He eventually entered a plea to avoid trial. Six months after that, his wife filed for divorce. His lakeside home was sold to pay the legal fees of his own defense. Hollister Heritage Holdings did not survive much longer. A federal probe opened within thirty days.
Reginald Hollister was indicted alongside his former counsel. Margaret Whitfield was reinstated at her firm in full. A year later, she opened her own practice. The first case she took free of charge was for an elderly black widow in another county whose property had been targeted by a developer.
She won. And then there was Nathaniel Brooks. The morning after the trial, the courthouse clerk walked into the offices of the state judicial conduct commission carrying a single well-worn notebook. 143 pages. Each page a date, a sentence, a witness.
Three years of small cruelties on the bench, all of them in Harrison Wakefield's voice. The day Wakefield called Ulisses a Black kid in his uncle's suit was the day Brooks decided to deliver it. The commission opened its review within 60 days. Three months later, Wakefield was quietly forced into early retirement on the condition that he avoid prosecution for a pattern of racial bias. He never sat on a bench again.
Nathaniel Brooks, who had served three years as a clerk in that courthouse after 28 years in other roles there, was promoted to chief clerk of the county within a month. The drawer beside his desk no longer needed a private notebook. As for Ulisses, the letters started arriving within a week. Yale, Harvard, Stanford, three different state attorneys general, a retired federal judge who had read the front-page story over breakfast.
He answered most of them politely. He turned most of them down. He had five years of high school left. He wanted to live like a child, at least on weekends.
In Eleanor's kitchen, a new frame went up beside the framed Juris Doctor. It held the front page of the Maple County Record. The headline said, “How a thirteen-year-old ended a thirty-year career.” Three months later, Sunday morning, the porch at 118 Maple Heights smelled of coffee and pine needles. Eleanor Daniels, 78 years old, the woman who had raised a Supreme Court of One, sat on the wooden swing her grandfather had built in 1953.
She wore her good blue dress. The wood beneath her had held three generations. Ulisses sat beside her, plain T-shirt, jeans, sneakers, untied, a cup of cocoa cooling on the railing. In his lap, the worn paperback of Gideon's Trumpet he had been reading the morning the case began.