Double Jeopardy

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It’s not what we don’t know that hurts.

It’s what we know that ain’t so.

—WILL ROGERS

Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.

—THOMAS JONES

SUNDAY

April 14

1

11:55 P.M.

THOMAS J. SEACREST, ESQ., kicked the sand on the north bank of Lake Palestine. According to the fluorescent-tipped hands on his new Fossil wristwatch, it was almost midnight, the appointed time. He looked all around, but he couldn’t see anyone. The night was pitch-black; the moon was hidden behind a dense cloud bank.

Seacrest harbored a terrible, humiliating secret: he was afraid of the dark. He had hated the dark when he was a boy, and he still hated it now, when he was thirty-two. He supposed in some respects boys never grow up, never overcome those primitive fears. Even though he knew of no legitimate cause for alarm, his hands shook and the short hairs on the back of his neck stood erect.

He lit a cigarette. That helped a little. The comfort did not come from the nicotine rush. In fact, Seacrest despised cigarettes almost as much as he despised the dark. The small, cold comfort came from the tiny glow given off by the burning ash.

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