Ms. Donovan made me lie down on a cot in the infirmary, and put cold compresses on my eyelids; took my temperature and noted that my teeth were chattering. “Violet, you’re a sick girl. Your temperature is a hundred and one degrees, that’s a fever. Your mother oughtn’t to have let you out of the house this morning.”

The nurse’s kindly words, like a curse, made me cry. My pride melted away, I had no strength to protect myself. Whatever I said, the alarmed nurse summoned the principal who asked me what was wrong, why was I crying, had something happened at home, and without knowing what I was doing somehow I was telling him about my brothers Jerome and Lionel and the baseball bat; I was telling him that Lionel had pushed me down icy steps the night before, I was afraid that he would kill me if I told anyone, and I was afraid that my father would be angry with me if he knew, I was afraid to go home . . .

I’d begun crying hysterically. Ms. Micaela, who had lingered in the infirmary, sat beside me on the cot, and hugged me. Afraid to go home. Afraid to go home. These words, once uttered, could not be retracted.

Police officers were summoned. One of them was a sympathetic woman my mother’s age who gripped my hand and encouraged me to speak, to tell all that I knew—“No one will hurt you. Never again. You will be safe from now on, Violet.”

Of course, I believed her. When I recall the police officer’s words, and the way she gripped my hand, I feel a surge of relief, hope—Safe from now on, Violet.

THAT WAS HOW IT BEGAN. AND ONCE IT BEGAN IT COULD NOT BE stopped.

It would become a matter of public record: the unsolicited, uncoerced, purely voluntary information provided South Niagara police by the twelve-year-old sister of two suspects in the Hadrian Johnson beating death.

In this way the remainder of my life was decided.

The Bat

THE BASEBALL BAT SUBSEQUENTLY IDENTIFIED AS THE MURDER weapon in the Hadrian Johnson case was discovered by a South Niagara police search team in underbrush less than three hundred yards from our house, on a high bank of the Niagara River where it had been hurriedly buried beneath a few inches of soil, rotted leaves, and litter.

The team had not needed a warrant to unearth the bat, which my (unthinking) brothers had buried in municipal-owned property.

The bat, its handle wrapped in frayed and faded black tape, had been washed, to a degree, and even scoured with something like a Brillo pad, but minuscule traces of bloodstains and partial fingerprints remained; most incriminating, wood splinters matching those in the bat had been embedded in Hadrian Johnson’s scalp.