"Mr. Overbeck, can I ask you something?"
"Sure."
"You had that recording eight days before I saw it. Your lawyer told me you didn't show it to anyone. Not your neighbors. Not your school. Not even to clear your own name when you got put on leave." She let that sit a second. "Why not?"
I'd thought about it a lot by then. "Because my lawyer told me not to," I said. "And because I was afraid if I showed it to the neighborhood, it'd turn into a show. And she'd be the one in the stocks instead of me. And I didn't want that either. I just wanted it to be true."
"Huh," said Quist, and I could hear her writing something down. "Well. It is."
Renata Crandall called me that same afternoon. The district had received a letter from the police department confirming I was not a suspect, and I was reinstated, effective immediately. She said "Okay. Okay," three times before she got to the point, and then she said, "Grady, I'm sorry. I'm sorry I didn't fight harder."
"You followed the policy."
"I followed the policy," she said. "I've been thinking about whether the policy's any good. I'm going to bring it up with the district. Come back Monday. The kids have been asking for you. One of them made a sign."
The sign was on my classroom door when I got there on Monday. It was a full sheet of poster board, and on it someone had drawn, with real skill, a gray fox with a black slip in its mouth, running, and above it in bubble letters were the words FREE MARIGOLD. Under that, smaller, someone else had added: SHE DID NOTHING WRONG. Under that, someone else had added: SHE DID LITERALLY ALL OF IT.
I left it up the rest of the year.
The parent who'd called the school came to see me in the second week. She was a nurse who worked nights and had a daughter in my fourth period. She stood in my doorway after school with her car keys clenched in her fist and told me that she'd seen the post at two in the morning on her break, and that she'd been scared for her kid, and that she'd called the district office before she'd thought about it, and that she'd been sick about it ever since. I told her that if somebody had posted that about a man who was around my kid all day, I'd have called too. It was true. She cried a little. I gave her a tissue from the box I keep for seventh graders, which is always the biggest box in the building.
Pippa came home the following Friday.