The Mistrial

I'm Meera Calhoun, fifty-three years old, and I run four hundred head of cattle on the east side of the county. I mention the cattle because it's the only reason I gave the judge for why jury duty was a personal insult. He didn't care. Nobody in the Grant County Courthouse cares about calving season, I learned that by eight in the morning on a Tuesday.

They parked us all in the juror waiting room, which is a beige box with linoleum floors and fluorescent lights that flicker like the whole building has a stutter. Smells like floor wax in there. It always smells like floor wax. Somebody mops this place twenty times a day just to give themselves something to do.

I found a chair near the wall, dropped into it, and let my boot heels scrape across the floor when I stretched my legs out. Felt good. Small victories.

"What time do they let us out of here?" the man next to me asked. Retired teacher, he'd told me twice already.

"Whenever they feel like it," I said. "We're livestock today. They'll move us when they move us."

He laughed like I was joking. I wasn't.

Around ten, a woman came through the double doors and the whole room straightened up a little. Defense counsel, somebody whispered. Sofia Freeman. I'd seen her name on the case handout and I'd seen her in the courtroom during the orientation dog and pony show, but this was the first time she was up close and working.

She was forty-something, wearing a charcoal suit that fit like it had been sewn on her, hair pinned back so tight it probably gave her a headache, and a jaw on her that could've cut glass. She carried a legal pad and didn't look at it once.

"Good morning," she said. "I'm Sofia Freeman, I represent the defendant in the case you're being considered for. I'm going to talk to some of you individually in a few minutes, and I want to thank you in advance for your patience."

Patient crowd. Nobody groaned. I scraped my boots again, loud, on purpose.

Her eyes came over to me for half a second. Just long enough to clock the boots. Then she kept going with her little speech about the presumption of innocence and how attorneys aren't the enemy and all that. It was a good speech. She was good. I hated how good she was, in the way you hate a horse that's prettier than yours.

When she finished, the bailiff started calling names for voir dire, and mine was in the first batch, because of course it was.

* * *

The courtroom was colder than the waiting room, which I didn't think was possible. They sat us in the jury box like we were on display, and the judge read us the charges, and then the questions started. The prosecutor went first, a junior one, young woman named Maggie Holt with a notebook full of color-coded tabs. She asked softballs. Do you know the defendant, do you know any witnesses, can you be fair. I said yes, no, yes, and we moved along.

Then Freeman got up.

She walked the length of the jury box slow, hands loose at her sides, and she looked at each of us like she was pricing livestock. When she got to me, she stopped.

"Ms. Calhoun. You run cattle?"

"Four hundred head."

"Do you have any feelings about lawyers that would keep you from being fair in this case?"

There it was. She asked it nice, but she asked it like she already knew the answer, and I'll admit that got my back up.

"Well," I said, "I've known a few lawyers in my time. Best thing I can say about any of them is they're honest about being dishonest."

Somebody in the second row snorted. Then the whole room went, which I'll take credit for, because I earned it. Even the court reporter smiled down at her steno machine. Freeman waited it out, arms crossed loose, and when the laughing died down she had this thin little smile on, like a paper cut.

"Noted," she said. "Anything else you'd like to share with the panel, Ms. Calhoun?"

"No, ma'am. I'll save the rest for your cross examination."

That got another laugh, and this time she smiled for real, one corner of her mouth, and I noticed I'd been watching that mouth a little too closely and made myself stop.

"Your Honor, the defense strikes juror number four."

Just like that. No hard feelings, apparently. The judge said something about the peremptory limit and I was shuffled back to the waiting room, told to stay on standby in case they needed alternates later in the week. So there I was, booted off the jury but still trapped in the building, which felt about right for how my year was going.

* * *

Lunch was a vending machine sandwich in the hallway, because the cafeteria line was forty deep and I'd rather eat cardboard, which the sandwich basically was. After that I wandered. Courthouses are interesting for about six minutes and then you've seen the plaque and the drinking fountain and the portrait of some judge who's been dead a hundred years.

I was looking for the back stairs, the ones nobody uses, because I figured there'd be a window and a bench and quiet. What I found instead was Sofia Freeman, alone on the landing between the second and third floors, phone pressed to her ear, pacing a three-foot strip of concrete.

