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about Mrs. Williams. She had come up to me after the hearings and had given me a sweet kiss
on the cheek. I told her how happy I was she’d come back to court. She looked at me
playfully. “Attorney Stevenson, you know I was going to be here, and you know I wasn’t going
to let these people keep me out.” Her words had made me smile.
Michael got out of the water looking worried.
“What did you see?” I joked. “Shark? Eel? Poisonous jellyfish? Stingray? Piranha?”
He was out of breath. “They’ve threatened us, lied to us, there are people who have told us
that some folks in the county are so unnerved by what we’re doing that they’re going to kill
us. What do you think they’re going to do now that they know how much evidence we have
to prove Walter’s innocence?”
I had given this some thought, too. Our opponents had done everything they could to frame
Walter—in order to kill him. They’d lied to us and subverted the judicial process. More than a
few people had passed on to us that they’d heard angry people in the community make
threats on our lives because they believed we were trying to help a guilty murderer get off
death row.
“I don’t know,” I told Michael, “but we have to press on, man, we have to press on.”
We both sat there in silence, watching the sun fade into darkness. More fiddler crabs
emerged from their holes, scurrying crazily and getting closer to where we sat. I turned to
Michael in the approaching darkness.
“We should go.”