Compelled Witness

The waiting room had no windows. Linnea had been sitting in it since seven-forty with a water-stained copy of Euripides’ Hecuba and a Styrofoam cup of coffee that tasted like the inside of a filing cabinet. The bailiff who had shown her in called her “Professor” with a certain careful emphasis, the way people address the clergy — not respect, exactly, but a hedging of bets. She had not corrected him. She had not said, Associate professor, actually, because precision was not, at the moment, useful.

The Hecuba was from the college library’s discard shelf. Someone had underlined a passage near the end of the second choral ode in soft pencil: The gods hear the just and the unjust alike; it is the listening that differs. The translation was inexact — she would have rendered it differently, the verb carrying a middle voice that suggested something closer to “the gods attend” — but the underline was firm, made by someone who meant it. The handwriting could have been Petra’s. Petra had owned a soft pencil. Petra had underlined things.

Linnea closed the book and set it on the chair beside her. It was eight-fourteen. In a courtroom two corridors away, the State of Massachusetts was preparing to ask her what she knew about the death of Petra Alderman.

She had dressed that morning in the way of someone who has thought too carefully about the question. A gray wool blazer over a navy blouse, no jewelry except for a pair of small gold studs she’d bought in Athens fifteen years ago, when she’d presented a paper on trust and institutional collapse in pre-Socratic banking arrangements to a room of nine people, four of whom left during the break. Her hair was gathered. Her shoes were clean. The blazer had a small pull near the left cuff that she kept worrying with her thumbnail.

Three weeks before Petra died, in the fall semester, she had told her seminar something about testimony. She had said it to a room of five students sitting in a loose half-circle in her office because the seminar room had been double-booked, and Jonah Alcott had been on the floor with his back against the radiator and his knees drawn up, and he had looked at her — not the way students usually look, which is either bored or performing interest, but the way a dog tracks movement at the edge of a field — and said, So testimony is theater, and the witness box is just a stage.

And she had said, Yes.

She had said more than that. She couldn’t remember what.

“State your name for the record.”

“Linnea Gould.”

“And your occupation?”

“Associate professor of classical languages and literature at Aldwyn College.”

The courtroom is smaller than she expected. Vaulted ceilings, which should produce grandeur but instead produce a feeling of air being wasted — too much space above the heads of too few people. The gallery is sparsely occupied. Jonah’s mother in the second row, a raw-boned woman in a blue coat who has not looked at Linnea once. Two reporters. A handful of people Linnea does not recognize. The jury box, fully seated: twelve faces in two rows of six, all trying to look like they are not forming opinions. The judge, whose name she has forgotten. The prosecution, whose name is Renard, whose suit is too tight across the shoulders, who has the compressed energy of a man about to do something regrettable in public.

“Professor Gould, how long have you taught at Aldwyn College?”

“Twenty-three years.”

“And in the fall semester of 2023, you taught a seminar titled — ” he consults his notes — “‘Sacred Obligation and Transgression in the Ancient World.’ Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“How many students were enrolled?”

“Five.”

“Would you name them, please?”

She names them. Jonah Alcott. Petra Alderman. Suki Traille. Devlin Amari. Hazel Foss.

She says their names in alphabetical order and watches the court reporter type them, each name a small mechanical event, letters flattened into record.

Petra had been the one who listened most carefully, and this was not, as people sometimes assume, a passive quality. Petra listened the way a cellist reads a score — with the full body engaged, with a responsiveness that was itself a kind of argument. When Linnea had taught the unit on institutional betrayal — the Bern banking crisis of 1720, two trusted houses speculating with the savings of five hundred families, the bubbles bursting, the city paralyzed for thirty years because no one would risk again — it was Petra who came to office hours afterward, Petra who sat across the desk with her notebook open and said, not accusingly, with genuine intellectual puzzlement: But you’re describing yourself, Professor Gould. You speculate with us. You take what we give you — our time, our attention, our willingness to take these texts seriously — and you invest it in your ideas. What if your ideas are wrong?

And Linnea had laughed, because it was a brilliant observation, and because the only honest answer — then you’ll be ruined, the way the five hundred families were ruined, and I will be ruined too but differently, the way the bankers were ruined, which is to say not at all, because I will still have the knowledge and you will have only the loss — was not something she could say to a twenty-year-old sitting in her office at four in the afternoon with the late October light coming through the window and the radiator ticking.

She had laughed, and Petra had not laughed, and the moment had passed, and now Petra was dead and the moment had not passed, and Linnea was sitting in a witness box in Hampshire County Superior Court being asked about her syllabus.

“Professor Gould, I’d like to direct your attention to a specific lecture. On October fourteenth, 2023, you gave a talk to this seminar on the Bacchic mysteries. Do you recall that?”

“I do.”

“I have here a copy of notes taken by one of your students during that lecture.” Renard holds the pages at an angle, as if displaying a painting. “These are the notes of Petra Alderman. Do you recognize them?”

She recognizes them. The small, vertical handwriting, the careful spacing, the occasional Greek word transliterated in the margins. Petra’s hand, Petra’s mind, the faithful transcription of Linnea’s voice rendered into ink on college-ruled paper.

