Dark Rooms

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“Wouldn’t take no. You know how she is.”

I wanted to shake my head, say, How? But instead I lied, nodded. That familiar feeling of disconnectedness, the sense that people were mysterious to me in a way they weren’t to each other, descended. Before it could turn into full-on depression, I shook it off. Said, “If you’re going to be home tonight, I could help you with your French paper. I know it’s due Monday and—”

“Donnez-moi un break, okay?”

“What do you mean?” I said, surprised. “Why?”

“Because I’m not going to be home tonight.”

I half laughed. Of course she wasn’t going to be. Of course she wasn’t.

“And neither should you,” she added.

“But I always go to bed early the night before a match. You know that. And tomorrow’s is a big one.”

We’d reached Houghton Gymnasium by this time, were standing at the rear of the building, a few feet from the entranceway to the girls’ locker room. It was private here, and the late sun was mild. I tilted my head back to feel its warmth. A faint breeze was on the air, and when it blew, I could hear the clink of rope against metal flagpole. Nica turned to me. Slowly she lifted her right hand, brought it to her left nipple, then shook it rapidly back and forth: titty hard-on. Titty hard-on was a favorite gesture of hers and Maddie’s. It was meant to convey excitement—sexual—but, coupled as it always was with blanked-out eyes and a bored expression, was actually meant to convey the opposite of excitement—of any kind. So, basically, it was a put-down.

“What’s that for?” I asked, hurt.

“You’re already in college, Grace. Have been since forever.”

Not since forever. Since mid-December. I’d applied early decision to Williams. Nica, a junior, would apply to colleges next year. “So?”

“So you have no excuse for being well-rested anymore. Maddie invited you to the party, too, you know.”

Trying to act casual, as if my interest was low, “Maddie said that? She said I was invited?”

“She implied it. Same thing.”

It wasn’t. Not remotely. I flattened the corners of my mouth to show Nica I wasn’t fooled, but otherwise let it go. Then I said, “If you’re not going to the party with Maddie, where are you going?”

“Out.”

“Hot date?”

She smirked.

“Guess you and Jamie are giving it another shot, huh?” Jamie was Jamie Amory, Nica’s boyfriend of two years, her ex-boyfriend of two months.

I tried not to look relieved when she said, irritated, “How many times do I have to tell you? Jamie and I are over.”

“So it’s a mystery man.”

That smirk again.

“Not that much of a mystery. I know he likes to brand his girls.”

It was a shot in the dark, but it hit. Nica’s jaw dropped. “How?”

“X-ray vision,” I said. And when she just looked at me, “I was brushing my teeth this morning. You came out of the shower in a towel. You reached up to open the medicine cabinet. I saw your armpit.” The tattoo inside her armpit, specifically. An arrow, bloody-tipped.

Groaning, she said, “I’m going to have to throw out every bathing suit, tank top, and sleeveless dress I own now, aren’t I?”

“Or stop shaving under your arms.”

“Gross.”

I wanted to ask her who the guy was, but I didn’t want her to tell me only because I’d asked. I looked at her. She was staring off into the distance, worrying a shred of dry skin on her lip with her front tooth, like she was making up her mind about something. There was a shard of gold in her left iris, which, in certain lights and at certain angles, turned the eye from dark hazel to pure green. That was happening now.

Finally, her gaze came back to me. “I probably won’t be in till late tonight. Can you cover for me with Mom and Dad? Tell them I’m staying over at Maddie’s?”

“That depends. Will you answer my questions when you get home?”

She held up her hand, three fingers raised: Scout’s honor.

I pretended to think it over. “Fine,” I said, with a sigh.

She nodded her thanks, then opened the side pocket of her racket bag, pulled out her cigarettes, her zebra-striped Bic.

“Come on, Nica, we’re still at school,” I said, peering around anxiously as she lit up.

She exhaled. “Relax. We’re alone. Want one?”

I made a scoffing noise, a show of waving away her minuscule smoke cloud. “Those things are going to kill you, you know.”

She considered what I’d said, then shrugged. “Like I want to live forever.”

She started laughing. And a second later, to my surprise, I did, too.

I woke up the next morning from a bad dream I couldn’t remember—there and gone, too fast to be pinned down—drenched in sweat, heart pounding. Immediately I was struck by the conviction that something was wrong.

