When the neighbors heard the gunshot, they thought it was a tire blowing out on the road. By the time anyone reached the farmhouse, Merritt was already gone. Her body lay slumped against the doorframe, a dark pool of blood beside her.
– – –
When Merritt left the firm, people said a skilled woman like her was retiring far too early. She corrected them: “I’m not retiring. Just changing scenery!”
At 63, she earned the right to be playful with her words.
Her colleagues sent her ornate fruit baskets and expensive wine bottles wrapped with silk bows. The other partners gave long speeches about “a career marked by brilliance and integrity.”
She liked that word — integrity. It had followed her all her life, like a well-behaved dog that had learned to obey her tone. She had built her career on precision. Judges admired her confidence; juries admired her charm. And she admired herself most of all.
When she left the firm, she moved to the countryside — “for peace,” she said. So she bought 20 acres, a farmhouse, and six chickens. The house leaned a little to one side, like it was thinking of something else. Something about the slant reminded her of herself.
She planted tomatoes, painted the porch, even named the chickens — not after clients or judges, but after authors: Joan, Eliot, Zadie, Agatha, Herman, and Franz.
Her neighbors adored her. She fixed their fences, baked lemon bars for them, and laughed at their unfunny jokes. She was clever, alert, and a pleasant person to be around. When they asked what she used to do, she simply said “law” and quickly changed the subject. They assumed she’d done good work, sought justice. She didn’t correct them.
– – –
One spring morning, a rundown white pick-up truck rattled up the dirt drive. The man who stepped out wore a knockoff Carhartt work jacket and a baseball cap. Thin, mid-forties or fifties, with tired eyes and unshaved stubble on his chin.
“Merritt?” He knocked once.
She opened the door and smiled. “That’s me.”
He looked past her into the house. “You don’t remember me,” he said, more as a statement than a question. “My father knew you. Calvin Deacon.”
The name pulled something loose in her memory — a product liability case, early 2000s. She’d won that one. The company she represented had stayed solvent while Deacon’s factory had folded. Dozens laid off. One suicide, if she recalled. A small tragedy, but inevitable.
“Of course,” she said brightly, almost with maternal warmth. “I remember all my cases.”
“You’ve ended lives, Merritt,” he said. His jaw tightened. “Not just my father’s, but hundreds more. I looked into you, and I know what you do.”
She blinked once, slow, but her gaze was level. “I didn’t end anyone. I won. Truth is a tool, and if that means a few documents disappear along the way or a witness changes their statement… that’s not corruption. It’s skill. Every verdict costs something, and I did what I had to.”
He laughed dryly. “So will I,” he said.
The man’s hand reached into his jacket pocket. The gun appeared like punctuation, a sentence ending itself. A small, black shape that looked oddly delicate in his shaking hand.
“Wait,” Merritt said, not from fear but the old reflex: object, stall, find the argument that bends the world back to your side.
But there was no jury here, and the man did not wait. The gun fired once.
For a moment she stayed upright, the way guilty people sometimes do, unwilling to concede. Then the world tilted — porch, sky, chicken wings.
The bullet struck below her sternum, fracturing ribs, puncturing her liver, splitting bone and muscle, driving through tissue with perfect and unarguable logic. She’d always admired precision.
Time slowed the way it does in court, just before the verdict. She knew she was going to die. She thought her life would flash before her eyes like in the movies — the grateful clients, the applause. But instead came fragments.
The voice of her former husband, before he left for good: “You destroyed them.”
“Someone had to win, and I made it me.”
“You sound like God.”
Then, the courtroom. Her hand raised, swearing truth she’d already decided. A witness trembling. A signature forged in intent if not in ink. The widow outside the courthouse steps. A child clutching a newspaper with Merritt’s face above the fold. Each image was a piece of evidence, her own cross-examination.
She hadn’t moved to the country for peace. She’d come there to escape the journalists, the investigations, the whispers that one of her last cases might not hold up if reopened. A witness had recanted. A damning memo had surfaced. The firm had settled quietly, but the truth had not.
She thought of all her verdicts, each one a seed sown in poisoned soil. Her whole career had been a field of half-truths that bore fruit only she could stomach. And now, she thought, the harvest had come.
Her neighbors would tell the story differently. They would say she was kind and generous. They would say her death was senseless.
Inside the house, the phone rang until it went to voicemail: “Hello, this is The Chronicle newspaper. We’ve obtained documents that suggest you withheld key evidence in the Barrow case. I’d appreciate a comment before we publish.”
But Merritt, composed and admired to the end, would never return that call.
Above her, the wind chime let out a faint metallic note, a gavel closing court. And in the dirt below, the dark pool of her spilled blood seeped into the roots of her tomato plants, promising a fine yield.
By summer, they would bear heavy fruit. Red, ripe, and gleaming like truth finally unearthed. The neighbors would marvel and say the soil here must be special.
And they would eat the sweet sun-warm tomatoes because justice, like the earth, always feeds. God watched quietly, for Merritt already played His part.
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