At the moment, she was drinking tea, although she hated it. She couldn’t drink alcohol with the way things were right now, and she couldn’t drink coffee, either, because coffee made her jumpy. It was very important that she not get jumpy at this stage of the game. It was like an obstacle course with live land mines. She had to get from here to the other side without getting hurt. It was almost impossible.
Kendra Rhode did not look like she was jumpy. She looked bored. Marcey was in awe of Kendra Rhode. She never had to wonder for a moment if she deserved the things she had. She was born with them. She never had to worry that she would lose everything she’d worked for. She didn’t work for anything, and she couldn’t lose it, because she had family lawyers and family bankers and family accountants making sure it was safe, and she would inherit even more when her parents died.
Kendra was sitting in the big wingback chair next to the fireplace, the only chair in this rental that wasn’t very low to the ground. Marcey and Arrow used to joke that they’d rented the place from an aging hippie. There were even beanbag chairs in some places. Kendra would never sit in a beanbag chair. Marcey thought about Arrow and took a long drink of tea. It didn’t help a bit.
“So,” she said, thinking that they had to talk about something. You couldn’t sit for hours in the same room with a person and not say anything. Except that Kendra could sit like that. Marcey tried again. “So,” she said. “I’m getting a little crazy. They keep saying we shouldn’t go out and get into the papers with, you know, all that other thing going on.”
“Do they have the death penalty in Massachusetts?” Ken-dra asked.
Marcey blinked. This was something that hadn’t occurred to her. She usually didn’t think much of what was going to happen in the future, even if the future was only a year or two. She tried to think it through.
“Well,” she said, “California has the death penalty, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose,” Kendra said.
“Well,” Marcey said again, “California has the death penalty, and being for the death penalty isn’t hip, and California is hipper than Massachusetts. So if California has the death penalty, Massachusetts must have it too.”
Kendra got that little smile on her face that Marcey had always laughed at when it was aimed at other people. When Kendra aimed it at her, it wasn’t funny at all. “Think of that,” Kendra said. “Using that logic, since California is the hippest state in the union , every state must have the death penalty. But they don’t. Only thirty-eight states have the death penalty.”
“That leaves how many without it?”
“Twelve,” Kendra said. The smile was back.
Marcey made herself take a deep, long, endless breath. It wasn’t as if she’d dropped out of high school to hang around on street corners. She’d been working, and working very hard. She couldn’t help it if she had missed some of the things other people might have gotten by sitting in classrooms. Arrow hadn’t graduated from high school either, and neither had Kendra. It was just that Kendra didn’t seem to have missed as much.
“If they have the death penalty in Massachusetts, I wonder what kind it is,” Kendra said. “It’s probably lethal injection. Most places have lethal injection now. It’s too bad. I think it would be really interesting to watch somebody die in the electric chair.”
“I don’t think you can watch,” Marcey said carefully. “I think they do it in private. At least, I’ve never seen pictures, and I think I would have.”
“They don’t let just anybody watch,” Kendra said. “And they don’t let cameras in. They just allow a few people in a kind of audience, like a theater. I’ve seen it in movies. They allow the victim’s family if they want to come. And the person being executed gets to invite witnesses. Do you think Arrow would do that, if they decided to execute her? Do you think she’d invite us as witnesses?”
Marcey was finding it impossible to take any more deep breaths. She was finding it close to impossible to take any breaths at all. “You can’t really think they’re going to execute Arrow Normand,” she said. “How can you think that? She didn’t kill that idiot.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure,” Marcey said. “And you are too. You know she couldn’t have been the one who shot Mark. You know it.”
“I don’t know anything,” Kendra said. “And besides, I’ve got a terrible memory. I can barely remember where I put my car keys.”