Nica.

I threw off my blanket and ran across the hall, opening her door without knocking. The room was in its usual state of full-scale squalor: unclosed drawers, unclean laundry, undusted surfaces, uncapped pens, lip-gloss tubes, soda and nail-polish bottles. The comforter was pulled down on the bed, and I could see the ghost of Nica’s body imprinted on the sheets, the pillows flat and dented. The fleece I’d borrowed from her earlier in the week, returned yesterday, though, was still at the foot, neatly folded, label facing up, which meant she’d slept someplace else. Looking at it, I told myself what I was feeling was anger. If she got caught by Mom and Dad, she’d not only get herself in trouble, she’d get me in it, too, since I’d lied to cover for her.

I stood there for a minute, absently rotating my shoulder, limber after a night’s rest and pain-free, trying to think what to do next. My cell vibrated in my pocket. I whipped it out, hoping it was her. It wasn’t. Just the weather update I had sent to my phone hourly on game days. No missed calls either, so I called her. Voice mail picked up. At the beep I said, “Thanks a lot, Nica,” in a tone that was angrier than I felt, the anger from before, if anger was ever really what it was, having already dissipated, replaced by unease. But why, I wondered, unease? There wasn’t anything weird or out of character about Nica spending the night in a bed that wasn’t hers. She sneaked out all the time. Maybe then it wasn’t her I was uneasy about. Maybe I was uneasy because I was supposed to play an important match in a couple hours. Telling myself that must have been it—prematch jitters—I slipped a sweater on over my pajamas, headed downstairs.

The house was quiet, and my footfalls seemed to echo on the stairs. I could hear an appliance in the kitchen—the microwave, bleating plaintively because someone stuck something in it, forgot to take the something out. And then another sound—a tapping, faint. Not Dad. He’d be at Chandler, supervising morning detention. Not Mom, either. She’d be in her darkroom, working. Had already been there for hours, no doubt. Besides, this wasn’t her kind of noise. Too furtive, too cautious. There it was again. I stood, rigid, ears aching with the effort of listening. And then, suddenly, I realized: Nica, trying to attract my attention without attracting Mom’s. She wanted me to let her in. I flew down the last step and into the kitchen.

It was empty, no one behind the back door. On the other side of the window above the sink, though, was a slender rhododendron branch, knocking against the pane with the breeze. I stared at it, trying to remember if I’d seen Nica take her keys with her yesterday, until the microwave sounded again, and I reached for its handle. Sitting on the rotating glass tray was the bowl of Grape-Nuts and soy milk Mom ate most mornings. I started for the darkroom, about to duck my head in, tell her breakfast was ready. Then, anticipating the way her face would go hard and flat, the snap of her voice, if I interrupted her, broke her concentration, I stopped. I turned instead to the back door, thinking Nica might be outside, waiting until Mom went upstairs to shower.

But the backyard was as empty as the kitchen, not a soul. It was a beautiful morning, though, the sky a deep blue streaked with wispy white, the sun a rich, buttery yellow. I stood there, the rays gently pressing down on my skin, seeping into it, warming it, and breathed in the daffodil-scented air. Through an open window, the sounds of the Wheelers, our next-door neighbors, eating breakfast floated lazily toward me: the murmur of their voices, Mrs. Wheeler, pregnant, asking Mr. Wheeler to bring her her calcium supplements and a glass of orange juice; the soft scrape of a chair leg against tile; the suctiony pop of a refrigerator door; and then the jounce and slosh of a juice carton being shaken. I could hear the delicate wing beats of the sparrows, fighting for space on the perch of the bird feeder dangling from the yard’s lone tree. Somewhere far away, a car engine revved to life, and, beyond that, the dim drone of a lawn mower.

I started walking through the grass, its sweet-smelling wetness sticking to my ankles and feet, over to the fence at the far edge of the property. Our house was owned by the school, and though not quite on campus, very close to it, separated only by a graveyard and a line of trees. When the trees weren’t full, you could see clear across the graveyard to Endicott House, Jamie’s dorm. They were full now, though, so the view was obscured.

