Perfect Read online

  “So am I,” Matt said just as untruthfully.

  The two men looked at each other, nearly identical in their height, build, and coloring and in their matching expressions of proud, false confidence. As Zack reached for his suit coat, Matt cleared his throat and reluctantly said, “If . . . if I were to need to use this, what do you want me to do?”

  Looking in the mirror, Zack knotted his tie and said with a shrug and a lame attempt at humor, “Just try not to bankrupt me, that’s all.”

  An hour later, in the courtroom, standing beside his attorneys, Zack watched the bailiff hand the judge the jury’s verdict. As if the words were spoken in a faraway tunnel, he heard the judge say,

  “—guilty of murder in the first degree . . .”

  Then after a brief trial to assess punishment, Zack heard another verdict more excruciating than the last: “Punishment is assessed at forty-five years to be served in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice at Amarillo . . . . Bail pending appeal is denied on the basis of sentence exceeding fifteen years . . . . Prisoner is remanded into custody . . .”

  Zack refused to wince; he refused to do anything that might reveal the truth: He was screaming inside.

  He stood rigidly straight, even when someone grabbed his wrists, yanked them behind his back, and slapped handcuffs around them.

  10

  1993

  “LOOK OUT, MISS MATHISON!” THE shrill warning from the boy in the wheelchair came too late; Julie was dribbling the basketball down center court, laughing as she whirled to make the shot, then she caught her ankle in a footrest of a wheelchair and went flying backward, landing squarely and ignominiously on her rump.

  “Miss Mathison! Miss Mathison!” The gymnasium reverberated with the alarmed shouts of handicapped kids in the gym class Julie supervised after school, when her regular teaching duties were over. Wheelchairs gathered around her along with kids with crutches and leg braces. “You okay, Miss Mathison?” they chorused. “You hurt, Miss Mathison?”

  “Of course I’m hurt,” Julie teased as she shoved herself up on her elbows and scooped the hair out of her eyes. “My pride is very, very hurt.”

  Willie Jenkins, the school’s nine-year-old macho jock who’d been acting as observer and sideline coach, shoved his hands in his pockets, regarded her with a puzzled grin, and remarked in his deep, bullfrog’s voice, “How come your pride hurts when you landed on your bu—”

  “It’s all in your perspective, Willie,” Julie said quickly, laughing. She was rolling to her feet when a pair of wing tip shoes, brown socks, and tan polyester pants legs entered her field of vision.

  “Miss Mathison!” the principal barked, scowling ferociously at the scuff marks all over his shiny gymnasium floor. “This hardly looks like a basketball game to me. What sort of game are you playing?”

  Even though Julie now taught third grade in the Keaton Elementary School, her relationship with its principal, Mr. Duncan, hadn’t improved a whole lot since the time he accused her of stealing the class lunch money fifteen years ago. Although her integrity was no longer an issue with him, her constant bending of the school rules for her students was a permanent thorn in his side. Not only that, but she plagued him to death with innovative ideas and when he nixed them, she rounded up moral support from the rest of the town and, if needed, financial support from private citizens. As a result of one of her notions, Keaton Elementary now had a specially designed educational and athletic program for physically handicapped children, which she’d created and was constantly altering with what Mr. Duncan viewed as typical, frivolous disregard of his preestablished procedures. Miss Mathison had no sooner gotten her handicapped program under way last year than she’d gone on another—stronger—tangent, and there was no stopping hen She was now waging a private campaign to stamp out illiteracy among the women in Keaton and the surrounding area. All it had taken to set her off on this crusade was the discovery that the janitor’s wife couldn’t read. Julie Mathison had invited the woman to her own house and started tutoring her there, but it soon evolved that the janitor’s wife knew another woman who couldn’t read, and that woman knew someone, who knew someone, who knew someone else. Within a short time there were seven women to be taught to read, and Miss Mathison had pleaded with him to let her use a classroom two evenings a week to teach her students.

  When Mr. Duncan had protested sensibly about the added cost of utilities to keep a classroom open at night, she’d sweetly mentioned that she’d speak to the principal of the high school then. Rather than look like a heartless ogre when the high school principal yielded to her blue eyes and bright smile, Mr. Duncan had agreed to let her use her own classroom at Keaton Elementary. Soon after he capitulated on that, the irritating crusader decided she needed special learning materials to help speed up the learning process for “her” adults. And as he’d discovered to his everlasting frustration, once Julie Mathison had set her mind on some goal, she didn’t stop until she found a way to achieve it. Sure that she was right, that some important principle was at stake, Julie Mathison possessed a stubborn resiliency combined with a boundless, energetic optimism that was as remarkable as it was annoying to him.

  She’d been frustratingly single-minded about her handicapped kids, but this literacy program was a private quest of hers, and nothing he said or did was going to deter her. She was determined to get the special materials she needed, and he was certain her need for two days off in order to go to Amarillo had something to do with finding the money to pay for them. He knew for a fact that she’d persuaded the wealthy grandfather of one of her handicapped students—a man who happened to live in Amarillo—to donate funds for some of the equipment they needed for the handicapped program. Now, Mr. Duncan suspected, she intended to try to prevail upon the unsuspecting man to donate funds to support her women’s literacy program.

  That particular “fund-raising” penchant of hers was what he found most distasteful and most embarrassing. It was completely undignified when she went “begging” for extra funds by appealing to wealthy citizens or their relatives. In the four years she’d been teaching at Keaton Elementary, Julie Mathison had managed to become the proverbial thorn in his side, the blister on his heel. For that reason, he was completely immune to the fetching picture she presented as she got to her feet and waved her students into the locker room, calling instructions to them about the game next week. With her face scrubbed clean of makeup, as it was now, and her shoulder-length chestnut hair pulled off her forehead and held in a ponytail, there was a glowing wholesomeness about her and a youthful vitality that had fooled Mr. Duncan into thinking she was sweet, pretty, and uncomplicated when he hired her. At 5’5” tall, she was fine-boned and long-legged, with an elegant nose, classic cheekbones, and a full, soft mouth. Beneath gracefully winged dark brows, her large eyes were a luminous indigo blue, heavily fringed with curly lashes, eyes that seemed both innocent and gentle. As he’d learned to his misfortune, however, the only feature on that delicate face of hers that gave a real hint of the woman beneath was that stubborn chin of hers with its tiny, unfeminine cleft.

  Mentally tapping his foot, he waited until his troublesome young teacher had finished dealing with her “team,” smoothed her sweat suit, and raked her fingers through the sides of her hair before he deigned to explain the reason for his unusual afterschool visit to the gym. “Your brother Ted called. I was the only one upstairs to answer the phone,” he added irritably. “He said to tell you that your mother wants you to come to dinner at eight o’clock and that he’ll give you Carl’s car for your trip. He—ah—mentioned you were going to Amarillo. You hadn’t said that when you asked for the time off for personal reasons.”

  “Yes, Amarillo.” Julie said with a smile of bright innocence that she hoped would put him off but merely put him on his guard instead.

  “You have friends up there?” he said, his brows snapping together over the bridge of his nose.

  Julie was going to Amarillo to meet with a wealthy rel