The Trial of Callista Blake

by Edgar Pangborn

I

In the robing room after the noon recess, Judge Mann was assailed by a feeling of being out of place, ludicrously so, dismayingly. The village atheist blundering into a crowd of churchgoers to retrieve his hat; or an explorer required to take part in a tribal ritual without a briefing on the rules. Innocent oversight, by the way, on the part of local chieftains and witchdoctors, for why wouldn't they assume that everybody knew the rules from infancy as they did? What am I doing here?

He could ask the question of Joe Bass and receive an intelligent answer. No good. No use making Joe uneasy about the Judge's state of mind.

Even the door to the courtroom looked unfamiliar. Why had he never before noticed that the swirling grain of the oak resembled the smoke lines of a bonfire? He stood with his hand on the knob, reflecting also that technique is not enough: he should spend several months, say a year, in a special kind of discipline, before it would be right to start taking piano pupils—supposing he had any such intention. He turned the knob, hearing the muted uproar of a hundred conversations in the dull room beyond; opened the door a crack, and the noise became a sonorous flow; opened it then all the way, and the roar was shut off by the action, since every talker had been watching that door, impatient for the continuation of ritual. For example, I would have to learn much more about children—

"All rise!"

He walked to the Judge's bench a stranger. Why the devil must they stand up? Settling their damn lunches?

Seated, noticing how quickly today the rustle and throat-clearing subsided, his eyes were annoyed by shabbiness. Old stains, scratches on the woodwork, in every corner a pinch of dust; on every face—Callista Blake's, Hunter's, even Mr. Delehanty's—the marks of that peculiarly human strain that people experience in the presence of the heavy institutions they themselves have made. Maybe his eyes were exaggerating the dust, to support the bias of his mind, which insisted on pointing up the dirt, cracks, awkwardly mended spots and general bad housekeeping of the law itself. Well, there are certain things to do before I go. "Are you ready for your opening, Mr. Warner?"

"Yes, your Honor." The Old Man could hardly say that no one is ever ready to send his love into the bonfire. "Members of the jury, I don't think you want to hear any elaborate opening speech from me. A great part of the defense of Callista Blake has already been brought out by testimony for the prosecution. I am not referring only to the transcript of the interrogation of Miss Blake by District Attorney Lamson, in the course of which she told practically everything that she can tell if I put her on the witness stand. I am thinking, for example, of the testimony of a very honest and impartial State policeman, concerning footprints and other evidence by that pond in Shanesville. I'll revert to his testimony in my closing words. I'm thinking of the testimony of Mrs. Jason." Anyway, Mann thought, Cecil Warner's voice was in good shape; he was slow, and calm, and steady on his feet. "And I am thinking, of course, of those letters written by Callista Blake which the District Attorney by some process of reasoning utterly beyond me—I suppose it's reasoning—appears to regard as evidence of guilt.

"We're confronted here, ladies and gentlemen, by a case in which the most vital elements are intangible, subjective. Now, the law doesn't like intangibles. That's natural. If we're dealing with clear, everyday facts of observation we know where we are, we're used to thinking in those terms, we can manage as well as if we were manipulating a solid object in the hand. Take a common sort of case for an example: a man falls in getting off a bus, is injured, and sues the traction company. All right: you've got eyewitnesses, medical testimony, and a few fairly simple questions to decide: did he fall? was he injured, and if so how badly? was the bus company at fault, and if so what's a just compensation for the injuries? A jury will have minor difficulties in a case like that: there's the possibility that the man's a clever fraud, and since most people are not good observers, the eyewitnesses may contradict each other a little, but on the whole juries don't have too hard a time in reaching a fair verdict in such cases.