I slid between two posts and entered the tiny woods. As soon as I did, the sunlight and warmth and snatches of family dialogue fell behind me. Inside, everything was green and black and cool and dank, dark with the stench of dampness and shadow, of ferns and fungus. The scrub pines surrounding me had branches growing every which way, tangling together in a sooty snarl that blocked out the sky. Their bark looked mean, rotten, and when I touched it, it crumbled under my fingertips, dry as a scab. Something caught in my throat and I shivered. Wiping my hands on my pajama bottoms, I quickly began walking the thousand or so feet to the other side.

When I reached it, was standing at the edge of the graveyard, I made a scan of the horizon for Nica’s fast-moving form. Many a dawn would she slip out of Endicott in one of Jamie’s sweatshirts, the drawn hood concealing her hair and most of her face. Cutting through the rows of tombstones and markers, she’d steal in our back door, undetected, except by me, watching from my bedroom window. She and Jamie weren’t a couple anymore, but there was a better-than-even chance that the new guy, with whom she’d obviously spent the night, was also in Endicott. That or Minot, the other guys’ dorm.

I didn’t see Nica as I was hoping to, though. Instead, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of movement or color. Only when I turned around, no one was there. Suddenly I noticed how quiet everything had become. Motionless, too, the leaves and trees perfectly still, not so much as a whisper of a breeze on the air. I closed my eyes. My ears filled with the beating of my heart, the in-outs of my breaths, the contraction of my throat muscles—sounds, I realized, that were always there but hidden, tucked away under every other sound—each shift, throb, flutter magnified, made significant, by the deep silence around me. And then a branch snapped and my eyes flew open. Pulling the old cardigan tight around my chest, I turned, started back to the fence.

That’s when I heard the police siren in the distance. It ripped into the morning, tearing it in two. For a moment I froze, transfixed. Then I began to run, but heavily, the way you do in nightmares, my limbs clumsy and strange, my feet sinking into the spongy earth, catching there, everything ground down and in slow-motion, and all at once I understood that I was in a nightmare: last night’s, the one I couldn’t remember but now, suddenly, in flashes, could. Still, I hauled my body along, through the trees, over the fence, toward what I knew—knew because it was there, all of it, in that piercing mechanical wail, knew because it was prophesied in my dream, as elusive as a scent, a shadow, a ghost, knew because it was written in the very blood flowing through my veins—would be as bad as it gets.

As I reached the sidewalk in front of my house, I spotted the cruiser with the siren. It was whipping around the corner of Upham, wide into the right lane of Fiske, rear tire bouncing off the median strip. An unmarked sedan followed seconds later. No swirling cherry lights, but I could tell it was a cop car nonetheless. No mistaking it for anything else. And watching the two vehicles cut sharp rights onto Schofield, the street the graveyard entrance was on, I felt my legs buckling, collapsing beneath me. I dropped first to my knees, then to all fours, the shock of certainty hitting me: Nica was dead.

My sister was dead.

Chapter Two (#u7bbaeee7-3347-57f9-9abe-1963c98dc984)

Nica’s body had been found by Graydon Tullis, a sophomore in Endicott House who’d snuck into the graveyard with a couple of guys from food services to get high before morning detention, the very session my dad was overseeing. Afterward, the food services guys had headed down campus to start their shifts at Stokes Dining Hall, and Graydon had headed east to main campus. He was applying Visine as he walked, chin tilted back, lower lid thumbed down, when he tripped on something, went sprawling into a face-plant. He turned around to investigate, thinking it was a tree root, or one of those baby tombstones your eye can sometimes skip over.

But it wasn’t.

It was a pair of feet in frayed-lace Converse. Slowly Graydon’s gaze traveled upward, all the while the old camp song “Dem Bones”—with the toe bone connected to the foot bone, and the foot bone connected to the ankle bone, and the ankle bone connected to the leg bone … —running through his mind. (A dazed-sounding, pouchy-eyed Graydon told me all this a couple weeks later. Not that I asked. He cornered me as I was ducking out of Stokes, apple in hand, looking for a deserted classroom to eat it in.) And then his gaze arrived at the hipbone connected to the backbone. His first thought was how teeny-tiny the hole was and yet the crazy amount of blood that had leaked from it. His second thought was how the other colors that came out of the body—the greenish beige of snot, the watered-down yellow of pee, the milky off-white of semen—were dull, muted, earth tones. Blood, though, was so vivid. So vivid it looked fake! Like the stuff you squeezed out of a tube on Halloween.

