You were weak. You relented. She watched Standing Raleigh hug his smarmy lawyer and Elmer Gantry his way right out of the courtroom. She was ushered in silence with the other jurors to a freight elevator and out the back of the Crowley building. Down a cinder-block hall, they were joined by court officers and clerical staff, everyone scurrying to their cars. Anne ferried the Zephyr around the tight turns of the stygian parking lot, then out into the quivering evening light of Commerce Street, past the media Hooverville, past the protesters who were right for the wrong reasons, across the trickling ditch of the Trinity River, under the roaring Stemmons overpass, looping past the cenotaphless south end of Dealey Plaza, and then, missing several turns for uptown, she pulled over in downtown traffic and retched with sobs for failing Peggy Raleigh.

For the first few days after the trial, Anne tried to shore up her mental defenses by blaming the police and district attorney. There was some truth to that—because Peggy survived the attack, the Dallas PD never worked the case like a homicide, which bereft the D.A. of evidence, and left Anne with a shaky timeline and Standing Raleigh’s guilty conscience.

The Times Herald and Morning News chummed the waters with competing outrage. A few days later it was reported that Lucy Goodfellow had fled town and checked into a holistic healing center in some godforsaken part of California. Then Standing Raleigh disappeared as well, his children abandoned to the custody of Peggy’s parents, which left even more lurid unease over the verdict. He later turned up in prison ministry in a different godforsaken part of California. A couple of reporters had called Anne, but marooned in her guilt about the trial, she refused to comment. That left the accounts of the deliberation to the foreman, Ferris, who blathered about the jury being “unified” and the case against the reverend being “unsatisfying,” and made it sound like he alone had averted some giant miscarriage of justice. This became the driving force behind Anne’s suspicions, and after the immediate weariness of the whole ordeal wore off, she did discover something. There were a lot of Ferris clans in Dallas. A lot of Caruthers too—dating all the way to the early days of the Republic of Texas. Anne returned to the back catalog of United Methodist Reporter in Bridwell Library and found that before Standing Raleigh was the pastor at First United, he had been assistant pastor at Highland Park UMC—where Mark Ferris’s father, also a DDS, was chair of the finance committee. Raleigh had also served as outreach coordinator at Ridgewood UMC, a church near White Rock Lake, basically built by the Caruthers family.