"Here it's not so. In this case the tangible facts are hardly in dispute, the vital problem is the interpretation of those facts. There was aconitine in Callista Blake's apartment; the defense has not denied it. I know, and Callista Blake knows, why it was there; the State will try to tell you it was there because of a deep-laid premeditated plot to kill Ann Doherty. Ann Doherty did drink the poison there, undoubtedly; we know it happened accidentally, the State will say she was intended to drink it. The State has demonstrated an affair between Callista Blake and James Doherty; we have not denied it nor thought of denying it. And the State, by inference, supplies Callista Blake with the motive of common jealousy and argues that this led to premeditated murder. Now Callista herself knows that isn't so; I know it, and so do a few others really well acquainted with her: they're aware that no degree of sexual jealousy would ever drive her to perform such an act. But how in the world is she to prove it to twelve honest jurors who never saw her before the trial? It's just not in the field of tangible proof. I could put her on the stand, and if she talked to you all day long, what could she say on that subject that isn't already said in the traditional words she's already spoken when she was indicted?—'I am not guilty.' Finally, the defense does not deny that Callista Blake drove out to Shanesville soon after Ann Doherty left. The State will have it that she went out there in a sort of pursuit of Ann Doherty, to make sure Ann died. We know she did it because she had just discovered that Ann might have got some of that stuff; we know she went out there in an attempt to reach Ann before it was too late and save her life; and it was too late, and Ann Doherty was dead. So there you have state and prosecution asserting precise contraries. We cannot, by tangible evidence, prove the intentions, motives, ideas of Callista Blake; neither can the State. In this connection I'll merely remind you for the present that the State's own witness Sergeant Shields very clearly and carefully said there was no way of telling how Ann's body got into the pond; he made it clear there isn't a scrap of that precious tangible evidence to show that Callista Blake did anything except stand there and look down, as she told Mr. Lamson she did.

"Because of the nature of the case, the primary questions of reasonable doubt and criminal intent or absence of it, I am intending to call only two witnesses for the defense. As a prosecutor, and taking it for granted that he has somehow honestly convinced himself of Callista Blake's guilt, it was unavoidable that my able adversary should have piled up all that mass of circumstantial evidence, even though hardly any of it was in dispute. As a prosecutor, he had to do it; trying to your patience as well as mine, but that's how the law works. Yet when the dust of argument has settled and you've gone into that jury room, I think you'll see—or more likely you do already—how the whole thing comes down to the question whether or not you believe Callista's word. The two witnesses I mean to call are the two who can come nearer than any others to telling you, showing you, convincing you, what kind of girl, what kind of human being Callista Blake really is. And I have no more to say by way of argument until after they have been heard. Miss Edith Nolan, please!"

She came forward not briskly but with poise, her thin face showing the gravity of concentration. She wore the same green tweed suit, in some need of pressing, that she had worn all through the trial. The dark shade, nearly the green of hemlock, set off her red hair pleasantly, the Judge thought, but did not belong too well with light blue eyes; and to wear the same costume four days running was maybe a little odd. He noticed also, and hoped the jury would not, her moment's hesitation as Mr. Delehanty recited the oath and held out the Bible for her. Probably she would prefer to affirm but had decided against such action to avoid offending the jury, accepting what to her might be a distasteful absurdity for the sake of her friend. Edith Nolan would not be, like Mrs. Jason, a truth-teller at any cost, though the Judge supposed that whatever she said would be in the service of truth as she saw it.

And what would Callista Blake do if and when it was time for her to take the oath? If Callista had learned anything yet about the grown-up necessities of compromise, it did not appear in the evidence nor in her own actions thus far. The girl who made the responses in the Lamson interrogation seemed too young, too sharply earnest to understand flexibility or the art of yielding minor issues for the sake of great ones. He thought: Let her learn it quickly! And instructed himself irritably to quit borrowing trouble ahead of time.

Miss Nolan also took care to make no open demonstration of the friendship which the Judge knew existed between herself and Cecil Warner. One swift eloquent glance he saw, a silent declaration: "I'm with you and will do whatever I can." Then she was in the witness chair, private tensions skillfully hidden, giving routine information: age thirty-one, unmarried, portrait and free-lance photographer, A.B. Radcliffe plus a year of art school, studio and residence at 96 Hallam Street, Winchester.

"Is that address near to 21 Covent Street, Miss Nolan?"

"Yes, four of those long uptown blocks."

"How long have you known the defendant Callista Blake?"

"It's almost a year and a half now. She's been my assistant at the studio since July of last year. She answered an advertisement of mine, I employed her, and we very soon became close friends."

"Did she take her apartment at Covent Street soon after she began to work for you?"

"I think it was the same week. I helped her look for it."

"The close friendship you speak of—tell us more of that, will you? For instance, you're familiar with the details of Callista's life—past history, opinions, tastes, temperament, things of that sort?"

"Yes, Mr. Warner. A year and a half isn't a long time, but I think I know Callista as well as I could know my own younger sister if I had one, or better. Interests in common, a natural sympathy I suppose it might be called. We agree on many things, and when we differ we know how to talk, get our ideas across to each other."

