have you?"

…

I saw it that night.

I sat at the kitchen table in the dark, with my laptop open and a cold cup of tea at my elbow, and I read it all. I read for four hours. It was one long scroll of strangers' voices, a river of them, rising and falling, and all of them said the same thing, in different words, as a congregation says a creed.

It had started in a courtroom.

I had known there would be a hearing. Whitcomb had warned me. On the fifth day after the story broke, a lawyer for Desmond Voss, who had been introduced to the court under the name of Raymond Pruitt, because it was the only one anyone could prove, had filed a motion to suppress. It ran to forty-one pages. It was beautifully written. It argued that the film, the list, the tape, and every document derived from them had been tainted by premature public disclosure, that the prosecution had poisoned the well, that no impartial jury could now be seated in the state of Ohio.

And on page twenty-three, in a footnote, it cited an affidavit.

I read the footnote five times. It was a dry little paragraph in eight-point type. It said that a witness for the prosecution, a minor child, aged thirteen, had made statements to the police concerning her purported prior death by smoke inhalation in an apartment fire, and her subsequent return to life, and that her testimony, therefore, was of doubtful reliability.

That was all.

The footnote was meant to destroy her. It was meant to say: look at what they're relying on. A child who believes she came back from the dead. It was a lawyer's trick, and a good one. It had been written by a man who billed nine hundred dollars an hour and had never met June.

And a clerk had put it on the internet.

…

The girl who came back.

That was what they called her.

I scrolled. I scrolled until my eyes burned. There was a hashtag. There were three. There was a thread, forty thousand comments long, in which a thousand people argued about whether it was real. There were videos, narrated by young men in dim bedrooms, with dramatic music, tracing her history from a hospital record. There was a documentary teaser, three days old, made by someone I did not know, with a picture of June on the thumbnail: her school photo, last September, her hair in a ponytail, her small serious face turned to the camera.

SHE DIED. SHE CAME BACK. SHE BROUGHT DOWN A CONSPIRACY.

God sent this child, wrote a woman in Tulsa.

It's a hoax, wrote a man in Phoenix. Munchausen by proxy. Look at the mother.

Prayers for the little angel!!

Is she a witch?

I think she's a prophet.

Asking for a friend: does she do readings?

I shut the laptop.

I sat in the dark, with my hands on the lid, and listened to the radiator clank, and my heart beat in my ears like a drum. In the next room my daughter was sleeping. She had gone to bed at nine without a word. She had come home from school at four with her hood up and her head down and gone straight to her room, and when I knocked she'd said, through the door, in a quiet flat voice, "I'm fine, Mom."

I hadn't asked what had happened. I had not, God forgive me, wanted to know.

…

I knew the next morning.

Dunleavy called at seven. He did not say hello. He said, "Have you got the television on?" and I said no, and he said, "Put it on. Channel 3," and there she was.

She was walking up the front steps of Lincoln Middle School, with a blue backpack and her head bent, in the pale slant of morning, between two lines of people. They had come out of nowhere. Vans, a dozen cars, a boy on a scooter with a phone held out in front of him like a lantern. A girl in a school sweater had come running up and was shoving something into June's hand. A man in a gray coat, with the long lens of a camera, walked backward, snapping, snapping. A woman in a green parka had hold of her sleeve.

"June! June! Can you tell us what it was like?"

"June, is it true you saw the man's face?"

"June! June, over here! One for the church!"

I watched my daughter put out her hand and push the woman's off her sleeve, politely, as you would flick away a leaf. I watched her say something. I could not hear it. She did not run. She walked up the steps in the middle of the shouting, a slight straight figure in a hooded coat, and a security guard I had never seen opened the door, and she went in, and it shut.

The anchor said, "We'll be right back."

I sat there on the edge of the couch for a long time.

…

"The leak," said Carla Whitcomb, "is damaging the case."

We were in her office. It was a small corner room on the eleventh floor of the federal building, with a view of a parking structure and a smell of old carpet. She sat behind a desk heaped with banker's boxes. Her glasses were on a chain round her neck. In the three weeks since the annex she seemed to have shrunk. She had never been large, but she was smaller now, and grayer, and the sharp quick humorous look had gone out of her eyes, leaving only the sharpness.

