“In my experience that’s a pretty rare outcome for someone like your uncle.”

“You don’t know anything about him.”

“I’ll know more after I talk to him,” Mansur said, but he was wrong. He wouldn’t get anything out of Uncle Alva. I hoped he wouldn’t get anything out of Dirk, either. “So you went to Missouri with Gentry Frank? How did you end up driving Mr. Frank’s truck back to Wichita? Mr. Frank’s aunt, Bernice Betts, she identified you as the woman who returned his vehicle.”

“Yes, I returned his truck. I didn’t know what else to do. Gentry left his phone with me, I didn’t know where they went, and he and Edrard never came back.”

“By Edrard you mean Joshua Kline? Who was killed in Arkansas?” Mansur flipped over another page in his file folder, I think just to see me flinch, but there was no bloody picture.

“He was introduced to me as Edrard,” I said.

“According to you, they left you in southern Missouri, drove away, and you didn’t hear from them again, so you drove Mr. Frank’s truck back to Wichita.”

“Exactly.”

“And Richard Bowers?”

“I don’t know who that is.” I could guess. The girl at the motel had called him Rick.

“Becky Eddiger identified him as a friend of Joshua Kline’s who might have gone to Missouri with him. She wasn’t sure. He says he didn’t go. What do you say?”

“If he did, I never saw him. And I don’t know who Becky is,” I said.

If Rhys claimed he never went to Missouri, it meant he was sticking to the lie. Mansur made an irritated little pout with his mouth, and flipped a few pages in his file folder.

“Apparently all of these people are members of a . . . historical medieval combat group, and the . . . Society for Creative Anachronism. They all have pseudonyms. You may know Becky as Rosalinda?”

“Yeah. Edrard’s wife. I met her a couple weeks ago at Gentry’s castle.”

“His castle,” Mansur muttered. “Ms. Eddiger was under the impression that Frank, Kline, you, and possibly Bowers, were going to Missouri on some kind of crazy mission. That was how she described it.”

“I went to Missouri to see my uncle. Edrard came later to see Gentry. They left. I never saw this other guy.”

Mansur looked at his notes some more, while I waited for the other shoe to drop. For him to say, According to your sister you were there.

Except LaReigne wasn’t just my sister. She was our father’s daughter. I was guessing she hadn’t spoken to the police at all.

CHAPTER 50

Charlene

   Gentry had always been a problem for the courts. When he was three, and bumped from foster home to foster home, because no one could handle him. When he was eleven, and had his knightly misadventure.

I’d thought that was behind us, but after he was arrested, we lived it all over again. Every morning when I looked around the breakfast table at Bill, Trang, and Elana, I wondered what we would do as a family. Maybe the worst part was trying to maintain communication with Gentry, when he was in Arkansas, and we were trying to hold our lives together. Phone calls were impossible. He would answer questions, but only if I asked the right ones. He wrote letters, but they told me nothing about how he was coping. I didn’t want empty reassurances. I wanted to know the truth, and Gentry’s truth filtered through Middle English and bounced off Gawen told me nothing useful.

According to our lawyer, Gentry was still a problem for the courts.

“Obviously, they won’t want him to take the stand. The feds haven’t even subpoenaed him for Barnwell and Gill-Trego’s trials,” Ms. Howell said. She had come highly recommended by a church member, and I generally thought she was wonderful, but it soured my stomach every time she said Trego. As we learned more about the investigation, it was clear Zhorzha knew nothing about how those men escaped from prison. However innocent she was on that front, she was directly responsible for Gentry being a party to the deaths of three men, albeit none of them good men, and none of them innocent. Zhorzha was the reason Gentry was in jail, waiting to go to trial.

“Wouldn’t it be risky for him to testify anyway?” Bill said. After years of my nagging him to lose weight, he finally had. Now I worried the stress was killing him.

“Only for the prosecution,” Ms. Howell said.

“How so?” I said.

“Gentry? Gentry?” Ms. Howell leaned across the table and tapped her pen in front of him. He nodded. “Can you tell me about how you know LaReigne Trego-Gill?”

“Certs. She be the elder sister of Lady Zhorzha Trego.”

“And what’s your relationship with Zhorzha?”

“I am her champion. I am sworn to protect her.”

Ms. Howell smiled when she turned back to me. I never knew how to take those smiles, pitying but kind. I took hers in silence, because we needed her help.

“If he testifies, there are a few possible outcomes. One: The jury doesn’t understand him or the jury finds him funny. Two—and this is the one the feds are worried about—the jury sees an earnest young man with a disability, who is being prosecuted for what is essentially a good deed.

“Furthermore, because he was injured, it might be difficult for the prosecution to argue that what he did wasn’t self-defense. We may end up negotiating for an obstruction of justice charge or a mayhem charge. Worst-case scenario, manslaughter.”

“Is there any way to get them to lower his bail?” I let Bill ask, even though we’d stayed up a ridiculous number of nights trying to figure out how to scrape together the bond money. We couldn’t.

“Not while he’s charged with three counts of murder. They know they can’t convict on that, but it keeps him locked up until the trial.”

Just hearing it said—murder—made me sick.

I held out hope that we could reach a plea deal that would allow Gentry to serve his time in a mental health facility. Anything to keep him out of prison. While he was awaiting trial, he was housed at the county jail, but several times they took him to a diagnostic facility to assess whether he was competent to stand trial. Of course, he understood what he’d done was against the law, but according to Ms. Howell, the prosecutor worried there might be room for a diminished capacity plea, because of his voices.

In the end, I wouldn’t have to hear murder again, because Ms. Howell negotiated a plea deal. One count of obstruction of justice and two counts of assault with a deadly weapon, which meant Gentry wouldn’t have a felony on his record. As part of that deal, Gentry would go to the state hospital, rather than to prison.