"Your shared interest in artistic work has been a large part of that bond of friendship, hasn't it?"

"Yes, it has."

"Do you at present do any artistic work yourself, besides photography?"

"Not just at present. I have in the past. Illustrations for a children's book a couple of years ago. Nothing grand, but I hear the kids liked them. A few things like that."

"In any case you do have professional training and professional standing. I'm going to ask you for what the law calls an expert opinion. Miss Nolan, if you were not personally acquainted with Callista Blake, and if you were called on to judge her work, say in an exhibition of good serious modern painters, how would you rate it?"

Judge Mann saw T. J. Hunter consider an objection and settle for a somewhat elaborate bored look. The red-haired woman smiled, for the first time. Mann's pencil on the doodle-pad rather angrily crossed out its attempt to draw her face, not in cartoon but in a portrait sketch. It had escaped him altogether. I haven't got it. He laid the pencil down.

"It's hard to imagine myself not acquainted with Callista. But I think I can do it, Mr. Warner, for that one question. If I knew nothing about her, if I were seeing her painting or drawing for the first time under those conditions, I think it would be likely to outshine anything else in the show."

"If it were like this, for instance?" Intent on Edith Nolan's face, Mann had not been aware of Warner's drawing from his pocket a folded cover paper. Now it was in the red-haired woman's hands, and she was taking from it a page, evidently from a small scratch-pad, gazing at it and steadying it with her other hand because her fingers had started to shake. He thought in distress: Damn it, we do have to have some rules—

"Oh! When did she do this, Mr. Warner?"

"This morning, in court. Scratch paper. Before the reading of the letters, when Mr. Hunter and I were in side-bar conference and nothing else was happening."

"She was remembering little Doris Wayne."

"May it please the Court, is Mr. Warner introducing some of the defendant's art work as an exhibit for the defense, or is this just a love feast?"

"Mr. Hunter, I think your sarcasm may be distasteful to the jury as well as to the Court." But it isn't, and Terence, for Christ's sake hold your water! That was too strong. "May I see the sketch, Miss Nolan?"

Warner handed it up. Turned away from the jury, his round sagging face showed nothing of triumph, looked only tired and frightened. Another face confronted the Judge, with the arrogance and pathos and curious vulnerable mirth of childhood. Doris would be about ten, said Callista's affectionate unsentimental lines, and she was amused about something: perky, uncertain, lovable, maybe a bit dangerous. He thought: Now I know. And though I know it, she still could die. Judge Cleever—"I don't suppose it would qualify as an exhibit, Mr. Warner, since it isn't directly relevant to any of the legal issues. However, if you wish the jury to see it, the Court has no objection."

Hunter said quietly: "But I object. I haven't seen it, but I consider the introduction of it an unwarranted attempt to influence the jury's sympathies with irrelevant matters, and by an improper method."

"I will overrule your objection, Mr. Hunter. The defense is privileged to question Miss Nolan as a character witness. Miss Blake's artistic ability is an aspect of her character that it would be absurd to ignore. No objection was made by you when Mr. Warner asked Miss Nolan for an expert opinion in the field of art, in which she's evidently qualified to speak. The introduction of this sketch is merely a natural means of supplementing and demonstrating what Miss Nolan has to say."

Reluctantly, for it was loss of contact with something valued and not yet understood, he watched the drawing pass into the lumpy hands of Peter Anson, foreman, hands that held it briefly under bothered eyes and passed it on. Casually, and perhaps to cover the intentness with which he was watching the jury, Cecil Warner said: "Being older, more experienced, art school and all that, you've taught Callista to some extent, haven't you?"

The drawing escaped from the blank glance of Emma Beales into the hands of LaSalle, which held it for some time, and gently. Edith Nolan said slowly: "About technique, handling materials, things like that, yes, Mr. Warner, but ..." The drawing rested in Mrs. Kleinman's lap while she changed to reading glasses; probably the good lady couldn't get used to bifocals. "Her ability is very much greater than anything I have, so it would be truer to say, Mr. Warner, that she has taught me." Mr. Fielding looked at the face of Doris Wayne with lifted brows that might mean indifference or annoyance, and passed the drawing to Helen Butler. "You see, aside from her own talent, Callista has that faculty of searching out whatever's best in anyone, and—" Why must Helen Butler look at me? I am not Callista's accuser!—"and making it better if she can."

