He asked her to describe her wrists as they had been when Sam found her, and she described them without flinching. The color of the skin, the depth of the cuts, the loss of sensation in her hands that had lasted for two full days. He asked her to roll back her sleeves. She did. The scars were there, pink and definite against her skin, and Alderman looked at them for a long moment before Garrett moved on.
Then he took her back eight years, not to Harold's worst moments. Those would have been easy to dismiss as the subjective account of a grieving, unstable woman. Instead, Garrett asked her to describe the specific, documented incidents she had written in her statement. The dates, the words that were used, the way a particular kind of man constructs, slowly and patiently, over years, the architecture of a woman's doubt in herself. Martha answered every question in the same voice, controlled, precise, without embellishment, without tears, with the absolute reliability of someone who has nothing to prove because the facts themselves are sufficient.
Carver cross-examined her for forty minutes. He tried every angle. The instability argument, the emotional distress narrative, the suggestion that her account was shaped by her attachment to Sam. The implication that a woman willing to accept the hospitality of a man she barely knew demonstrated exactly the kind of poor judgment Harold's letters described. Martha answered every question with the same steady precision.
Not cold, not robotic, present, human, and completely unshakable. At one point, Carver said, "Mrs. Briggs, isn't it true that you left the Briggs household voluntarily on the night in question?" Martha said, "I was removed from the Briggs household by two men employed by Wade Briggs, taken to a fence post on a neighboring property, and tied there with rope. My coat was taken from me. My daughter was left in the snow without shoes.
That is the complete and accurate account of what occurred." "But you could have called for help. You could have "My hands were tied behind a fence post," Martha said, "in January, at four degrees, who would you suggest I call?" There was a sound from the gallery, not laughter, something more complicated than that. Alderman looked up from his notes.
His face, which had given nothing away all morning, did something brief and complicated of its own. Garrett called Decker next. Decker took the stand with a walk of a man carrying something heavy on his back that is not going to get lighter, no matter where he goes. He sat. He was sworn in, and then, without Garrett needing to ask more than two questions, he said everything.
He said it plainly and without ornament in the flat, factual voice of someone who has decided that the only way to say a thing is to say it entirely. He had been instructed by Roy Finch on Wade Briggs's orders to take Martha to the fence post and secure her there. He had taken her coat because Finch said to. He had seen the child's bare feet. He had done it anyway because he had told himself it was temporary.
It was a warning. It was just to make her compliant before the hearing. "Did you believe it was temporary?" Garrett asked. Decker was quiet for a moment.
"No," he said, "I didn't." "Why not?" Another pause. "Because Finch was smiling." The room was absolutely still.