Dan strode out of the counseling wing, down the main hall, and through the front doors with amdg engraved into their handles. He found himself walking past the driveway half-searching for his mother’s silver Zephyr in the pickup lane. The skies had cleared, and he noticed the golden traces of the sun stretching across the football fields and the small hillock that ran down to Inwood Road. He stood there holding in his hands his journal, the Dylan tape, and the songbook. Though no one seemed to notice him, Dan Malone felt a spark within. The trees that lined the school parking lot stirred and whispered in the late-afternoon breeze, and Dan felt a sudden awareness, a shimmering sense of discovery, that his journal, the newspaper, music, writing, reading, it was all connected with some hidden purpose. I will become a Norwegian rat. I can do this.

The hour when he would take part in the life of the world seemed to be drawing closer, and Dan wanted to think and write and listen to his heart and find out what it felt.

October 16

[ OCTOBER 16 ]

There was a plan to snake a man without collarbones down the well. As the silver Zephyr sputtered through rush-hour traffic, Anne Malone listened to KRLD about the rescue efforts for baby Jessica. It was a Friday morning, and Anne had dropped Dan off at school an hour early so she could report for jury duty. Refusing the mix-master madness of Texas highways, she niggled her way along Inwood and Preston Roads toward the downtown Dallas skyline. A man without collarbones? That seemed awfully desperate—a resignation to the fact that they couldn’t drill down in time. But how could that be? It’s in the middle of oil country. Anne turned off the radio in despair. Three days now. Somehow the child is still alive.

Eventually she found her way through Dealey Plaza, past the Old Red Courthouse, past the spot where history veered, down through the Commerce Street underpass. After a half mile of highway no-man’s-land, Anne turned into a parking garage attached to the hulking brown backside of the Frank Crowley Courts Building.

Parking ticket, elevator down, cheerless atrium, elevator up, gray terrazzo floor, beige hallways, and Anne arrived at the jury assembly room. She turned in her summons and took her seat on a long pew of blond wood. The jury pool was an accurate census sample of Dallas County—one half white retirees, civil servants, and housewives, the other half black, Mexican, Central American, and the working poor. A short video narrated by channel five’s Chip Moody gave a Disney history of the jury system, from casting stones in ancient Greece to the Puritans’ trials by drowning. A mention of the Magna Carta, sprinkle in the Bill of Rights, cut to trumpet flourish with mustangs running free across the plains of West Texas.