"Tell me," I said.

"Voss's lawyer is very good." She rubbed her forehead. "He's not a fool. He knows he can't win on the facts. So he's going to win on the process. Every article, every broadcast, every viral video is a gift. He'll put them in a binder and walk it into court. Your honor, how can my client receive a fair trial? Look at what the public has been told."

"We told the truth."

"We did." She said it gently. "That doesn't make it admissible."

"Ashby's confessed."

"Ashby's confessed to everything. He's in a cell, crying, begging to be punished. He will plead to every count." A pause. "But Ashby is the clerk. Ashby's the little man. If Voss walks, if Voss is convicted of a single misdemeanor, a trespass, a weapon, because the rest of it's been thrown out, then it's the clerks who go to prison and the man who made them goes home."

"And Dreyer?"

"Dreyer's cooperating. He'll testify. He'd testify to anything." She looked at me. "But a cooperating witness is a witness who's been offered a deal, and a defense lawyer will ask the jury whether they want to convict a man on the word of a coward in a deal."

I said nothing.

"I want you to understand," said Whitcomb, "that I don't blame you. I told you it was a thing you could do only once. You did it. I think you did it for the right reasons, and I think on a certain kind of day, I'd have done the same." She turned a pencil over in her fingers. "But you asked me to be honest. It was a mistake."

…

I rode the bus home.

I didn't want to be seen. I sat in the back with my face against the glass and my coat buttoned to the chin, watching the gray streets slide by. A woman across the aisle was reading a newspaper. I could see the front page over her arm. It was a photograph, very large. It showed a girl in a hooded coat, ascending the steps of a school, with her face turned a quarter toward the camera and her eyes half shut against the flash.

THE CHILD WHO CAME BACK.

I looked away.

I was right, I thought.

I turned the idea over, carefully, like a stone I did not want to cut myself on. I had been right in principle. I'd been right that silence was the enemy. I'd been right that the thing could not be hidden again, that the thirteen had a claim to the truth, and that the system had earned its exposure. I could not unsay a word of that. I would have said it all again.

And I was wrong about the people.

That was what I couldn't get past. I had thought of them as a question. I had thought of them as a principle, a cause, an injustice that cried out. I had thought of the truth as a light, and the light as a kindness. I had not thought, not for one moment, of Camille Reyes in her kitchen in Akron with the phone ringing. I had not thought of a boy in a paper hat. I had not thought of a girl of thirteen on a flight of school steps.

I never asked them.

I put my forehead against the glass.

It was theirs to decide, and I decided it.

…

I woke at 3:07.

I didn't know why. I lay in the dark on my back, staring at the ceiling, with my heart pounding and the sheets damp with sweat. The radiator was silent. The apartment was quiet. Through the thin wall I could hear June's breathing, slow and shallow, and the faint creak of the bed as she turned.

The clock on the nightstand said 3:07.

It's nothing, I thought. It's June's hour, that's all. It's the habit. I've caught it from her.

I lay still and counted. I got to twenty.

Then, from the front of the apartment, from the hall, came a sound.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

It was three raps on the door, evenly spaced, quite soft. It was a polite sound, a careful, considerate sound. The knock of someone who did not wish to wake the neighbors. It was not three short and one long. It was only three. It stopped. It did not repeat.

I sat up.

I slid out of bed without a sound. I took my robe from the hook and the poker from the radiator and went barefoot down the dark hall with my heart in my throat. The floorboards were cold. At the end of the hall, the front door was a pale slab in the gloom with a thread of yellow light under it from the corridor lamp.

I put my eye to the peephole.

A man stood in the hall. He was thirtyish, rumpled, bearded, in a puffy winter coat, with a camera bag over one shoulder. He was holding a small digital recorder up against the door, and in his other hand, I saw, there was a bunch of drooping yellow carnations in a paper cone.

He was smiling the shy, nervous, apologetic smile of a young man who has come a long way to knock on a door that will not want to open.

"Ms. Ostrander?" he whispered. "I know it's late. I'm so sorry. I just want to ask June one question."