His gaze kept going, up and up and up—with the backbone connected to the shoulder bone, and the shoulder bone connected to the neck bone, and the neck connected to the head bone … —at last reaching the face. The moment he realized who it belonged to was the same moment he realized he could smell the blood as well as see it. All of a sudden, a wave of nausea washed over him, made him vomit (a weak, indefinite brown) where he knelt.

Stumblingly, he ran to my house. He was hysterical, babbling and breathless, but Mom understood him well enough to let him lead her by the hand to the graveyard. She was the one who called 911.

An ambulance arrived only minutes after the police cars. But it was too late. Nica was already gone, a bullet from a .22 lodged deep in her left kidney. Time of death was established as between 6:45 and 7:30 A.M., though she’d likely been shot earlier. The knowledge that it took a while for her to bleed out—hours, possibly—was almost more than I could bear, and I knew if I thought about it, really thought about it, I couldn’t. So I didn’t think about it. Wouldn’t let myself.

It was surprisingly easy not to listen once I set my mind to it. When the details of the murder were told to me, I just sort of let them wash over my brain and out my ears. Which is why I’m not exactly clear on how the police deduced that whoever killed Nica probably wasn’t a stranger to her. But deduce it they did. And when it was discovered that I was the last known person to have seen her alive, they were very eager to talk to me.

Oh, those endless, bleached-out hours going over my story with Detective Ortiz. The stale air of that box of a room at the back of the station, the hard plastic of the chair, the can of Coke gone warm and flat from sitting out too long, me saying the same words in the same order again and again, telling Detective Ortiz everything Nica told me the day before, skipping only the part about the new guy—an omission for Jamie’s sake, it would hurt him to know she’d moved on so fast—just wanting to go to sleep, that total exhaustion, where even my face was numb, and none of the talk mattering anyway because she was already dead dead dead.

Her sophomore year, Nica was named homecoming queen. The victory was a fluke. Not that she wasn’t one of the prettiest girls in school. In fact, she was probably the prettiest. Which should’ve all but killed her chances. A word about Chandler: Chandler, as a school, thought it was too cool for school, too cool for a lot of things. The only way it would deign to participate in any of the traditional rah-rah teen rites of passage was ironically. And Nica, as it so happens, lost the vote. She came in a distant second to Quentin Graham, a Mississippi boy who showed up to class several days a month in a Chanel suit and pillbox hat. But the administration refused to recognize a male, no matter how chicly turned out, as a legitimate contender. (Refused, basically, to recognize the other meaning of the word queen.) And Nica won by default.

It was an utterly forgettable event in her life. She sat next to Mr. McFarlan, the assistant headmaster, wearing a crown—a Burger King one, borrowed for the occasion from Maddie’s boyfriend, Ruben Samuelson—for five minutes at morning chapel the day before alumni weekend. That was it. The only reason the title rates a mention is because it was a detail so seized upon by the media after she died. It put, I think, the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on her loveliness, made it official. Officially poignant, too. And pretty soon it started to seem as if her full name actually was Homecoming Queen Nica Baker.

Edgar Allan Poe, in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition” (Studies in American Literature: The Rise of the Supernatural, Ms. Laine, sophomore year), stated that, “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” And Nica was not just dead, she was murdered. Raped, too. Her story thus offered up the most potent narrative combination known to man, everybody’s favorite set of lurid extremes: sex and death, Eros and Thanatos, kiss kiss and bang bang. The public couldn’t get enough.

Once Nica’s identity was released, our house was besieged. TV news crews, journalists, and photographers were all camped out on our lawn, waiting for a whimper, a tear, a twisted feature—some scrap they could wolf down, some tasty little bite that would tide them over until the real meat came: a break in the case. Trespassing on private property was illegal, so the police set up a barricade, pushing the motley crew back, forcing it onto the sidewalk and street, which made its presence feel no less oppressive, and getting in and out of our driveway near impossible. I’d say the experience was surreal except I hate that word. It was surreal, though, the merciless intensity of those people calling out my name, my mom and dad’s names, the flash cameras constantly going off, giving the scene the queasy, too-bright, side-tilted quality of a hallucination.

