Jury of One by David Ellis Read Free Book Online

giving a poker face, but he wasn’t a natural. In her job, Shelly had seen plenty of them. Bottom line, he wasn’t going to answer. Everyone was playing it close to the vest. “Did you ask
him
that?” he asked.
    Actually, no, she hadn’t. It hadn’t seemed the time for twenty questions. She looked at this young man, the boy of whom Alex had spoken so affectionately, and she felt as if she really didn’t know Alex Baniewicz at all.
    “He was playing hoops at the open gym,” said Ronnie. “City Athletic Club. He was coming home afterward.”
    “You were home?”
    “Yeah. When he didn’t come home, y’know—with all this shit he was up to, I got worried. I knew something like this would happen.” He shook his head. “Can you fix this?” he asked her. “Make this go away?”
    She looked at him a moment. “I can try to help him.”
    “But you know people, right?”
    “Ronnie, this isn’t something where you make a phone call and erase what happened.”
    He received that statement like a stubborn child. He was feeling helpless, she could see. Surely, he didn’t think that she could snap her fingers and get Alex out of a murder charge.
    Ronnie brought his hands together. “Tell me what to say and I’ll say it.”
    She waved a hand and sighed. She wouldn’t know where to start.

7
Life
    A ROUTINE PROCEDURE,
she has been told. Not difficult, they must mean. Not risky, they must mean.
    It should just take a minute, she is told, for the anesthesia. Count backward from one hundred.
    100…99…98…
    He can’t know. No one can ever know. No one, but especially not him. Not Daddy.
    Church confirmation, three years ago, when Shelly was thirteen and was upset over the dress Mother had chosen for her, a dispute that escalated into an argument about Christianity and God. How could there be a God? she asked her father, who as always had intervened. With famine and war and poverty? How can there be a—
    93…92…91…
    When you were born, Shelly, he said. That’s how I know there is a God. When you have a child of your—
    We don’t advocate abortion, Shelly. We simply provide this procedure as an option for young women. You were sexually assaulted. This isn’t your—
    Your father will never know. This is your body. Your constitutional—
    87…86…
    He can’t ever know. It would kill him.
    Move on with your life.
    Daddy?
    Eighty-seven, eighty eighty I’m sorry eighty sorry Daddy but I can’t only sixteen years old please don’t stop loving me please forgive me you can’t ever know if you ever knew—
    Can’t…ever…know…

8
Lessons
    S HELLY WAS LATE for her class. Thoughts of Alex Baniewicz in detention, his life suddenly interrupted and steered in a different, uncertain direction, filled her as she walked into class.
    No.
Interrupted, steered
were the wrong words. He was a good kid, but he’d been playing with fire. She had warned him. Damn it, she had warned him.
    They were at the gym where Shelly worked out. Eleven women this week, ages ranging from nineteen to forty-seven, sat in chairs. Shelly did not know their backgrounds, did not even know their names, but she was relatively sure that many of them had been victims. That was why they were here, for a three-session seminar.
    Shelly had changed into sweats in the locker room. She walked into the small room with nothing, stepped onto the gym mat in the front of the room. “My name is Shelly,” she told them. “Write my numbers down and use them whenever you need them. Whenever.” She listed her home, office, and cell phone numbers. Most of the women had brought pen and paper and wrote them down.
    “Every minute of the day, every day of the year, a woman is sexually assaulted,” she said. “And that’s just rape. Add in muggings and break-ins, and the numbers go up exponentially.” She looked at the women but kept her eyes moving. She wasn’t going to confront anyone. Many of these women carried the secretdeep within, something Shelly