Don't get too rich for their blood, Miss Nolan! Hide a little the fact that you love her, or they'll begin to discount what you say. And yet, the Judge reflected, she could hardly be expected to dissemble; there would be a false note if she did. And how softly the woman was speaking!—as if they were here not to consider Callista Blake's life or death but only to talk about her as friends might talk affectionately of another in absence. He looked again at the jury. Miss Butler had relinquished the drawing to a hand from the back row and was frowning into the distance, her mild intelligent face more disturbed than he had seen it at any time during the trial. A Sunday painter, wasn't she?—he tried to remember her answers during voir dire examination, but they had gone vague: a rather mousy personality, good and pleasant but not strong.

The foreman Peter Anson fidgeted irritably, and settled into a glumness. Something wrong there. Judge Mann felt a kind of pain, in its beginning hardly distinguishable from a twisted muscle or the first warning of nausea. Anson's blunt face had become readable; at any rate Judge Mann's interpretation of its look came to him with such force that it was difficult for him to doubt his own insight: the blobby features were saying that to Mr. Peter Anson long-hairs and especially long-hair intellectual women were one big pain in the ass. You could understand it. Anson was a man who liked things simple and comfortable; he wanted larger issues settled by authority and formula, and you could say the wish derived from an honest humility, inarticulate awareness of his own mental limitations; unfortunately it meant that anything not covered by authority and formula must be brushed aside, or ignored—or hated. Confronted by a manifestly human Callista Blake or Edith Nolan—well, Anson was a good little joe and would try to be fair about it; BUT ... Only later did the Judge admit that his sense of unease, so much resembling obscure physical pain, could be the beginning of despair.

The drawing came back to Warner from the hands of Peter Anson but without another glance from him; for a moment his stubby hands were eloquent, saying: "This paper has nothing to do with me."

"It's true, isn't it, Miss Nolan, that although you're naturally fond of Callista and loyal to her, the fondness and loyalty are based on understanding? I mean, you know your friend's faults and weaknesses too. You have, maybe, something of an older sister's detachment?"

"Yes, I think it's fair to say that. Mr. Warner, if that drawing isn't to be used further, as an exhibit or anything—may I have it?"

"Well ..." The moment was a long one, Cecil Warner turning to look at Callista Blake with something more than inquiry, Edith and Callista gazing at each other directly, unsmiling, yet the Judge wished the moment might be prolonged for the sake of his own understanding. A kind of brilliance and a hush; the courtroom no more present than the ocean is present at some moment of wind and shining sand and sunlight: only the three of them; the three of them, and himself somehow more than a simple observer. Callista smiled: climax of a moment that could have lasted no longer. Warner was saying quickly: "Of course, my dear—" and giving the drawing to Edith, who put it away in her handbag and shut the clasp with care. "Now would you, as an observant friend, say that Callista is moodier than most people? Subject to depressions?"

Hunter bayed: "I suggest Miss Nolan's qualifications as a psychiatrist have not exactly been established."

"My question refers to a simple observation anyone might make."

"Is that a formal objection, Mr. Hunter?"

"No, your Honor. But I hope the testimony isn't going to stray into fields where only a psychiatrist would be competent to speak."

"Let your mind be at rest on that point, Mr. District Attorney. Is Callista Blake subject to periods of depression, Miss Nolan?"

"Yes, decidedly." Judge Mann considered the possibility of exaggeration, not falsehood exactly but close to it. Surely Callista Blake was not what his brother Jack would call a depressive type, if that word was still favored in the jargon. "However, Mr. Warner, I think Callista's depressions are generally related to some external cause. Related to things that happen to her." Yes, Redhead, that helps—some.

"Were you at all acquainted with Mrs. James Doherty?"

"By sight, hardly more. I believe I met her three times in all, when I was visiting Callista's family in Shanesville."

"Have you met Mr. James Doherty any more often than that?"

"I don't think so. Same occasions, and then one or two times since Mrs. Doherty's death, in connection with this case."

"Callista never told you much about the Dohertys, either of them?"

"No, not much, until last July. Then she took me into her confidence about the episode with Doherty, which had ended then, or so she hoped."

"She said that? That she hoped the affair was ended?"

"Just that, as I recall. She showed me that letter from Doherty, the thing that was read in court, and then later—well, next morning in fact, she said: 'I hope it's over. I hope I'm done with the fever and the blindness.'"

