Early in the morning of New Year’s Eve, six people gathered in the chambers of a retired judge. The chambers overlooked the courthouse parking lot and, beyond that, the quadrangle of office buildings and bare maples that made up the county seat. Snow materialized in the sky, and a cold wind chased ice crystals across the gray landscape.
“No need to stand on ceremony,” said Ole Swenson, stiff in the dark three-piece suit he wore for special occasions, which at his age were mainly funerals. “The stuff will only go to waste if we don’t dig in.”
The stuff was a continental breakfast: a tray of quartered bagels, a plate of assorted donuts, two boxes of coffee, pints of milk and cream, a tub of butter. A pair of court officers glanced at each other. The administrative judge, sleek in his black robe, turned back toward the window and cupped his hand on the frosty glass. A custodian, trapped here when he barged into chambers to collect yesterday’s trash, jammed his dust rag into the back pocket of his cover-alls.
“Well, I’m not shy,” said Peg Swenson, resplendent in a red dress. She poured coffee into a cup, tipped in some cream, and slid half a bagel onto a paper plate.
With that, the atmosphere in chambers changed from the funereal to the convivial. The court officers detached themselves from their positions near the bookcase and each grabbed a donut. The custodian fixed himself a cup of coffee. Ole bellied up to the spread, pondering the relative merits of cream over milk.
“He’s here,” the administrative judge announced.
Ole joined him at the window in time to see a dark sedan crossing the parking lot.
“Are you sure that’s him?” he said.
“Who else can it be?” said the AJ.
The atmosphere in chambers turned somber again. No one else poured coffee; no one else grabbed a bagel or a donut. Peg Swenson relinquished her cup and plate and sought her husband’s side. A moment later, the courier blew into chambers.
“Sorry for the delay,” he said. “Weather is much worse up there.”
Up there was the state capital, a two-hour drive when the weather was good. The courier handed a long cardboard cylinder to the AJ, watched him extricate the curled-up parchment, then took his leave. The AJ, in the manner of a town crier, unfurled the parchment from top to bottom and read every word aloud.
“And on that note,” he wound up.
One of the court officers produced a Bible, and the small group organized around him: the AJ to the left and Ole to the right with Peg beside him.
***
The induction of Ole Swenson as a county court judge for a term that would last one day sounded like a basic political scam. Ole had worked his entire legal career as law clerk for several judges. He earned an impeccable reputation for his equable temperament, supple intellect, and keen legal reasoning. Many times over those many years, people he respected told him that he “should become a judge.” He tried on several occasions, tossing his hat into the ring during a succession of nominating seasons. But the process – a dirty political process even in this county of tidy towns and patchwork farms – roiled his equable temperament, insulted his supple intellect, and defied not only his keen legal reasoning but also his sense of justice as incompetent lawyers and political hacks breezed past him onto the bench. And so he resigned himself to his law clerk’s lot, working invisibly behind the scenes, ghost-writing decisions and feathering his reputation among those whose opinions mattered. The years passed, and then, early in the year he turned seventy, he began to plan for retirement.
He started his final bid for a judgeship as a joke, but a joke that he knew had legs. If he could be appointed as a judge, even for one day, he would end his long court career with a judicial flourish. Beyond that, his single day as a judge would qualify him to be a judicial hearing officer, a cushy appointment reserved only for retired judges.
The joke circulated the courthouse, caught the attention of the local political boss, then floated up to the capital, where it reached the ears of the governor. The story of the eternally loyal law clerk named Ole resonated in those ears, and over the course of the summer and into the fall, a plan took shape. Ole’s judge, having reached mandatory retirement age, agreed to step down on December 30 instead of close of business on December 31. This “early” retirement created a vacant judgeship for a single day, to which the governor appointed Ole. It was the official certificate of appointment that the courier delivered to the courthouse.
***
Ole leaned back in the big leather chair and loosened his belt a notch. He had eaten two jelly donuts and drank three cups of coffee.
“Leave that,” he said. “Come. Sit down.”
Peg dropped a pile of dirty plates and crumpled napkins into the trash basket, then sat opposite her husband.
“So that was it, huh?” she said. “Three spectators, one here by accident. Coffee, bagels, and donuts. Forty-five years being the good soldier and you get eight hours as a judge.”
“A fast finish forgives a multitude of sins,” said Ole.
“Such as?” Peg arched an eyebrow. She had been against this whole ruse from the start, told Ole it would destroy his standing in the community, cited it as the reason she avoided the November high tea at the Women’s Club and refused to volunteer for the American Legion’s holiday boutique.
“It’s only an expression,” said Ole.
“I just don’t see how you can let yourself be played as a fool so all these other people can feel good about themselves.”
