A Reasonable Doubt by Susan Sloan (free novels .txt) 📕

who had been her date for the senior prom, and with whom, on one particularly beautiful spring night, she had lost her virginity.  And there had been men in college and law school, and a few even since then, that she had been attracted to.  But nothing had ever really gone beyond the dates and the proms and the beautiful spring nights.  Somehow, none of it had managed to advance from courting to commitment.

Lily told herself it was better not to have found the one and only, only to have it end in divorce, as it had ended for Amanda after just two years.  When she married, Lily wanted it be for the rest of her life, just as it had been for her parents and as it looked like it was going to be for her sisters.

As if reading her mind, Janet looked at her questioningly.  “So, anyone interesting in your busy life these days?” she asked.

“You mean other than cop killers?” Lily replied.

“Yes,” her sister said.

“Not at the moment,” Lily told her lightly.  “But I hear there’s going to be a new suit in the prosecutor’s office, so you never know.”  It was a put-off, of course, but there actually had been talk about a new deputy prosecutor coming on board.

Whatever her intention, the exchange now had everyone’s full attention.

“Tell us more,” Karen said.  “Is he cute?  Is he single?”

“Stop,” Lily protested, as she felt herself blushing.  “I don’t know a single thing about him.  It’s just the word that’s been going around.”

“You be sure to keep us posted,” Janet said, a twinkle in her eye.

It was a special weekend, and Lily had to admit she was sorry when it was over, and time for her sisters to leave.

They sat around the dining room table on Monday morning, wolfing down Diana’s delicious pancake breakfast, and chattering on about absolutely nothing important.  Then Lily helped them pack up their belongings, drag the suitcases down from the third floor, and load their respective vans.

She got right in the middle of all the hugs and kisses and tearful goodbyes, and then she stood in the driveway, beside her father, as they waved the Ingrams off to Denver and the Cahills on their way back to Portland.

“Makes you wish they lived closer, doesn’t it?” Carson said with a sigh, knowing they wouldn’t be back again until Thanksgiving.

Lily leaned down and hugged him.  It was exactly what she was thinking.

. . .

The walls were closing in on Jason Lightfoot.  From where he sat on his metal bunk, he could see a bit of blue sky in the morning and a star or two at night, if he were lucky, but even though the jail was quite close to the foothills, he couldn’t see a mountain or a tree.  If he stood up on the bed and grasped the steel bars that covered the slit of window above his head, he could pull himself up just far enough to catch a quick glimpse of a bird flying by.  It was agony.

The headaches were agony, too.  And the feeling like he was coming right out of his skin.  The fellow the lady lawyer had sent, Greg Parker, explained it to him.  He had been poisoning his body for years, and now he was going through a forced withholding of that poison.  His whole being, both physical and mental, was screaming for alcohol in every way it knew how.  And, as Parker had told him, if he didn’t deal with it, it would kill him.

Jason wondered which was worse -- sitting in a cell for years, waiting to die at the end of a rope, or dying quick from alcohol poisoning.  He had visions of rum bottles lined up in front of him, and of him drinking until he dropped dead.  At least, he reasoned, he would be going out on his own terms.

Still, he had to admit, it wasn’t as awful as it had been in the beginning -- the first few weeks, when the shakes were so bad he couldn’t stop his teeth from chattering, and the nightmares had him literally screaming.  In that respect, he had to concede, Parker had really helped.

Much to Buzz Crandall’s dismay, Lily was able to make special arrangements for her client.  She got permission for Jason to have a cell phone, so he could call Parker when things got really bad, and that helped.  Parker would talk him down, if he could, and if he couldn’t, he would get over to the jail as soon as possible.  Lily made arrangements for that, too.

“Which would you prefer,” she asked the warden, “that he kill himself on your watch, or that he lives to stand trial, and you’re the one who saw to it that he got there?”

It may have been unorthodox, but the warden wasn’t stupid.  He put out the word that Jason Lightfoot was to get the treatment he required.

And so far, it seemed to be working.  After four months, the nightmares were fewer and farther between.  The shakes had mostly subsided, and Jason was no longer snapping at everyone.  The only thing that hadn’t improved was his memory.  Stuff was still all muddled up in his brain, and hard as he tried, he couldn’t remember anything meaningful about the night of the murder.

His uncle came to see him once a month, his older sister came in March and May, and his younger sister came in April and again in June.  They sat there facing him, one after the other, with a Plexiglas partition between them, and talked over a telephone.  Determined to avoid discussing what was uppermost in their minds to discuss, because they understood that every word they uttered was being recorded, and could be used as evidence against him, they had little to say.  His uncle was still eking out a living on the farm.  His older sister lived in Anacortes, and had two children who attended university.  His younger sister worked as a nurse’s