“Yes.”
“What was your reaction when you first read or heard about it?”
“I felt very pleased at the resourcefulness of the human body.”
The unexpected answer broke the tension, and a hum of appreciation and amusement drifted across the courtroom. Donnelly was annoyed at losing the attention of the audience, but he realized it was to his advantage, and he pursued the subject.
“Do you remember, Dr. Woodbridge, how long the boy was submerged before being brought out of the lake?”
“I believe it was at least an hour.”
“What was the body’s mechanism that saved him, if only for a short time?”
“The term you used seems to be an adequate description for the layman, suspended animation. The lowering of the body temperature and slowing of its metabolism decrease the brain’s need for oxygen.”
“Are there other such cases on record of people surviving a previously unheard-of time of submersion?”
“Yes.”
“Well documented?”
“Yes.”
“What was the common denominator?”
“The low temperature of the water.”
The tic at the corner of Woodbridge’s mouth picked up its beat. He knew what was coming. He could see it in Donnelly’s eyes and in the way the district attorney had moved forward in his chair, ready to go into action like a runner listening for the starting gun.
“Dr. Woodbridge, could such a thing have happened to Madeline Pherson?”
The district attorney jumped to his feet. “I object, Your Honor. Witness is being asked to speculate. I object further to this whole line of questioning, or shall I say answering, since defense attorney seems to be delivering a medical lecture to the doctor.”
“Witness is not required to answer the question,” the judge said.
“Let me ask a hypothetical question instead,” Donnelly said. “Suppose such a thing had happened to Mrs. Pherson, could not the grooves on her throat and the lacerations and contusions on her body have occurred after her submersion in the water?”
Donnelly didn’t even wait for an answer. None was necessary. He turned a page of his notes as if it were the final page of a book.
Glancing at the wall clock, he saw that it was 11:16, later than the usual morning recess time but early for the lunch break. He decided to ask for the break, allowing the jury nearly three hours to ponder the question Could such a thing have happened to Madeline Pherson?
With forty-five extra minutes for lunch Eva Foster decided to go home. She lived in a three-story Victorian house with her father, Frank, her stepmother, Dora, and Dora’s teenaged son, Pete. Her father had changed jobs many times, and wives four times, but he clung with obstinate affection to the old house in spite of the office buildings and apartments built up around it.
Eva headed for her room on the second floor, avoiding the two steps that creaked and the worn place in the upstairs hall carpet which people were always tripping over. Nobody did anything about the worn carpet. It was as much a part of the old house as the dumbwaiter that moved noisily on its trolley back and forth from the kitchen to the third floor.
In her bedroom she glanced at herself in the full-length mirror attached to the closet door. Then she took off the knit dress, flung it on the patchwork quilt bedspread and put on a loose-fitting cotton shirtwaist. It was a nice, sensible dress, the kind she should have worn in the first place. Every office in the city had one exactly like it walking around with some anonymous female inside.
On her way back downstairs she noticed that the worn place in the hall carpet had two new worn places, one on each side, made by people wanting to avoid the original. Eventually there’d be a whole row of them growing across the hall like fungi.
She found her stepmother in the kitchen, making a salad and watching a game show on television. The show seemed to be a continuous laugh track, interrupted by occasional snatches of dialogue.
Dora’s high, sharp voice pierced the sound track like a stiletto. “What are you doing home?”
“I live here.”
“What?”
“I... live... here.”
Dora turned off the television, frowning as all the jolly people left her life as abruptly as they had entered. She had the kind of blond prettiness people always referred to in the past tense. “You know what I mean,” Dora said. “You didn’t get fired, did you? God knows it’s a contagious disease around this place.”
“I didn’t get fired,” Eva said. “Court adjourned early.”
She opened the refrigerator door and took out a can of tomato juice and an apple.
Dora was watching her suspiciously as if she weren’t quite sure she had been told the truth. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did it adjourn early?”
“It was a technical matter.”
“I wish you’d tell me what’s going on once in a while. My bridge club is coming this afternoon, and they’re dying to hear some inside information about the case.”
“I can’t give you any inside information.”
“Why not? You must have an opinion on whether the man is guilty or not. My goodness, you’re right there.”
“I’m right there now. But I wasn’t right there when the woman died.”
Eva stood at the kitchen sink, drinking the tomato juice and looking out at the liquidambar tree that separated the house from the apartment building next door. In the noon sun its giant leaves shone brilliant orange-red as if they were bursting into vibrant new life. But every year her father reminded Eva gloomily that this was not life but death. And pretty soon the leaves would begin to drop and curl up crisp as taco shells. Then her father would get up early in the morning and rake them into a pile to be crushed into the trash can. Her father was very neat.
“I bet the others do,” Dora said.
“What others do what?”
“The ones who work in the courtroom. I bet they go home and tell their families everything.”
“You can read in the newspaper everything you’re supposed to know.”
“But all the girls in the bridge club will know the same thing, and I won’t have anything extra to tell them.”
“If your friends want to know what goes on in a courtroom, they should come and find out for themselves. It’s a free show.”
Eva peeled the apple and cut it into quarters.
“I turned off the TV so we could talk,” Dora said. “And now you have nothing to say.”
“Not about the case, no. We could discuss the weather.”
“I’ll have enough of that when your father gets home. He’ll tell me what the temperature is in Paris, Bangkok, Hong Kong, you name it. And we hardly ever go further than Los Angeles. It beats me how a man fifty-six years old can want to read the surf reports every night in the paper, the size of the swells, what direction they’re coming from and the intervals between waves. It really beats me, a man who’s never been out of the country or on a surfboard in his life wanting to know the temperature in Hong Kong and the size of the waves at Zuma Beach. Don’t you think that’s odd?”