Mom, Dad, and I fought back the only way we knew how. By withholding. After that first day, the police pretty much left us alone. They were very polite, deferential almost, less because of who we were, I think, than because of what Chandler was, the influence it wielded in Hartford. And once they were done probing us, our stories and our alibis, we returned to the house, retreated to our rooms to cry. Well, Mom and I to cry, Dad to I don’t know what. His eyes were bone-dry, as if they were unable to weep or didn’t see the point. But mostly we retreated to our rooms to wait. Eventually, we reasoned, boredom would set in or another sensational crime would be committed—a murder victim who was even younger than Nica, who was actually rich, not just by-association rich, who got violated more egregiously, more bloodily, more kinkily—and the restless pack would move on, leave us to grieve in peace.

Five days passed. Six days. A week. Then two weeks. And, still, the case was no closer to being solved. All the statistically likely guys—Dad, Jamie, Ruben, the two or three male students with a documented history of aggression toward female students, even several of the male teachers who were on campus that weekend—had been ruled out as suspects. Plus, my family was staying mum, giving up absolutely nothing. Sections of the crowd, I noticed, were starting to break off; there were fewer news vans parked along the curb. The strategy seemed, finally, to be working.

And then, Dad got careless.

It was three o’clock in the morning. The street was quiet, almost staged-looking, the houses that lined it resembling props on a movie set, all lit by a moon that was high and round and bright as a lamp, casting a soft golden glow. And Dad, convincing himself that all was as harmless as it appeared, decided to take the garbage out for Tuesday morning pickup.

From a window in Nica’s room I watched him as he carried the bags to the curb, one over each shoulder, seeming to stagger under their weight, three or four pounds at the most. He’d just finished stuffing them into the blue plastic can, was standing under the streetlight, lid still in hand, eyes turned to the ground as if he were trying to remember where he was and how he got there, when a woman emerged from behind the Wheelers’ hedges. She was older than any of the media people I’d seen so far, and sadder, her soft brown eyes baggy, tired-looking, her camera-ready makeup smudged and starting to fade, ending abruptly at her jawline. Heavier, too, her bosomy flesh making her appear almost maternal.

“Mr. Baker! Mr. Baker!” she said. “Do you have time to speak with us?” She was out of breath from running the ten or so yards across our lawn. It put funny spaces between her words. And her skirt had hiked up. I could see the control-top portion of her pantyhose, her chubby thighs. I felt sorry for her.

Dad turned wearily, gave his back to her and the denim-shirted man with a camera trailing in her wake.

“It’s been two weeks and the police still have no suspects,” she said. “Care to comment?”

Slowly he started making the trek to the front door.

“Do you think they’re doing everything they can to find your daughter’s killer?”

He kept walking, maintained his plodding pace, like he didn’t even hear her. He was almost at the porch steps.

A little desperate now, “You want to know what I think? I don’t think they are. I think they’re too scared to conduct a real investigation. I think they’re afraid to go after any of the kids at this school—your school, Mr. Baker, the school you and your wife have devoted your lives to—because they believe that if they do, the kids’ fathers will come at them with a team of high-priced defense attorneys, make sure that the only jobs in law enforcement they’ll be able to get after this case are at the mall.”

This time he heard her, and what she said stopped him cold. My dad’s always been a gentle guy—mild, slow to anger, unconfrontational in the extreme, rarely yells and never swears. So it was something of a shock when I saw him do a sharp one-eighty, march back to where the reporter was standing. He was still holding the garbage lid, and now had it thrust out in front of him like it was a shield and he was charging into battle. When he reached her, he shoved his face in hers. Said, “You want to know if I think one of these rich kids is getting away with murder?” She craned her neck to give herself room but managed to get the microphone in front of his mouth. “The answer is, yes, I do. Jamie Amory. My daughter dumped him months ago and he couldn’t handle it, couldn’t handle being said no to, so he decided to make her pay.”

“But Jamie Amory has an alibi,” she pointed out.

“His alibi’s shit! He’s shit! A rapist and a murderer!”

Hearing these words, the reporter’s sympathetic cow-eyed expression vanished and she smiled. When she did, I saw her teeth, and my heart sank. They were small and sharp and inward-sloping: the teeth of a predator. The smile didn’t last long, though. Was wiped off her face when Dad threw down the garbage lid, wrapped his fingers around her wrist.

