He did not wait for her answer.
"A jury is going to hear that recording, and then they are going to look at the deed to 402 Sycamore Lane, and then they are going to think about what it means when a seventy-three-year-old woman is described as out of place in her own home. I would encourage you to think about that, too, because your own voice is going to be the most damaging witness against you at trial."
Sandra's hand reached for her coffee mug. Her knuckles went white around it. The mug was empty. It had been empty for twenty minutes. She gripped it anyway, the familiar gesture finding nothing in it to hold on to.
Beaumont added that the DA's office had the 911 audio and was reviewing it for criminal proceedings: filing a false police report that resulted in bodily injury was a felony in this state. He picked up his briefcase. He said, before he turned to leave, that she did not fully understand who she had chosen to do this to. He recommended she retain the most capable attorney she could find, and that she do it today.
The sound of his footsteps retreating across the patio stone was swallowed by the ordinary sounds of the club afternoon: the tennis balls, the stemware, the occasional laugh from a far table. All of it continuing exactly as it always had, indifferent to the specific catastrophe unfolding at Sandra Bellwether's table.
The conference room on the fourteenth floor of the Commerce Building was glass on two sides and looked out over Harlan County in a way that made the county look smaller than it was: the courthouse, the precinct buildings, and City Hall all visible at once from the right angle, containable within a single view. The way things that have seemed large and fixed sometimes reveal themselves, from sufficient elevation, to be merely pieces of a solvable arrangement.
Dorothea sat at the head of the table in a navy suit, her wrists bandaged in clean white gauze—the bandages neat and very visible below the cuff of her jacket, which she had not pulled down to cover them. Gregory Beaumont was to her left with a stack of legal documents organized in the way of a man who could locate any specific item in under thirty seconds. Harrison Cole, the city's lead counsel, sat across from them and looked like a man who had not slept well the previous night, which was accurate.