Gibbon's Decline and Fall by Sheri S. Tepper Read Free Book Online

into politics, maybe run for governor.”
    Darkness. A red glow. Carolyn had shut her eyes not to see. Would shut her ears not to hear, if she could. What was that sign Mediterranean people made, to avert the evil eye? That’s what she needed. A way of recoiling, so as not to think about Jagger! Jagger, who had married Carolyn’s friend, Helen. Jagger, who would end up killing Helen, as he may well have killed her sister Greta.
    She took a deep, calming breath.
    Stace was looking across the room, not noticing. “Anyhow, Jagger’s office sent Dr. Belmont out to the prison to check out Lolly Ashaler, and she took me along as witness and to run the tape recorder.”
    Carolyn forced Jagger’s wolf-grin image out of her mind and tried to concentrate on Lolly Ashaler. “I see.”
    Rather surprisingly, she did remember seeing: about a month ago on the evening news. It had been Channel umph. The one that touted its ability to be on the scene, and always was, ready at airtime with some talking head blurting breathless irrelevancies before a usually unidentifiable locale, indisputably there, wherever “there” was. The beginning of the Lolly Ashaler story had differed from the usual. Less persona, more cinema verité: movement, sound, an adequacy of chill light. A March afternoon left over from winter. Cops with their collars up, breaths steaming. A paved area backed bygraffiti-smeared walls, the camera moving past a stained mattress and the decomposed corpse of a recliner, then on to a Dumpster gaping like an ogre’s maw to spew a paper-wrapped bloody mess and the head of a dead newborn. The head was the only phony-looking thing in the picture: waxen and doll-like.
    Uncharacteristically, the reporter had stayed out of it and let the pitiable speak for itself, but the TV station hadn’t stayed on the journalistic high ground. All the reporters had plunged at once into avid melodrama, baying on the trail, issuing updates with glittering eyes in hushed and horrified tones as the police searched for the mother. The Mother. Then the mother who had abandoned. Then the mother who had killed. The father wasn’t mentioned, an omission that Carolyn had noted at the time. All in all, a distasteful mess.
    Carolyn frowned as she started another braid. “As I recall, the girl’s so-called friends or neighbors ratted on her. Which put an end to the hoo-raw for the nonce. The circus sort of died down.”
    â€œActually, it was back in the news last night.”
    â€œI must have missed it.”
    â€œYou didn’t miss much. That noxious blond reporter, Bonnie something, the one with the eyes? She put a panel together, what she called a cross section of the local public.”
    Carolyn made a face. “Did they talk about sending a message?”
    â€œOh, very definitely. They want to send a strong message.”
    â€œThe media are into messages lately. Were they for public stoning? Or should she just wear a scarlet letter
M?
”
    â€œThey were talking about that woman a few years back. The one who drowned her kids. Poor Lolly.”
    â€œWhat is it you want me to do for poor Lolly?”
    â€œDefend her,” said Stace, looking at her feet.
    Carolyn’s face went blank. She felt it sag and close, like an old door with a loose top hinge. “The court will appoint an attorney for her, Stace.”
    â€œHer court-appointed attorney came up to us outside the jail to talk to Belmont, very buddy-buddy and insider-like. He thinks they ought to tank her tomorrow and set her clock for the year 3000. For God’s sake, Mother, he was wearing an Army of God button.”
    Carolyn’s lips pursed, and she clenched her teeth. A partof the American Alliance, the Army of God was a national religio-political coalition, nominally Christian, which had brought under its wing most of the factions who considered themselves traditional. Certainly an Army of God stalwart