Callista tried to review the course of the day, long in retrospect. Maud Welsh all morning. Sergeant Shields, sober, exact, not unkind: four bobby pins and a paper clip. Sergeant Peterson a bleached mechanism for the production of not very good photographs, including one of the rock and the pond by daylight, not the light of a troubled and hazy moon. Trooper Curtis, plaster casts and fingerprints and so what? Sutherland R. Clipp who did everything. Trooper Carlo San Giorgio the nice boy. And Dr. Devens. None of them except Maud Welsh had remained very long on the stand; Cecil who understood the nature of the conflict had let most of them pass by with little or no questioning. Callista found she was remembering too mechanically; names and faces would not coalesce to any rationally useful larger pattern. Yet at some point—she thought it was during the testimony of Cousin Maud—something had been done or said that had lessened the opacity of the Blank, like a hint of dawn or false dawn beyond a dirty window.
Or was it anything done or said? Cousin Maud of the Plum Jam understood nothing of the interview with Ann at Covent Street, a happening far outside the cage where the life of Cousin Maud fluttered and squeaked. Perhaps this was the way of it: during the examination of Cousin Maud the Blank had thinned temporarily, of itself; a coincidence in time, maybe nothing to do with any word spoken. Probably during the cross-examination, when Cecil was questioning Maud about the Saturday night, the bedroom scene—A sorry Hamlet I made!
"Fuck your stinking jail too! We got rights, Polack. You ain't saving the taxpayers nothing, we all die of pee-neumo-nia, they gotta pay for a box. Listen, I been flang out of better jails before you was old enough to shove a finger up it. I want more heat, I want—"
Callista winced at the smack of Kowalski's feet passing her cell. She heard the clash of keys, clang of the iron door, high anticipatory whimpering (still that note of enjoyment?) broken off by the crack of a flat hand against flesh, repeated and repeated, Callista's body clenching in misery at each repetition of the sound, her scream of protest choked into silence by a bitten lip. They can't! Stop it! But it had happened the same way last night, would happen again and again, maybe always, here and there in the world, throughout the extent of foreseeable time: how long is that? Callista's fingernails were hurting her legs. Her mind held firm somewhere, listening.
Watson wasn't yelling much. She hadn't last night either, only a small rhythmic outcry. Mouse in a trap. "You gonna quiet down now?"
"Uh-huh. I'm sorry, Kowalski."
"Mrs. Kowalski."
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Kowalski. Gi' me a butt."
"This ain't no charity ward." Anger spent, Kowalski probably just wanted to get back to her comic book. "Nor you ain't no psycho, you're putting on to get attention, beat the rap for what you done wit' your busted bottle. All the jerks on Mullen Street, you had to stick it into plain-clo'es cop. That was crazy, but now you're crazy like a fox. You know that t'ing punt'red his intestyne? Still in hospital, and that ain't good news for you, Crazy-like-a-fox."