In the future, when he would retell this part of the story, he was never able to actually say with any certainty or really any memory at all how exactly it all happened. He knew that he was taking Terync’s life as a mercy, but he couldn’t recall the actual act of doing so. He could recount seeing the blood on the floor and all over his arm. He could even vividly recall seeing the blood across the front of the lady’s white dress and all over her bare feet. He just simply could not recall the act of drawing the knife deeply across Terync’s throat though he knew that he must have done so.
Kre was also unable to repeat the words that the lady said to him after the deed was done though he knew without a doubt that she spoke to him in her kind and soft voice. He would forever remember the soft kiss on his forehead, the warmth and the joy that he felt from that simple platonic act, but he had no memory of when she left the room. All he could recall from there was hearing the voices of his friends as they wondered why the door was open and the house left in such a mess. He remembered seeing Pete first, as the slender boy stepped into the bedroom and gasped at the sight of the gruesome scene before him. He recalled Pete calling out to the others and dropping to his knees next to him. He remembered being shaken and the sound of Pete’s voice echoing in his head asking if he was all right.
Kre remembered looking up at Pete and then moving his eyes to Gantry and the others that had just rushed into the room. He remembered looking down down at Cooter’s serene corpse, the old man’s smiling face lying nestled in the younger man’s lap, and he vividly remembered saying the words, “I killed him. I killed them both.”
Everything after that point was a blur. Pete had apparently run off to get a cart and to send word to his parents about what they had found. Gantry, in the meantime, helped Kre wash the majority of the blood off of his hands and arms before wrapping a blanket around him and setting him in the cart. The memories of dozens of faces and hundreds of sounds crashed about in Kre’s head and he was unable to determine the order or even the reality of the events playing about in his mind. He did recall telling folks those same seven words. He remembered repeating those words dozens of times like a mantra.
Kre was dimly aware that there was some sort of official proceeding going on around him but it wasn’t until the next day, the second day of the trial, that he started to mentally and emotionally wake up from the shock of the events of the other night. When he suddenly broke down in wracking sobs, his arms chained to the floor in front of him such that he couldn’t even cover his own face and wipe away his tears. Braun had insisted on the shackles given that the boy had admitted freely, and repeatedly, that he murdered two people. After that breakdown, the trial had gone into recess while Mrs. Koraski and Mrs. Hadam were given permission to tend to Kre and help him understand what was happening. Weasel-nosed Braun Osser warned the two women not to do anything that might influence the trial such as coaching the boy, and the two ladies replied in a most unladylike fashion.
Though he wasn’t able to stomach any food, Kre was given a small dose of distilled spirits to help ease the emotional pain he was feeling. It helped, though Kre spent the better part of that second day of trial looking down at the chains on his hands and reliving the last moments of Cooter’s life in his head. When asked to relate the story, he was able to do so clearly and articulately.
Kre finished his testimony with the part where Pete came into the room, since everything after that had already been said by so many others. There was a strange silence in the room for a moment as no one was really certain how to comprehend the story. Braun, of course, was the one to break such a solemn quiet.