If the Witness Lied Read Online Free PDF Page A

…”
    Somehow what? It’ll be all right? It won’t be all right, and they know it.
    Smithy was grateful for the train that took her away. A boarding school is designed to keep students too busy to get homesick. Smithy hadn’t given her family a thought until yesterday. Dad’s birthday.
    Thinking about Dad is the hardest thing in the whole world. Except for thinking about Mom. And now Dr. Dresser brings up the tough months: the months with Thanksgiving and Christmas. Thanksgiving for home; Christmas for love. The two things Smithy has abandoned.
    Kate talks of Thanksgiving food. Of mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie.
    I have to go home, thinks Smithy.
    And then, rushing over her, strong as tides or gales, is miraculous knowledge. She
wants
to go home.
    *   *   *
    Jack cannot feel a heartbeat in his own chest. His lungs are not inflating. His eyes are not blinking.
    On the other side of the wall, the television still murmuring beside her, Aunt Cheryl’s voice rises with excitement. “When do we start?”
    “The anniversaries are coming up. We have to capitalize on that.”
    So the media never even knew about Dad’s birthday. All Jack’s anxiety yesterday was pointless. This man means the day Laura Fountain died for her child and the day Reed Fountain died because of that child. They are both winter days, cold days that get dark early.
    Jack’s body has begun to tremble, like one of those old, old people with thin white hair and spots on the back of their hands who sit silently shuddering to themselves.
    “We should start filming immediately. And there’s the nice coincidence of Tris’s third birthday. Are you planning a big party? Do you have a theme?” The man chuckles. “Patricide?” he says. “No, no, just kidding.”
    But he is not kidding.
    Tris will be frozen in time. Frozen, with his crime in his little hand. There will be no escape. Not now. Not next year. Notwhen Tris is a teenager or a grown-up. He will be a piece of television, dragged out whenever they need a shocking example.
    Back when Mom made her fatal decision, the world grabbed hold of it. Jack never figured out how that happened. Overnight she was the flashpoint of a controversy. There were networks and media all over the place. They parked in the yard, they rapped on the door, they phoned, they filmed. Against their will, the Fountain family was on national television and in national magazines, the subject of blogs and editorials and talk shows.
    At school, Jack was regarded with envy. His classmates saw glamour and the possibility of fame.
    Jack struggles to breathe. Thinking this through will require oxygen.
    The producer in his living room will love it if Jack charges in, protesting and yelling. The guy probably travels with a mini-cam so he can snatch up chance encounters and add them to his arsenal.
    Because this is war. A battle waged against a three-year-old.
    And the Tris protection team is small and weak.

K ATE DANCES ALONGSIDE S MITHY . K ATE’S BODY IS ALWAYS BUSY . She taps, leaps, turns, whirls. She’s the ballerina inside the jewelry box, always wound up.
    Kate and Smithy are a good pair, the way Smithy once was with Diana Murray. Madison is the sister who is Diana’s age, but Smithy is the sister who became Diana’s best friend. Smithy spent her life racing across yards, pounding up the wooden steps of the Murrays’ back deck and in the back door, shouting hello to Mrs. Murray, eternally at her computer, and racing up to Diana’s room.
    Smithy has never mentioned Diana to Kate.
    “Second breakfast?” asks her roommate. Kate is as thin as a bookmark, but always consumes a double breakfast. At her first breakfast, she has a glass of orange juice and toast with peanut butter. Now she will have cold cereal. She will spend an amazing amount of time studying the cereal choices.
    Smithy finds herself stranded in front of shiny many-slicetoasters in which she is not toasting anything, because she can’t remember how