“So let’s say,” I said, “you go back to the car, start it up, then drive over the hill, and that’s when Sian must have gotten off the bench and stumbled into your path, or maybe you veered toward her. Something like that.”

“And hit the tree.”

“How did you do it?” I asked.

“What’s that supposed to mean? You mean, like, how could I do something so stupid? That’s kind of what everyone’s asked. And it’s because I didn’t understand the consequences of my actions.”

He said that last sentence like he was reading it off a teleprompter.

“That was the defense strategy,” I said. “But do you really believe that?”

A hesitation. “I guess.”

“It’s a load of shit and you know it, but it worked,” I said.

“Whatever.”

“But that’s not what I’m asking you. How did you do it?”

“Do what?” he asked impatiently.

“Drive the car.”

“Lots of people are able to drive cars when they’re drunk. They just do a shitty job of it.”

I put out a hand to stop him. I turned and looked at him. “The car’s a stick.”

“What?”

“Galen Broadhurst’s car is a stick shift.”

“No, it couldn’t be,” Jeremy said. “You’re wrong.”

“I’m not. I made some calls to confirm it.”

“But . . . that doesn’t make any sense. Maybe the shift in your car is harder to use or something.”

“I don’t think so. I can’t see you managing a manual transmission in any make of car. No offense, but you were pretty terrible at it. A few more lessons and I think you’ll be fine, but today? Not so great.”

“But how . . . Maybe it’s one of those shifters that can go back and forth. Like, you can shift it if you want, but you don’t have to.”

I put a hand on his shoulder to steer him forward, and resumed walking. “No, it’s not like that. I don’t get how someone who’d never driven a stick before could not only hop into that Porsche and drive it, but could do it drunk.”

Jeremy didn’t say anything. He kept looking down at the millions of grains of sand, as if one of them contained the answer and all we had to do was find it.

“But . . .”

“But what?” I asked.

“But that seems like a kind of obvious thing. I mean, I guess somehow I must have driven it, although I don’t see how. But if the whole stick thing could raise, whaddya call it, some sort of reasonable doubt, I think Mr. Finch would have brought that up.”

“You’d think so. It was never part of the defense strategy discussions?”

“I wasn’t really part of those,” he said.

“I talked to Grant Finch. He said if it had been an issue, you should have raised it.”