It could be despair, that dullness in him like a bodily ache. The Judge found he was again studying faces on the jury. Emmet Hoag bored, half asleep by the look of him. Ancient Emerson Lake neither bored nor hostile, his gaze rigid, vaguely vulturine, apparently hypnotized by the swell of Edith Nolan's breast, under the tweed suit hardly more than hints of fullness and softness, but evidently enough to set an old man dreaming in his rank and lonely antiquity; would he be hearing what she said at all? Young LaSalle seemed indecisively friendly, Mr. Fielding remote behind an unreadable pallid front. The Beales woman studied Edith Nolan's green handbag, possibly wondering if it was a style that would suit herself. Mrs. Grant appeared grumpy; likely her bony frame was uncomfortable in the graceless seat of the jury box. The only faces of the entire jury that showed any positive liking for Edith Nolan were those of Helen Butler and Rachel Kleinman. He saw Dora Lagovski apparently submerged in moist daydream; recalled that when Callista's drawing had reached her he had seen the damp lips form (in merciful silence) the word "cute." Emerson Lake's jaw was now moving slightly, approximately in time with the mild rise and fall of Edith Nolan's breathing—damn the old buzzard. But what about himself, aged forty-seven and for the last few minutes intensely aware of Edith Nolan as a desirable woman? Weren't his own wits wandering?

So far as the Judge could see, Edith Nolan was doing nothing to flaunt her personal attractiveness. Probably to many eyes she would have none. Her make-up was not prominent, the tweed suit practically dowdy, her manner consistently simple and direct. If his wandering middle-aged eye wanted a tickling, why not choose an obvious pin-up type like the juror Dolores Acevedo? He forced himself to glance in that direction once again. The black-haired beauty was showing no more emotion at present than Mr. Fielding. Very lovely indeed; made more so by her position next to the sallow weediness of the schoolteacher Stella Wainwright. Lovely like a conventional painting, Acevedo—and no more disturbing. Her face blurred; the instant's involuntary motion of his eyes transformed it to another, also under black hair: but these were close-set curls, the face altogether different, not beautiful at all by common standards but rather homely, big-nosed, small-chinned, the eyes sea-blue and, not for the first time, frightening. "It wasn't natural how men went crazy for her—not even pretty—any man, garage man, anything in pants...."

That peevish outbreak from Maud Welsh had puzzled the Judge at the time. Now he could sense the quality in Callista that Maud Welsh had meant. Earlier perhaps he had been too intensely preoccupied with other aspects of the case and with his own situation as Judge, the lawyer and judge dominant, the male animal quiescent or at least temporarily locked up in the cellar. Yes, she had it, the quality sensed but not understood because understanding is a verbalizing process and there aren't any words for the electric something-or-other that will make men turn in desire toward one particular woman in a crowd, ignoring others who may be in a dozen ways prettier, more agreeable, more available. Callista had it. Edith Nolan, in her own totally different way, had it, at least for himself, perhaps not for most others. No: Maud Welsh wouldn't have been likely to make that remark about Miss Nolan. Yes, they are wandering.

"Do you recall, Miss Nolan, what day it was that this conversation took place, about Doherty's letter?"

"Yes, it was the evening of Monday, July 6th, the same day Callista had received that letter."

"I'll ask you to tell the circumstances more fully in your own way."

"She telephoned me, that evening, soon after going home from my studio. Asked me to come over to Covent Street. Her voice sounded as it might if she'd been in physical pain. I went at once, and found her—well, dazed, sick, in shock you could call it. She'd been in one of her blue moods all week, I didn't know why. She held out that letter to me. I read the thing. I remember I told her she'd feel better if she could cry, or smash dishes, anything to break the tension that was making her sick. She did cry, the only time I've known her to do so. And told me about it. Everything, I think. Except at that time she didn't know she was pregnant—a few days past the period, not enough to signify. When she was able to talk she was much better, got things in proportion, summed it up quite realistically herself without my saying much. She'd loved him a while, the kind of infatuation any lonely and imaginative girl might experience; then when she most needed him he'd broken it off, and that was that."

"Objection! Irrelevant opinions."

"Objection overruled." Judge Mann reflected dourly on the legal unwisdom of what he was about to add, and added it: "It appears to the Court that the witness is concerned with matters of fact as she saw them, speaking to the best of her knowledge and belief." Old buzzard, pint-size Emerson Lake in a black silk nightie, you wanted that startled blue-eyed glance, the warmth of it and the friendliness, and you knew you'd get it: consider whether that was why you spoke.