“I told you…”
“Yes. You told me how this qualifies you to be a judicial hearing officer. For what? So the real judges can knock off work early and play golf while you continue to handle their cases?”
Ole said nothing. Twice, maybe three times during the last few months, he had come close to confessing the true reason for his one day on the bench. Confessing now would be a mistake.
“I just don’t see how you can be so forgiving,” Peg added.
“I’m not,” said Ole.
Peg got up and went back to cleaning as if the mess were to blame.
“So what are you going to do today, Judge Swenson?”
“Sit behind this desk that never was mine and reminisce about things that might have been.”
Peg froze for a moment before dropping the last of the coffee cups into the trash.
“What time shall I pick you up?” she said.
“Five,” said Ole. “I plan to serve out my entire term. I don’t want anyone accusing me of leaving early on the taxpayer’s dime.”
***
For all of the many years that Ole served as a law clerk he lugged a briefcase from home to the courthouse and back again. Early on, the briefcase carried little of consequence: a sandwich, a bag of chips, two cookies wrapped in a napkin, maybe a magazine to divert his mind as he ate lunch at his desk. Later, as his reputation grew and the judges piled on the responsibilities, Ole used that briefcase to ferry work to and from home. The kids were in their early teens then – Jake the older and Krissy two years behind – and Ole took over an extra bedroom that once housed their toys and transformed it into a study. It was the quiet place where Daddy worked on his cases and therefore was off-limits. No toys, no school projects, no popping in without a knock. Now that it was just the two of them, the study was a place where Peg refused to tread.
After Peg departed chambers, Ole opened his briefcase. It held no food and it held no work, but instead was crammed with brass statuettes, glass paperweights, and commemorative ashtrays that collected dust on his desk at home. He set these and the framed photos of Peg and the kids on the chambers desk and moved them here and there until the arrangement felt right. It might have seemed silly to carry in all these knick-knacks and arrange them so carefully for a mere few hours. But he was a judge now, and this was his chambers, and he planned on treating today as if it were his first of many days on the bench rather than his first, last, and only.
The retired judge had left behind a stack of papers for Ole to handle: trial subpoenas, stipulations of settlement, routine court orders. Leaving behind these papers was part of the deal as well. Each paper Ole signed became a court document, permanent proof not only that Ole had become a judge but also that he had judged.
Ole signed the papers and placed them in a basket on the small table just inside the chambers door for a court officer to carry down to the clerk’s office for filing. Possibly today, more likely after the first of the year. Ole paced chambers, looked out the window at the thickening snow, hovered over the remaining donuts. Ten o’clock came. Seven hours left in his term. He opened the file cabinet where, years ago, he had organized the folders of blank legal forms into alphabetical order. What he needed was under “B.”
***
As Ole grew older he developed a philosophical aversion to wishing away time. That changed the moment he signed the bring-down order and dispatched a scanned version by e-mail over the official courthouse server. The two-hour turnaround seemed like a trivial amount of time, but on this day made up a significant chunk of his judicial career. Still, he wished it away.
The snow strengthened. Drifts piled up in the empty parking lot. Beyond, the maples turned ghostly, while the brick office buildings hovered on the edge of visibility. Peg phoned near noon to say that she had assembled a special lunch to bring to the courthouse, but decided the roads were too risky to drive.
“No matter,” said Ole, understanding Peg’s attempt to make up for her harsh words. “But I appreciate the thought.”
Five minutes after the call ended, an unmarked blue van with snow caking the steel grids on its side and rear windows swung into the parking lot and stopped broadside near the back door of the courthouse. Two men in dark blue, their bodies thickened by bullet-proof vests, jumped out. They slid open a side door, and two more men in dark blue pushed out a third man in an orange jumpsuit. The man in orange bent at the waist to slacken the chains that ran from his cuffed wrists to his shackled ankles. He shuffled furiously as the men prodded him through the snow.
***
“We’ll be right outside if you need us,” said one of the guards.
“I understand,” said Ole. “Thanks, guys.”
He waited for the last of them to file out, then swung the chambers door shut. The man in the orange jumpsuit sat in the chair where the guards had shoved him. He leaned forward, elbows on knees.
Ole walked around and behind the big desk for his first full-on look at the man. With his wizened face, scraggly gray hair, and long teeth, he looked about ten years older than Ole. But Ole knew, because he knew every pertinent fact about the man, that they were born in the same year.
The man sniffled, watery snot running under his nose. He tried to lift his sleeves high enough to wipe it, but the chains stopped him.
Ole pulled a tissue from a box, leaned over the desk, and floated the tissue onto the man’s hands. There was enough slack in the chains for him to dab his upper lip.
“Just drop it on the floor when you’re done,” said Ole. “Good. Now. Do you know why you’re here?”
