The Manhattan Hunt Club Read Online Free PDF Page A

family, sitting on the other side of the courtroom behind the prosecution table. His parents’ smiles had been countered by their looks of pure hatred. Though his parents appeared shocked by his conviction, Jeff had felt only a numb sense that the verdict was inevitable, that his nightmare was never going to end.
    Now, as he waited for the final phase of his trial to begin, he tried to summon up some shred of hope, but found nothing.
    Where his body had once been full of energy, it now seemed exhausted. At twenty-three, he felt like an old man.
    Where six months ago his life had stretched before him like a landscape with limitless horizons to explore, now all he could see ahead were endless days confined within the bars of a prison cell.
    That morning, when he had looked in one of the worn pieces of polished metal that served as a mirror in the building known as the Tombs, he found himself staring for a long time at the pallor of his face, the gauntness of his neck and chest, and the dark rings of exhaustion around his eyes.
I look like what they think I am,
he’d thought.
I look like I belong in prison.
    The door leading to the courtroom opened then, and Sam Weisman appeared. In the months since his trial began, Jeff had learned to read more from his lawyer’s posture and expression than from what he said. At sixty, Weisman’s thick hair was snowy white, and his shoulders tended to sag as if carrying the weight of every case he had handled. “They’re ready,” he said, and though his tone was neutral, there was something in his stance that made Jeff wonder if, finally, something good might be about to happen.
    “What’s going on, Sam?” he asked as the correction officer unlocked the gate of the cage and swung the barred door open.
    Weisman hesitated, as if weighing his response, but then simply shrugged. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I’ve just got a feeling, you know?”
    The brief flicker of hope faded as quickly as it had flared up. Sam Weisman had had a “feeling” when the jury stayed out for more than one day, and he’d had a “feeling” when they filed back into the jury box the following afternoon. The jury had found him guilty on every count he’d been charged with.
    So much for Sam Weisman’s “feelings.”
    Now, with the cuffs removed from his wrists, Jeff stepped through the door and into the courtroom, Sam Weisman right behind him.
    Jeff felt suddenly disoriented. They were all there—the prosecutors at their table, Sam Weisman’s assistant at the one next to it.
    The same people sat on the spectators’ benches—his parents behind the defense table, and Cynthia Allen’s parents behind the prosecutor’s. The same smattering of reporters who had covered the trial were in the rear, present now to witness the final act.
    And Heather Randall was sitting by herself at the end of the bench his parents occupied, just as she had every day of the trial.
    “Why don’t you sit with my folks?” he’d asked when she visited him after the first long day in court. Heather had shrugged noncommittally, and the impenetrable look she always adopted when she was hiding something dropped over her face. He realized that he knew the answer to his own question. “Dad’s blaming you, isn’t he? He thinks that if it hadn’t been for you, I would have stayed in Bridgehampton.”
    “Wouldn’t you have?” she asked.
    Jeff shook his head. “He might as well blame Mom—she’s the one who made sure I went away to college.”
    “Easier to blame the summer people,” Heather replied. “And God knows, as far as your father’s concerned, that’s all I’ll ever be.”
    “He’ll change his mind. When all this is over, he’ll see.”
    And now, this morning, it
was
all over, but obviously Keith Converse had not changed his mind.
    One thing in the courtroom was different today, though: except for the day she had testified, this was the first time Cynthia Allen was present. Looking diminished and