"Exception."

"Did Callista say anything to suggest she was thinking of suicide?"

"Two things, Mr. Warner, which I didn't understand at the time as I should have. When she was crying and hysterical, she said: 'I want my father, my father, I can't find out how to live without him.' Well, I knew he'd died away back when she was seven years old. Then later she said, twice I think: 'I wish I was dead.' That—oh, I took it to be simply an unthinking expression of grief and exhaustion. It seems to be a thing people say without considering quite what it means. I took it that way: alarming but not to be understood literally. But I think now, she meant it literally."

"You stayed with her a while, I suppose?"

"Yes, took her back to my place and made her go to bed there, gave her a sleeping pill. I played some hi-fi records, things she liked, until she fell asleep. In the morning she seemed to be in good command of herself, sense of humor restored anyway. That's when she said she hoped she was cured, and for a while I stopped worrying about other things she'd said."

"But only for a while?"

"Only for a while. During the following month, the rest of July, it was clear that things weren't right for her. Not herself. Deep abstractions for instance, when she wouldn't answer because she really didn't hear. Normally with me she's completely courteous, wouldn't dream of ignoring a question if she heard it. In July she was slipping down into the bluest of blue moods, and I couldn't reach her. I wondered about pregnancy because of what she'd told me, and asked her about it, I guess a week after she'd first told me the situation. She said: 'Oh, I'm all right.' Mistakenly, I took that to mean she'd had the delayed period. Either she answered evasively, which isn't like her, or she didn't understand my question. The last, I think. I think she was in such a faraway mood it was hard for her to get hold of what people said."

"Did she say any more, that month, about suicide?"

"Indirectly, yes. One evening we got into a sort of general talk, just kicking ideas around. She said some individuals are deficient in the will to live; living is desiring, she said, and such people don't desire strongly enough for a complete effort to stay alive. Well—something in it if you're speaking of certain pathological cases—catatonics I think the doctors call them—patients who just lie around, won't eat or even move, a kind of death in life. But that's so far from anything in Callista's make-up, I couldn't believe she was talking indirectly about herself. She said not all zombis are in the psychopathic hospitals. Later—this did alarm me—she remarked that she'd have no problems worth mentioning if she could discover any purpose in existence. A depressive remark, certainly. She wouldn't have said it if she hadn't felt she was losing her hold on things, losing her interest in living—and if I understand it correctly, Mr. Warner, that loss of interest is the danger sign. People can talk a lot about killing themselves, and nothing happens. But if the interest in living goes—"

"Objection! This is exactly the sort of thing I was afraid of, your Honor. I don't care what she calls it, Miss Nolan is now lecturing us like a professional psychiatrist, and I object."

"Overruled." I believe I snapped; the rumble on the left is the noise of calf-bound law books revolving in the grave. "The Court has not received the impression that the witness is claiming any professional standing in psychiatry. The remark you object to, Mr. Hunter, was a general one, to be sure; but she was speaking of matters that are either common knowledge or ought to be. I must rule that the defense is within its rights to let her follow this line, to help clarify her testimony on matters of fact." And where in the pluperfect hell do I dig up a precedent on that one?

"Exception."

"Yes. You may complete what you were saying, Miss Nolan."

"If the interest in living is gone—I mean the simple wish to stay alive and see what will happen next—then I think there's real danger of a suicide. And as the Judge said, Mr. Warner, I guess that's pretty much common knowledge. Callista herself was certainly aware of it, from her reading, her general education. Well, that remark about discovering any purpose in existence—I caught Callista up on that, I remember. I reminded her that we make and choose our own purposes—" (Watch it, Red!)—"so far as we know them." She understood the danger, probably, the risk of touching on any questions that, for most of the jury, were settled on Sunday morning and decently ignored the rest of the week. "She—thought about that, I'm sure, and for a while I think she came part way out of her depression. Not all the way."

"Summing up then, Miss Nolan: knowing her as you do, and seeing her, I suppose, every week-day during last July—you're convinced that most of that time she was behaving like one in the grip of a serious depression with the possibility of suicide?"

"I don't have any doubt of it, Mr. Warner—now. I ought not to have been in doubt at the time. If anyone is guilty in this case it's myself, because I ought to have stayed with her just about every minute until she won her way out of that mood. Then there would have been no chance for the horrible accident that makes it possible to charge her with—"

"Objection!"