“Guards hauled me out of the yard, dragged me to the van, didn’t tell me till we were halfway here that some judge signed an order.”
“I’m the judge,” said Ole. He spread his hands to emphasize these were his chambers. “And the order is called a bring-down order. That’s…”
“I know what a bring-down order is. It’s what some damn judge signed every damn time the DA’s office filed a new case against me so I could hear the charges and make my plea.” The man looked around as if expecting people to pop out of the corners. “But there can’t be any other cases.”
“Correct,” said Ole. “No more cases. One of those judges issued a ruling that foreclosed any further cases against you.”
“So what am I here for?” said the man.
Ole lifted his briefcase onto the desk. In addition to the knick-knacks, the briefcase contained a file folder. Ole put on his reading glasses and paged through the file. It wasn’t a case file; it wasn’t anything legal at all. It was a collection of handwritten notes and a bunch of yellowed articles and blurry photographs clipped from old newspapers. He stopped at a photo showing a much younger version of the man wearing a baseball cap and slumped in the back seat of a police cruiser.
“To talk,” said Ole.
“I have nothing to say to you,” said the man.
Ole looked over the tops of his glasses and summoned his most baleful stare. The man barely cringed.
“My name is Ole Swenson. Judge Ole Swenson. Does that name mean anything to you?”
“You’re just some judge who signed an order. What? I’m supposed to know you?”
“How about Kristine Swenson? Went by the name Krissy.”
“Never heard of her,” said the man. He squirmed in the chair, but more out of impatience than any nervousness brought on by recognition or guilt.
Ole drummed his fingers on the desk. He had seen countless criminal defendants who believed they could stonewall the legal process simply by clamming up.
“Well, let me tell you about Krissy.” Ole tossed his glasses onto the old newspaper photo. “She was a good kid. Popular, straight A student, tremendous athlete. A kid who was going places, a kid who would make her mark in the world, a kid who would make her parents proud. You know the type.”
The man said nothing.
“Then ninth grade happened,” said Ole. “Ninth grade is a funny time for girls. Some look like they are still in middle school, others can pass for college co-eds. And just as they’re different on the outside, they’re different here, too.”
Ole tapped a finger to his temple.
“Self-confidence, self-esteem, maturity. These are complicated matters for ninth grade girls. Some blossom, some shrink. Some blossom and then they shrink. That was Krissy. She thrived that fall and winter. Good grades, star of the freshman volleyball team, captain of the freshman basketball team. But then came the spring, and she went into a tailspin. Her grades dropped. She quit the softball team. She fell out of touch with her friends.
“Her mother and I were confused. Krissy always had been able to handle everything, and now it seemed like she couldn’t handle anything. Our friends told us that ninth grade takes a toll on girls. At that age, they are not ready for the social scene, not ready for the boys, not quite sure who they are or where they stand. We needed to be patient and let her work things through. We might never learn the cause of her angst. One day it would just go away.
“Our friends were right. By next fall Krissy seemed her old self again. She didn’t go back to sports, but her grades rebounded, and her mother and I explained to ourselves that she just needed to re-order her priorities. That terrible spring was soon forgotten.
“Forgotten, as it turned out, but not gone. It stayed with her, beneath the surface, like a crack in a wall that you can patch and re-patch but never goes away because some cracks are forever.
“Well, she went to college, graduated with honors, got a good job, lived in an apartment with a lake view, had a boyfriend. Her mother and I happened to visit her the weekend after you were arrested. We didn’t rush to judgment about the beloved coach accused of such terrible crimes. He was your softball coach, wasn’t he? we asked. We weren’t even sure.
“The big things don’t happen right away. They gather and gather and one day they just break right over you. That’s the way it was with Krissy. The boyfriend disappeared. The job started not to go so well. The apartment turned shabby. In other words, that crack from long ago began to show through. And then we got the call that she was in the hospital with slits on both wrists. That’s when she finally told us what happened in the early spring of ninth grade.
“After she got out of the hospital and we took her back home, we all met with the DA. Krissy told a precisely detailed story: the date, the time, the weather conditions. How you kept her out on the field slinging those windmill pitches until it was too dark to see, then asked her to help you drag in the duffel bag full of baseball bats and the wire basket full of softballs. How you made sure that she was the only girl left in the showers when you walked in.
“The DA listened politely, I might even say sympathetically. But what he told us at the end was no-can-do. You’d already been tried, convicted, and sentenced on complaints filed by four girls who preceded Krissy. You were serving four consecutive life sentences. There was no money left in the county budget for a fifth conviction, no compelling need to waste the time and effort to add to a sentence that already guaranteed you’d never see the outside world.
“And so here we are. The timing is a bit off. Well, more than a bit. Years, really. But I arranged this as early as I could.”
