“I hope so.” Anna smiled. “I should get to bed, huh?”
“Yes. Good night.” Maggie kissed Anna on the cheek, but she was wondering what to do about Noah.
Chapter Twenty-three
Noah, After
TRIAL, DAY 5
The courtroom fell silent as the 911 audiotape reverberated through the speakers:
This is 911, what is your emergency?
My stepdaughter isn’t breathing. CPR isn’t working. I’m a doctor but it isn’t working. You’re not supposed to do mouth-to-mouth anymore, are you? Just chest compressions?
Yes, just chest compressions, Doctor. Is there any injury? What happened?
I think she’s been strangled. Please send an ambulance. The address is 460 Howell Road.
It’s on its way. Keep up the compressions. How old is your daughter?
Stepdaughter. She’s seventeen. The compressions aren’t working. I think I’m pressing hard enough. Listen, is the ambulance on its way?
Yes, it’s en route. Stay on the phone with me. I’ll talk you through it—
I can’t, I have to go. I can’t stay on the phone and do the compressions. Please send the ambulance. Thank you.
Noah didn’t remember the tape sounding this bad when Thomas had introduced it during direct testimony, because Thomas had set it up the way they’d planned. But now Noah was hearing it through Maggie’s ears. He couldn’t see her in the gallery, but he knew this would be killing her.
“Dr. Alderman, let’s circle back to the moment that you discover the body of your stepdaughter, strangled on your porch. You must have been shocked by that awful sight, were you not?”
“Yes.”
“And surely you were horrified, were you not?”
“Yes.”
“And you must’ve been grief-stricken upon realizing that such a young girl, your own stepdaughter, was dead, were you not?”
“Yes.”
“But you expressed none of those emotions in the 911 tape, did you?”
Noah hesitated. “No.”
Linda half-smiled. “There’s no excited utterance of the type one would expect from a shocked, horrified, and grief-stricken stepfather, is there?”
“Well, no.”
“You didn’t say, ‘oh my God!’ or ‘oh no!’, did you?”
“No.”
“You didn’t cry, did you?”
“No.”
“You spoke in complete sentences, did you not?”
