The Code of the Hills by Nancy Allen Page A

the girl knew better than to resist. Donita felt her failure, carried it around her neck like the oxen’s yoke.
    She taught them her mother’s lesson: that it had to be kept secret, that it was just something men did, and that it must be kept within the family circle, never to be spoken of to others.
    â€œThink about something else,” she’d whisper to her girls. “Think about something nice.” She didn’t tell them to think about heaven. She parted with her mother’s example on that score. Donita wasn’t too certain that she could count on the existence of a heaven, or that she would get in if there was one.
    But she was a better mother than her own, she believed. She never pushed them away when they wanted to come to her. She would comfort them. Give them some sugar. Share a cigarette, give a squeeze.
    She would stroke Charlene’s back as the girl shuddered. “Think about ice cream,” Donita would urge.
    But Char didn’t cry no more. Not for a long time.
    Donita stubbed out the cigarette in the sink. Things would get better. She would see to it.

Chapter Six
    O N T UESDAY, IN Associate Division 3, Elsie spent the morning trying traffic cases and negotiating plea bargains with defense attorneys. She had to exercise control to keep from snapping at the lawyers. She was morose, still smarting from Noah’s failure to appear the day before.
    The afternoon docket was devoted to preliminary hearings in felony cases. Sitting at the courtroom counsel table, she studied a witness statement intently, and scribbled direct examination questions on her yellow legal pad. She had a three o’clock preliminary hearing in a first degree robbery case, for which she was thoroughly prepared; she had conducted phone interviews of the convenience store witnesses on Monday night, after her dinner date didn’t show up. Checking her watch, she gauged the amount of time she had before her witnesses appeared.
    Moses Carter, judge of Associate Division 3, was still in chambers, which suited Elsie just fine. Judge Carter was not fond of her, though not because of her courtroom performance or demeanor. She’d had the misfortune of walking in on the judge enjoying the charms of a municipal clerk at the county Christmas party a year ago, and since that time he’d refused to look her in the eye.
    The party had begun as a quiet affair, centered around a bowl of Hawaiian punch mixed with ginger ale and a platter of stale sugar cookies. Courthouse personnel, looking ragged from the demands of the holidays, chatted listlessly. Elsie was gearing up to make her getaway.
    But after a rascal in the county commissioners’ office added a bottle of Everclear to the punch bowl, the party took off. Crusty clerics melted into belles, and courthouse stalwarts who hadn’t cracked a smile in years roared with hilarity. Elsie, partaking of the spiked punch bowl, decided it would be good fun to take off her bra and wave it like a flag. But when she stepped into a utility closet to disrobe, she stumbled onto Judge Carter, reaching a climax in the arms of a woman who was not his wife.
    Since then her relationship with the judge had been severely strained.
    Worse, he tended to rule against her, given the opportunity. As a result, she always prepared her cases with particular care when appearing in Associate Division 3.
    Elsie toyed with the idea of going downstairs for a Diet Coke, but she’d had one with lunch and she was trying to cut down on aspartame. She couldn’t remember just what the sweetener’s bad properties were, but the evils were formidable, she knew. She’d sworn off diet drinks entirely on New Year’s Day. When her abstinence plan didn’t last twenty-­four hours, she revised her resolution to a single serving per day, and tried to stick to that. Sometimes she succeeded, sometimes she didn’t. Work days were tough. Gotta have some kind of reward system,