which he'd gone on to manipulate his wife, his son, his own lawyer, the jury, and the entire criminal justice system, there was probably no better way to describe his conduct than by using the words the grand jury had settled on a year earlier, back when they'd handed up the indictment.
Depraved indifference to human life.
There came a time when Jaywalker cranked up the Merc and took one last drive up to Rockland County. He waited until fall came, and even when fall came, he waited for a clear day, knowing how the sun would light up the brilliant colors of the changing leaves along the Palisades Parkway.
He found the eight memorials by the side of Route
303. They were neat and well tended, but the number of artifacts had dwindled. There were fewer photos, cards, stuffed animals and items of clothing. Even the tiny baseball mitt was gone. But there was a forwarding address of sorts. Propped up against a small Star of David was a funeral announcement someone had encased in plastic, evidently to protect it from the elements. Following the service, it said, interments would take place at the Beth El Cemetery in Valley Cottage.
He located it without too much trouble, and parked inside the metal gates. He told an old man wearing a yarmulke what he was looking for, and the man smiled and pointed to a rise, a small hilltop in the distance.
'You can drive up there, if you like.'
But Jaywalker preferred to walk.
He found them beneath the shade of a huge maple tree that he guessed had to be older then he was, older even than the man with the yarmulke. They were in a single row, small rounded mounds marked by smaller headstones. It had been eighteen months since the accident, half a year since the unveilings would have taken place, and the grass atop the mounds had taken root, sprouted, grown and filled in. And as they had been in both life and death, the children were still together.
All eight of them.
From there he drove over to New City, where he spent the rest of the afternoon. He walked the streets, sampled the shops and exchanged small talk with anyone willing to share a few minutes of time with him. They talked about nothing in particular. The weather, the fall colors, the price of gasoline. What they didn't talk about was the case, not unless he pressed them to. And when he did, they surprised him. Where Jaywalker had fully expected to find lingering anger, bitterness and frustration, he found only a readiness to move on. A few people even mentioned that they recognized him as the lawyer for the accused, but none seemed determined to hold it against him. One went so far as to tell him he was a good lawyer and a mensch.
Driving home, he couldn't help but marvel at the way the community had managed not only to survive, but to come together and heal. The eight families had opted for a single funeral service, he'd been told, and then buried their children shoulder to shoulder beneath the same tree on the same hill in the same cemetery. Somehow they'd gotten past all of it-Carter Drake's initial responsibility for all that had happened, Amanda Drake's unwillingness to implicate him or herself, and Abe Firestone's ultimate inability to place blame upon either one of them.
They'd moved on.
To Jaywalker, that sheer depth of resilience, that capacity of the families and the community to survive, was nothing less than astounding. It was enough to make him drive the rest of the way home with a wry smile on his face. It was enough, he realized at some point, to make a guy wonder…
