"Yes, he was still on the back porch. I just said I'd called the police, said I'd go back to the pond, way they told me. So I did."
Maud Welsh, Edith thought, might have loved Ann in whatever flustered way she was capable of loving. For Edith the memory of Ann, met only three or four times, hung suspended in the past like an antique picture: something by Fragonard, say, in a frame of fussy gilt. Dainty, a bit undernourished—Ann pestered herself with diets now and then—and insipid. You couldn't quite imagine the angelic face distorted or transfigured by extremes of passion, or wrinkled by thought. With no overtone of spite, Callista had said once: "Ann isn't vain. I think she likes to share her prettiness in a nice way, the way you'd share a box of candy. She feels it was very pleasant of God to make her so pretty, and so going to Mass and keeping confession up to date like a good bank account, that's a matter of genuine gratitude as well as a sort of spiritual hygiene."
"While you waited for the police you didn't move or change anything?"
"No, sir, I just sat there and prayed for her."
Most of the jurors looked vaguely gratified. The faces of Terence Mann and Cecil Warner were politely blank as a church door on Monday morning. Edith could not see Callista, for Warner leaning forward at that moment shut her away. And T. J. Hunter at the prosecution's table was fumbling at a plastic bag.
"Miss Welsh, do you identify these garments as those that Ann Doherty was wearing when you found her body in the pond at Shanesville?"
"Yes, I—let me see the blouse again—yes, sir, I do."
"These stockings: can you identify them as the ones Mrs. Doherty was wearing?"
"Well, I suppose—I mean, that type, they look so alike."
"I'm putting my hand in this one, the right. Here's the heel. Now as near as I can manage it, my wrist is about where an anklebone would come—does that help you?"