Page 61 of The River We Remember

AT THE JAILHOUSE, Fielding stood up from the seat behind the desk, and Brody said, “Let’s book him, Asa.”

They took Bluestone’s fingerprints and mug shots and took from him his wallet, locking it in the safe they kept for prisoners’ personal articles.

Brody said, “Someone you want to call, Noah? A lawyer, maybe?”

Bluestone said, “No one.”

“You intend to represent yourself in all this?”

“I’m not going to do anything in all this,” Bluestone said.

“I’m not sure what you mean by that, Noah.”

“I mean exactly what I said.”

“The court will appoint a lawyer for you.”

“The court will do what it has to do, I guess.”

Douglas Anderson had gone to court that morning, been arraigned and released into the custody of his parents, so Noah Bluestone became the sole occupant of the jailhouse cellblock. He sat on the metal-framed cot and put his back against the wall. The only window was at the far end of the cellblock. All he could see there was a small patch of evening sky.

“It’ll be suppertime soon. What would you like?” Asa asked.

Bluestone said, “Doesn’t matter.”

“Makes it easy,” Asa said.

The lawmen left him and joined Graff at the jailhouse desk.

“He’s going to need counsel,” Graff said. “And it doesn’t sound like he’s inclined to get his own.”

“I’ll apprise the judge and our county attorney of the situation,” Brody said. “Guess we all know who they’ll bring into this.”

And less than an hour later, Charlie Bauer got the call.

- PART TWO - THE RIVER WE REMEMBER

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHARLOTTE BAUER’S FATHER had been a banker in Jewel, a relatively wealthy man who’d invested in land. For as far back as anyone could remember, he’d called his daughter Charlie. When Charlie finally returned to Black Earth County after the man’s death, she sold most of those holdings but kept the property on which she’d been born and raised, a few acres along the Alabaster River a mile north of town. The house looked across a field that her father and his before him had planted in alfalfa for hay they sold to others. When the land became Charlie’s, she left the field fallow so that the natural wild plants of the prairie would take root there, things like goldenrod and milkweed and clover and coneflowers. Beyond the field, along the bank of the Alabaster, stood a line of trees, mostly cottonwoods and box elders. Charlie had been a lawyer and though retired, still took on a case now and then if it interested her. When she wasn’t busy with legal work or other things, Charlie Bauer often sat on her porch and enjoyed the view, most often in the company of a good book and a little Johnnie Walker Black and occasionally, with a cigar.

The afternoon when Judge Eide called and explained Noah Bluestone’s situation and asked Charlie to represent the man’s legal interests, she’d been sitting on the porch reading The Grapes of Wrath yet again. She’d met Steinbeck, had encountered him in California in 1937. Some of the migrant workers she was trying to help in one of their many attempts to organize themselves took her to a small shack where a tall, very serious man with a thin mustache was temporarily living. He introduced himself as John. Only that. They shared some wine and bread and cheese and talked about the terrible situation of the itinerants who worked the fruit ranches. When Charlie left, he gave her a copy of a book he’d recently published titled Tortilla Flat, which she kept in a place of honor among the many volumes on her bookshelves.

After talking with the judge, she returned to the porch and stood for a long time looking across the wild grass and flowers. The trees that sheltered the Alabaster were green against the washed blue of the late afternoon sky. Beyond them to the east, the land rose in a series of swells quilted with young, cultivated fields, and Charlie thought that Steinbeck might understand and appreciate the complications of the heart that such a place as this engendered.

“IN HERE,” BRODY said and opened the door to the cellblock.

Charlie had read the formal complaint against Noah Bluestone. The prosecution’s assertion was that Bluestone had shot and killed James Patrick Quinn at an as yet undetermined location, but most probably the Bluestone farmstead. He’d wrapped Quinn’s body in a tarp and had transported it to Inkpaduta Bend, where he’d attempted to make the death look like a suicide. At the moment, the only solid evidence against him was the blood on the tarp, which he’d attempted to burn and then to hide by burying it in his orchard. But there was also the hog’s blood on Inkpaduta Bend and the evidence of the slaughtering at the Bluestone farmstead, which Mrs. Bluestone admitted had been carried out on the same day as Quinn’s death.

According to the prosecution, that death had most likely occurred in the heat of anger as a result of two circumstances. The first was the argument with Quinn over the accusation of theft and the firing that followed. The second was the attention, unwanted or not, that Quinn was paying to Bluestone’s wife. The evidence of this second assertion was the sapphire ring found in Quinn’s pants pocket, a ring that perfectly fit the finger of Kyoko Bluestone. It was all circumstantial, but damning enough, especially in light of the fact that both Noah Bluestone and his wife refused to answer any questions related to Quinn’s death. Because there was no indication of premeditation in the crime, the county attorney was indicting on a charge of murder in the second degree. But Charlie knew that could always change if additional evidence came to light.

No one had told Bluestone that Charlie was coming, but he knew who she was, and when she entered the cell, he knew what she was doing there.

“I don’t need a lawyer,” he said before she had a chance to open her mouth. It was spoken politely.

“Mind if I sit, Noah, and we can talk about that?”

There was only the cot, and he slid to one end to give her room.