Pruitt denied the recusal request by 10:15. Carla called with the news and Rex could hear something in her voice that she was working to keep level. " He's not going to make this easy." She said. " Pruitt is going to lean toward the petition.
He may not grant it outright, but he's going to make the hearing as hostile to Arthur as he can. " What does Arthur need to do?" Rex asked. " He needs to be coherent, calm, and credible." Carla said. "
He needs to be more convincing than Leek's paperwork. And Rex," she paused, "he needs to do it without you in the room because Ellison is going to argue your presence is coercive. And Pruitt will agree." Rex absorbed this. " Arthur can't be alone in there."
he said. " He won't be alone. I'll be there. Pete Corrigan will be in the gallery. Karen Shoe from the AG's office is coming as an observer."
A beat. " But you can't be the one beside him when he walks in. That's their entire strategy. Don't hand it to them." Rex was quiet. "
Can he do it?" Carla asked. Rex looked at Arthur across the table who was watching Rex's face with the quiet attention of a man who understood that the conversation he couldn't hear was about him and was choosing to wait rather than ask. " Yeah." Rex said. "
He can do it." He hung up and looked at Arthur directly. " There's a hearing at 2:00." Rex said. " Carla's going to be with you.
I'm not going to be in the room." Arthur's expression didn't change. " Because of your record. Because of my record." Rex confirmed. "
Daniel's lawyers want to make you look like a confused old man who got picked up by a dangerous criminal. If I'm standing next to you when you walk in, they've already won half the argument before you say a word." Arthur looked at his coffee cup, turned it in his hands. " So I walk in without you." he said. "
You walk in with Carla." Rex said. " Who is genuinely terrifying when she needs to be." Arthur almost smiled. " And you?" "
I'll be outside." Rex said. " Close enough." The old man nodded slowly and then he said something Rex wasn't expecting. " You know what the hardest part is?"
Arthur said. " It's not the hearing. It's not Pruitt or Ellison or whatever they're going to say about me in that room. He looked up. The hardest part is that he's my son.
I keep waiting to feel like he's a stranger. Like I can just separate it. But I can't. He's still the boy I taught to ride a bike. He's still the kid who cried for 2 days when our dog died.
He paused. How do you hold both things at once? Who he was and what he became. Rex was quiet for a moment. I don't know, Rex said honestly.
I think you just carry both. I don't think they cancel each other out. Arthur looked at him. My father, Rex said slowly, choosing each word, was not a good man in a lot of ways. Wasn't there when he should have been.
Made a lot of things harder than they needed to be. He stopped. But I loved him anyway. And I hated that I did. And then he was gone and I still love him.
And I still hate some of what he did. And those two things just live next to each other in the same place. They don't resolve. Arthur was very still. I think that's the human condition, Arthur said quietly.
Yeah, Rex said. I think it might be. At 11:30 Helen Marsh arrived. Dutch had driven her from Garrison that morning. A small woman with white hair cut practically short and the careful observant eyes of someone who had spent a lifetime watching people and drawing accurate conclusions about them.
She walked into Bev's kitchen with a cane she didn't lean on heavily. And she looked at Arthur and said, You must be Arthur Brennan. I am, Arthur said. I'm Helen, she said. " He told me you were confused, too."
Arthur stood up from the table and he crossed the kitchen and took Helen Marsh's hand in both of his and neither of them said anything for a moment. And Rex looked away to give them the privacy of it. Because there was something in that moment. Two old people strangers until 48 hours ago, both of whom had been made to doubt their own minds, both of whom had been systematically isolated and reduced standing in a borrowed kitchen in the middle of Montana holding each other's hands. It was not a dramatic gesture.
It was the opposite of dramatic. It was just two human beings recognizing each other across the specific geography of what had been done to them. Helen sat down with them. She had her own story and it tracked with Arthur's the way a second set of footprints tracked through snow, same path, same direction, same depth. Daniel had met her at a community event two years ago.
He'd been warm attentive, the kind of attentive that older women without children nearby sometimes mistake for simple kindness because simple kindness looks so much like the real thing when you haven't had enough of it. Bernard Leek had come to her house six months later. The supplements had started three months after that. " I thought I was losing my mind," Helen said flatly. " I'd lived alone for two years after Roy died and I'd been fine.
Completely fine. And then suddenly I couldn't remember what I'd done the day before. I'd find things in strange places and not remember moving them. I started writing everything down because I was afraid of what was happening." She paused. "
Daniel told me it was probably the stress of the grief. He was very gentle about it. He recommended Bernard. He said he was the best in the county for cases like mine." Rex watched her speak.
There was no tremor in her voice, no hesitation. Helen Marsh was angry in a specific solid load-bearing way of a woman who had processed her grief about what had happened and come out the other side of it without losing a single degree of the clarity that the scopolamine had temporarily taken from her. " I want to testify," Helen said at the hearing this afternoon, "if they'll let me." Carla, who had arrived at Bev's kitchen by 11 and was sitting at the end of the table with her laptop open and three phones in various states of readiness, looked up. It's a civil hearing on the emergency guardianship petition.
The judge controls what testimony is admitted. Then ask him, Helen said. I'm 80 years old. I'm not confused, and I'm not afraid of a judge who took money from the man who put something in my vitamins. Carla looked at Helen for a moment, then she started typing.