“Shit!” he said, squeezing. “Do you hear me? Shit, shit, shit!”

She began to arch backward, a panicky look in her eye.

“Hey, pal,” the cameraman said, “hands to yourself, okay?”

Dad spun around. “Who are you calling pal, asshole?” And, letting go of the reporter’s wrist, he swung out.

Unbelievably, he connected with the cameraman’s jaw. There wasn’t much force behind the punch. It probably didn’t feel too nice, though, and, once the cameraman shook it off, he carefully placed his equipment on the ground and threw a punch of his own. He was a middle-aged guy and out of shape. Still, he had a good three inches and thirty pounds on Dad. But as he pitched forward his suede boot slipped on the grass, so that his punch ended up being even weaker and more off-target than Dad’s. Until that moment, I’d thought all violence was agile and sure-footed, almost balletic-looking, as it was in the movies. I was surprised to see how awkward it really was, how clunky and no-rhythm. The two men, panting and grunting, taking time out from combat to bend at the waist, wheeze and suck air, exchanged graceless blow after graceless blow until, finally, Dad fell on the sidewalk with a thud, not because the cameraman landed a KO, but because Dad took a wild overhand right that missed everything and lost his balance.

For a while he lay there on the asphalt, either resting or passed out with his eyes open. Whichever it was, he looked strangely at peace, his chest rising and falling gently. Then the cameramen leaned over to touch him, make sure he was okay, and he let loose with a howl, a gross moan so dense with pain and rage and sorrow that it just stopped time.

I yanked the window curtain from inside my cheek, belatedly aware that I’d been chewing the fabric. I ran downstairs and out the door, pulled Dad away from the cameraman in whose arms he was now sobbing, and took him into the house.

Dad cried for five hours straight. Cried until his eyes dried out and he wasn’t crying tears anymore. Cried until Mom turned on the TV to cover up the ragged, torn-off sounds he was making, after which he was too shocked to cry. There he was on the local morning news, cheeks clogged with blood, mouth frothy with saliva, eyeballs like the kind you buy in a gag shop, calling Jamie Amory a rapist and murderer. Mom and I exchanged sleepless, dread-filled glances. I flashed on a T-shirt that Ruben once wore to class, was ordered to go back to his dorm room and change. Scrawled across the chest in sky-blue letters was the phrase SHIT, MEET FAN.

Only for Dad it never got the chance to because later that morning Manny Flores was discovered in his room by a dorm monitor after he’d missed his first and second period classes. He was hanging from a beam, a ripped-up bedsheet cinched around his neck. Not quite hanging, actually. His room was in the attic, and the ceiling was sloped, making it impossible for his feet not to touch the ground. So he improvised, thrusting his body forward, cutting off his air supply. At any point he could have stopped the strangulation by simply standing up. It was an agonizing—and agonizingly slow—way to die, which means he must have wanted to very badly. Lividity indicated that his death occurred between nine and eleven P.M., several hours before Dad’s run-in with the reporter.

Manny was a day student who’d been living in Endicott House since Christmas when his mother ran off with her boyfriend, basically dumping him on the school’s doorstep. I didn’t know him. Not many people at Chandler did. He kept to himself, didn’t play sports or participate in any extracurricular activities. No gun was found in his room, but, as I said, he was a day student, a local, from the kind of neighborhood where getting your hands on a .22 wasn’t a big deal. And since Chandler was less than half a mile from the Connecticut River, getting a .22 off your hands wasn’t a big deal either.

The papers didn’t print his suicide note, but the police showed it to my family as a courtesy. Here’s what it boiled down to: he loved Nica, Nica didn’t love him. Unrequited affection, the oldest one in the book. As an explanation it was both lucid and murky, coherent and incomprehensible, profound and banal. I wished he hadn’t said anything at all.

The whole thing went to a fast fade from there. The publicity had already hurt Chandler. Several parents, feeling the environment unsafe, had insisted on yanking their kids out, midsemester or not. Something like twenty percent of incoming freshmen had rescinded their acceptances. The school wanted the case closed as quickly as possible. The police couldn’t have been more cooperative. And just like that, it was all over. “Justice was served” when “confessed murderer” of “homecoming queen Nica Baker” acted as his own “judge, jury, and executioner.”

Sound of two hands slapping dust off each other. Done and done.