Ole lifted one of the framed photos off the desk. It showed Krissy as an eighth grade girl. She wore a green jersey, a matching ball cap, a long flowing ponytail. A gleaming aluminum softball bat rested on her shoulder. And she was smiling. Ole’s eyes began to well up. He blinked them dry, then turned the photo so that it faced the man in the orange jumpsuit.
“I want you to confess what you did,” said Ole. He walked around the desk, sat on the front edge, and set the photo beside him. “Then I want you to apologize to her.”
He folded his arms across his chest, folksy but firm.
“That’s it?” said the man.
“That’s it,” said Ole.
“And then what?”
“And then the guards take you back to that shit hole where you belong.”
The man in the orange jumpsuit narrowed his eyes and tightened his lips and nodded his head as if thinking on Ole’s demand.
“I’ll tell you what you’ll get from me,” he finally said. “You’ll get nothing. I don’t know that girl. I don’t remember that girl. She’s just another one whose life didn’t pan out the way she expected and needs to blame it on me so I can bear away her sins.”
“You won’t confess?” said Ole. He pushed off the desk. “You won’t apologize?”
“Confess to what? Apologize for what? I did nothing to her.”
Ole reared back and slapped the man across the face. He felt the meat of his palm meet the flat of the man’s cheek. He felt the knob of his wrist strike the point of the man’s jaw. He heard a crack and felt a crunch in the instant before a sharp pain shot up his arm and into his shoulder. His vision blurred. His knees weakened to the point of collapse. He slumped against the desk, holding his bad wrist in his good hand, then staggered into the chambers lavatory. He stood at the sink and looked into the mirror. His face was a red and splotchy watercolor version of itself. His wrist, already black and blue, was twice its normal size. He ran cold water on his wrist, then undid his tie and fashioned a crude sling by tying it end to end.
Back in chambers, the man in the orange jumpsuit sat impassively in the chair. Ole opened the chambers door, and in the corridor outside, the four guards snapped to attention.
“We’re finished,” said Ole.
The guards yanked the man out of the chair and dragged him into the corridor. None of them acknowledged Ole’s red face, his watery eyes, his limp arm in the makeshift sling.
Ole closed the door behind them. He sat in his chair and lowered his head to the desk. On his lap, his wrist throbbed. Through the muffling snowfall, he heard the van doors slam, the engine fire up, the van churn away in the snow. The sound of the engine faded, but not completely. He worried that the sound might stick in his ears forever. The phone chased it away.
“The roads are clear,” said Peg. “Are you still staying till five?”
“On the dot,” said Ole. “Just pull up to the back door and wait for me. I’ll come out.”
***
During the brief period between the first and last attempts, Krissy, Peg, and Ole were in therapy together. The therapist cautioned that they could not rewrite the past, could not undo what had been done. Instead, they needed to get beyond it. They each, in their own way, needed closure.
Closure. It was a word the therapist held out as some sort of holy grail. To Ole, the concept was just as mythical. He was a creature of the courtroom, not of the therapist’s couch. For him, there were always two adversaries, each vying to vanquish the other.
At 4:30, Ole began the arduous task of returning the photos and knick-knacks to his briefcase. His broken wrist hurt like hell, and he whimpered as each little movement fired up more pain and loosened more horrible memories. This one day on the bench had become his holy grail, but ultimately had proven nothing except that he was the same failure as a judge as he had been as a husband and father.
At five o’clock, Ole stood inside the back door of the courthouse, his briefcase hanging by its shoulder strap to act as a sling. The snow had stopped, and through the bare maples patches of blue appeared on the horizon. Peg’s car bumped into the parking lot and slid to a stop exactly where the blue van had stopped so many hours before. Ole ventured out into the cold. He heard the car doors unlock and eased into the passenger seat while drawing the briefcase onto his lap to hide his pain.
“How was your afternoon, Judge?”
“More difficult than I expected.”
He tried to close the door, but the pain was so intense that he needed to reach across himself with his good hand.
“Ole, what’s wrong?”
“I broke my wrist,” he said.
“How in God’s name did you break your wrist?”
Ole whimpered quietly and then, in a rush, confessed the real reason he maneuvered to become a judge for this single day of days, how his grand scheme had failed so miserably, and how by striking that man across the face he had reduced himself to a weak, pitiful monster.
He denied it,” Ole blubbered. “He denied everything. About himself, about what he did, about Krissy.”
“He would do that,” said Peg. “Of course he would do that.”
“I know, Peg. I know. But something else scares me more than what happened,” said Ole. “What if it never did?”
Bio: Kevin Egan is the author of eight novels, including Midnight, a Kirkus Best Book of 2013. His thirty-plus short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Mystery Tribune, The Westchester Review, and Rosebud.
