She smiled at him and patted his hand. “Why do you go there, Malachi?”
“I like the sea,” he said. “It’s up from the wharf, and you can be alone with the wind and sea and the waves crash against the rocks there. Right at the peak, you can always feel the breeze, and it feels so good. It’s like it whips through you, and it makes you all clean. Sometimes, I just sit and look out on the water. And I try to imagine what it would have been like, years ago, when the great sailing ships went to sea, and the whalers and the fishermen went out.”
Every kid needed a place to dream.
She smiled at him. “Do you go there a lot?”
He nodded. He lifted his shoulders, and they fell again. “I have no friends,” he said. “It’s okay. I know that my family was different.”
His family was different. In a city that made half its tourist dollars through the rather unorthodox belief in the Wiccan religion. Did people believe? Or did tourists just enjoy the edge of it all—tarot cards were fun, just as it was fun and spooky to head to Gallows Hill and wonder if the spirits of the dead rose in tearful reproach or if they indeed rose to dance with the devil. But the Smiths believed in something. Not that, but something. And with belief being so cheap, in a way, that could mark them as outcasts right off.
“Am I right to say that your family had very strict religious beliefs, Malachi? Almost like the Puritan fathers?” Sam said.
Jenna looked at him, surprised that his thoughts were running vaguely similar to her own.
Again, his face reddened. He nodded, looking down. “Father said that all the Wiccans were the same, that it was all hogwash, that there is no devil in the Wiccan belief. I don’t think he really hated anyone, though. But there really was a devil—he was the horned God. People just wouldn’t say that he was the devil. My father didn’t want to hurt anyone—it isn’t our place to judge on earth. He just said that they were all going to hell.”
“Tell me what you believe, Malachi,” Sam said.
“I believe in what Jesus said. That we should love our fellow man—never hurt him.” Malachi paused a minute. “Actually, I kind of like what the witches say. You know, that they would never hurt anyone, because whatever harm is done to another comes back on us threefold. I mean, I don’t believe that there’s a count—that doing a bad thing to another human being means that three bad things will happen. But I do believe in a great power, and that we answer to that power—to God, through Christ His son—when we depart this world. And I think He will ask me if I was good to those around me, and I will say, ‘Father, I tried my hardest. I’m sure that I’ve sinned, but I have tried to be a good person.’”
There was something so earnest about his words. They weren’t like the rhetoric of many a televangelist. They were heartfelt and sincere.
He could be a fanatic, she told herself. And fanatics, no matter what their religion or calling, could be dangerous. Yes, kill in the name of God!
But it just didn’t seem that he saw killing as one of his God’s commandments.
“I do see it all a bit differently than my father did,” Malachi added, and then tears welled in his eyes again. “He believed—he may have been mistaken sometimes, but he believed. He must be in Heaven now.”
“Of course he is,” Jenna murmured. Sam stared at her. She stared back at him. It had been the right thing to say, and she knew it. It didn’t matter if the man’s beliefs had warped his ability to be a decent father.
“Tell me what happened after you were on the cliff,” Sam said.
“I—I came home,” Malachi said. Jenna, sitting next to him, could feel him. He was trembling again, reliving the horror.
“And exactly what did you do?” Sam asked. His voice was smooth, easy. He wasn’t attacking; he was asking.
“I walked into the parlor,” he said, his voice so soft they could barely hear him. “My—my mother … She was by the hearth… . She—she was on the floor. I ran to her … I fell down on my knees. I saw … the blood, but I couldn’t believe that she was dead. I held her—and the blood was all over me. And I couldn’t bear the feel of it. I tried to get it off of me. I stood up and—and then I saw my father, over by the sofa … I started screaming. I raced up the stairs and found my uncle in one bedroom, and my grandmother … my grandmother, oh, God!” He cried out the last and buried his face in his hands, sobbing and wailing.
Jenna pulled him closer, murmuring soothing words. She stared at Sam as she felt Malachi’s body shudder against her own.
“Do you remember anything after?” Sam asked him. “Do you remember me?”
It took a long time for Malachi to answer.
“I remember Detective Alden telling me that I was under arrest, that I had killed my parents,” Malachi said dully. “I didn’t kill them. I’m not crazy, and I didn’t kill them. I loved them. My parents, my grandmother … my uncle. I loved them. I didn’t always agree with them. But they loved me, and I loved them.”
He said the words with certainty. He said the words like an innocent man. Jenna believed him.
Sam had a few more questions. She barely heard them. She sat next to Malachi Smith, trying to give him human warmth and comfort. And when it was time to go at last, she wasn’t exactly sure why, but she agreed with her uncle.
Malachi Smith was not guilty.
There was something pure about him.
She had no proof, and the evidence was against him.
But she believed in him.
When they left the facility, Sam Hall was quiet and grim.
And she realized that he, too, was experiencing the same feelings.
Sam sat at the desk in the den at his parents’ house, idly rolling a pencil in his fingers, staring at the screen of his computer and looking at the empty notepad by his side.
He’d been surprised that Malachi Smith had now made an indelible impression on him.
He shouldn’t have been so surprised, not really. From the time he had come upon the kid in the road, he’d been touched by the boy. Shaken. Not shaken. Yes … disturbed, at the least.
His client was innocent. He firmly believed it, which was good—he’d defended men when they might have been innocent, and when they might have been guilty as all hell.
He realized that he actually felt righteous about pursuing a nonguilty plea for Malachi. This case made no sense. He liked to believe that he could read people, and he knew all the little things to look for in a liar. Liars seldom made eye contact. They were fidgety, keeping their movements close to their own bodies. They had a tendency to touch their mouths, or their faces. The emotion in their words was often just slightly off or askew—acted out, rather than real.
The world was filled with very good liars, of course, but he’d spent a great deal of time in court, and he’d watched countless defendants, witnesses, prosecutors, judges, jurists and defense attorneys. He was good. The courtroom was actually one big stage, and often, the rest of a person’s life depended on how well the ad-libbed and scripted performances were played out.
He’d been at his desk an hour now, so there should have been a list of notes on his pad. He should have been to a dozen sites on the computer. He was still staring at the screen, reliving in his mind’s eye the time he had spent with Malachi Smith.
He had to shake the feeling he’d experienced with Malachi.
Sam was no longer sure what he believed in himself. He supposed that he believed