Chapter 22 — The Sentencing

The legal storm took the better part of a year.

Truett Rennick was charged with the old crimes and the new ones both — the false imprisonment, the staged death, the fraud, the decades of it.

He turned on my mother to save himself, and my sister turned once the case against her was plain, and in the end my mother was the last to give anything up, refusing to confess until the recovered evidence made confession beside the point.

Brigitte took a plea.

My mother was tried.