I should have turned around and gone back down. I didn't.

"...no, I understand that, but if he signs it Thursday we're still ahead of the deposition schedule." She saw me and didn't stop talking, just gave me a nod, the kind you give the mailman. "Right. Thursday. Tell him if it slips to Friday I'm billing the delay to his office and he can explain that to the partners."

She hung up and pocketed the phone.

"Stairwells are for staff, Ms. Calhoun."

"Didn't see a sign."

"There's no sign because I've never needed one." She looked me over, boots to jacket, same way she'd done in the courtroom. "You're not on the jury."

"Struck this morning. Your doing."

"My doing," she agreed. "You laughed at your own joke before anyone else did. That's a tell."

"It wasn't a joke. It was testimony."

That got the corner of her mouth again. She leaned back against the rail, arms crossing, and I got the feeling she wasn't in any hurry to go anywhere, which suited me fine because I wasn't either. The fluorescents in the stairwell hummed worse than the ones upstairs.

"You're angry," she said.

"I'm bored. Angry takes effort and I budget my effort for things that matter. Cows, weather, horses. Lawyers didn't make the list."

"Lawyers. Plural. What did one of us do to you?"

"Nothing I'd waste a story on."

She studied me then, longer than was polite, and I'll say plainly what I noticed, because it stuck with me. Her eyes dropped to my hands. I'd been working a leather glove soft in my fist, and I stopped, and she didn't look away quick like a person caught at something. She took her time, then came back up to my face like nothing had happened.

"Rancher's hands," she said.

"Twenty years of fence wire and calving. They do the job."

"I'm sure they do," she said it flat, but there was something under it, and I'm not so old that I can't hear something under a sentence. "You know, most people who get struck from a jury leave the building."

"Can't. Standby. They've got me until Friday."

"Ah. So you're going to haunt my courthouse for three more days."

"It's not your courthouse."

"It's mine from eight to five. Ask anyone." She pushed off the rail and gathered her jacket, and I caught a whiff of her perfume, something sharp and expensive, and I made a note to be annoyed about that later too. "There's a bar across the street. The Gavel. It's where everyone ends up whether they admit it or not."

"I don't drink with lawyers."

"Nobody drinks with lawyers. They drink near lawyers and pretend otherwise." She started up the stairs, then paused a step above me, which put her looking down, and she seemed to enjoy that. "Wednesday, if the trial's still dragging, the jury's sequestered in deliberations and nobody watches the pool. You might find the wait goes faster with bourbon in you."

"Is that an invitation?"

"It's an observation about bourbon." She climbed the rest of the stairs and was gone, heels clicking off the concrete, and I stood there on the landing like an idiot with a soft glove in my hand.

I went back down and out to the hallway and the whole rest of the afternoon I heard that click of heels on concrete and that corner-of-the-mouth smile, and I was mad at myself about both. Six years I'd gone without letting anybody get under my skin, and I'd done fine, and now a woman in a two-thousand-dollar suit had looked at my hands like that and I was supposed to just go sit in a waiting room?

Wednesday, she'd said. I had my calendar memorized already. That was the problem.

Wednesday morning I did something stupid, and I did it on purpose, which makes it worse. I got to the courthouse early, waited for an elevator full of nothing, and pushed two when the waiting room was on one. There was no reason for me to be on two. A struck juror on standby belongs in the beige box downstairs with the magazines. I rode up, got off, and walked the length of the hall like a woman with business.

I told myself I was stretching my legs. I'd been in a truck for an hour and a half, and a person needs to walk. That was the story I was selling, and I wasn't even buying it myself.

The courtroom was at the end of the hall, doors closed, a window in each one with the blinds half up. I slowed down in front of the left door, casual, hands in my jacket pockets, and looked in like I was checking on the weather. There she was, standing at the defense table, leaning over her notes, that charcoal suit again, hair pinned back tight again. Same legal pad. She must have a stack of them in her office, a whole drawer of legal pads, and I bet she'd notice if one went missing.

She looked up. I don't know what it was, some lawyer sense or maybe she'd just heard my boots on the marble, because those things echo and hers don't. Her eyes came up and found me