"Objection sustained." She looked up with understanding and no reproach. The man in private applauded her doubtless intentional violation of rules, while the Judge must condemn. "The witness's answer will have to be stricken." It comes to me, I did not add that the jury is to disregard it. That all right, Red?

"Miss Nolan, I understand you weren't present at a certain picnic in Shanesville last August 7th. Did you know about it at the time?"

"Yes. I closed the studio that afternoon—the weather was impossibly hot. Cal said her mother was having one of her picnics, and thought she might go. Cal didn't ordinarily care for that sort of thing, but I—oh, I guess I just told her to run along and have a good time."

"Did Callista speak later of seeing the Dohertys at that picnic?"

"Yes, Monday. All she said was that they were there, and she hadn't talked with either of them. I asked if she was—cured, and she said: 'Oh, Edith, I can't talk about it yet, I can't.' I had to let it go at that. All that week she was very blue. She was working hard—too hard; volunteered to straighten out some of my records. Afraid to relax, maybe."

"When did you last see Callista before her arrest?"

"Friday, August 14th, when she left the studio after work."

"What did her mood seem to be at that time?"

"Tired, unhappy, withdrawn—but maybe a little more composed. I knew that, left to herself and barring unforeseeable accidents, she'd find good and reasonable answers to her troubles, but—Mr. Warner, it's strangely difficult to help anyone you love."

"Did you talk to her on the phone that week end any time?"

"Yes, late Sunday afternoon, the 16th. My father was in town that day, a flying visit, unexpected. Callista had never met him. I wanted her to. I called her late in the afternoon, past 5:30 I think—to ask if she'd like to come over in the evening. She said she might, but there was something she had engaged to do first. She sounded very much better. Not happy, but—calm anyhow. She didn't say what the engagement was, and didn't make it sound like anything too important. It could have been a reference to Mrs. Doherty's coming to see her—I mean, nothing Callista said was inconsistent with that. She could hardly have talked to me as calmly, almost cheerfully, as she did, if she'd still been overwrought or—or had known she was heading toward something disastrous."

"When she didn't come to meet your father, did you call her?"

"Tried to, a little after nine—that would have been when she was out in Shanesville, according to what she told the District Attorney. I wasn't worried when she didn't show up, just supposed that something had delayed her until too late, and that she'd bring me up to date when I saw her Monday."

"What was her usual time for coming to work in the morning?"

"Any time before ten was all right with me. That Monday, August 17th, she telephoned me at about ten and said she was sick. Her voice was completely changed: flat, dead. I asked of course what was wrong. She said in the same tone, without hesitation: 'I've been pregnant since June and last night I had a miscarriage.' I told her I'd come over as soon as I could get rid of a client who was waiting in the studio. She said then in a very distressed way: 'No no, Edith, please don't!' She insisted she was all right, and then for a moment or two she was almost incoherent, saying she—oh, refused to drag me into her troubles, things like that. I said nonsense, I was her friend and that's what friends are for. Finally I asked if there was anyone with her, and she said no, but there would be presently. I thought she meant her mother or maybe her stepfather or both—she didn't say so, it was just one of those mistaken impressions you get under stress."

"You didn't go over?"

"No, sir. I thought that if Mrs. Chalmers was there I'd likely just be crashing in and doing more harm than good. I called again, later. Busy signals. When I finally got through, about one-thirty, the phone was answered by some policeman who asked me a few dozen questions and was finally willing to tell me that Miss Blake had been detained for questioning on a certain matter, as he called it, and was at the courthouse, at Mr. Lamson's office."

"Who was that policeman, if you recall?"

"Gage or some such name."

One for the Chief of Detectives. The Judge will not smile. There is no reason to smile.

"Did you then go to the District Attorney's office, Miss Nolan?"

"Yes."

"Were you given any information about your friend?"

"No, sir, just a brush-off from some clerk. That's when I started trying to call you, Mr. Warner."

"Yes. I have only one or two more questions, Miss Nolan. Did Callista ever express to you any hostility toward Ann Doherty?"

"Never. I recall that she spoke of her several times, but never with hostility or resentment or anything suggesting jealousy. No exaggerated friendliness either. I got the impression they were—acquaintances."

"Well, for that matter, did you ever hear Callista speak maliciously about anyone?"

"Never."