“I recognize the handwriting, yes.”

“I’d like to read a passage. According to Ms. Alderman’s notes, you said the following: ‘The ancient Greeks understood that certain truths can only be reached through the body, through action that the rational mind would forbid. The Bacchic initiate did not believe in the god as an intellectual proposition. The initiate became the god through ecstatic practice — through dance, intoxication, the dissolution of the ordinary self.’ Did you say that?”

“I said something to that effect, yes. It’s a standard reading of the Dionysiac tradition.”

“A standard reading.”

“Yes.”

She does not say: I said it with conviction. She does not say: I said it in the voice I use when I want students to lean forward, the voice Jonah once called the one that makes you sound like you’re letting us in on a secret, which was not a compliment, though she had taken it as one. She does not say: I said it and meant it and would say it again, because it is true, and because the fact that a girl is dead has no bearing on whether it is true.

“And three weeks after this lecture, Professor Gould, Petra Alderman was found dead in the Stockbridge Chapel.”

“Yes.”

“In a setting that witnesses have described as a ritual.”

The defense attorney rises. “Objection. Characterization.”

“Sustained. Mr. Renard.”

Renard adjusts. “In a setting that involved fire, chanting, and the arrangement of bodies in a circle.”

Linnea says, “Yes.”

The defense attorney’s name is Cavallo. She is tall, angular, with a manner that suggests she arrived in the courtroom directly from a conversation she found more interesting.

“Professor Gould, you arrived at the Stockbridge Chapel on the night of November fourth. What time was that?”

“Approximately twelve-fifteen a.m.”

“How did you know to go there?”

“I received a text message from Suki Traille at eleven-forty-eight. It said, ‘Professor, we need you at the chapel.’”

“And you went.”

“Yes.”

“At midnight. In November.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

She had gone because Suki’s text carried the particular urgency of someone trying not to sound urgent. She had gone because she was awake — she was always awake at midnight, reading in the chair by the kitchen window with its view of nothing, the ceiling above her dripping into the saucepan she no longer moved — and because the message meant the students had done it, had finally done the thing they’d been circling for weeks in seminar, the thing she had neither authorized nor forbidden, and because the distinction between those two — not authorizing and not forbidding — is a distinction she has spent two years trying to believe is meaningful.

“I was concerned for my students.”

“You drove to the chapel.”

“It’s a twenty-minute drive from my house. The chapel is in the woods off Route 112, past the old cider operation. You have to park on the logging road and walk the last quarter mile.”

“And when you arrived. Describe what you saw.”

She describes it. She has described it before, to the police, to the college’s internal review, to her attorney, to herself in the dark at three a.m. when the ceiling leaks and the account shifts slightly each time she runs through it. She describes it now in the register the courtroom requires: sequential, concrete, denatured.

“The chapel door was open. There was firelight from inside — they had built a fire in a metal basin in the center of the floor. I could hear voices. When I entered, I saw four students arranged in a rough circle around the fire. Jonah Alcott was standing. The other three were seated on the floor.”

“What were the voices saying?”

“I couldn’t make out words. It was chanting — rhythmic, repetitive. I recognized the cadence as something derived from the Orphic hymns we’d studied in seminar, but distorted. Slower. The vowels drawn out.”

“Could you identify who was chanting?”

“Suki and Devlin. They were seated cross-legged, facing the fire. I could see Suki’s mouth moving. Devlin had his eyes closed. Hazel Foss was sitting apart from the others, near the east wall. She was not chanting. She was holding her phone — I remember thinking that was odd, that someone would hold a phone during — ” She stops. She had been about to say during a ritual, which is the word the prosecution wants and the defense does not. “During whatever was happening.”

“And Mr. Alcott?”

“Standing. Between the fire and the back wall. His arms were at his sides.”

“Was he chanting?”

“No. He was watching the others. Or watching the fire. It was difficult to tell — the light was unsteady.”

“Where was Petra Alderman?”

“On the ground. Approximately six feet from the fire, to the left of the entrance. She was lying on her side, facing away from me.”

“Was she conscious?”

“No.”

“Was she alive?”

She thinks of the Lopushna Monastery. The comparative unit on sacred spaces — one lecture among several. Hundreds running for sanctuary during the Chiprovtsi Uprising and burned alive inside the walls. The terrible inversion of a holy place: refuge becomes the killing ground, the people running toward God running toward their own destruction. She had taught it as history. She had taught it as a pattern.

“Professor Gould?”

“I could not tell. I called 911 immediately.”

She says immediately. Cavallo watches her.

“At what time did you place the 911 call?”

“Twelve thirty-one a.m.”

“You arrived at approximately twelve-fifteen. You called 911 at twelve-thirty-one. That’s sixteen minutes.”

“I — it may have taken me longer to reach the chapel from the logging road than I estimated. The path is uneven.”

“Sixteen minutes, Professor Gould. A quarter-mile walk takes five or six minutes, even on uneven ground. What did you do in the remaining ten?”

She does not know what she did in the remaining ten minutes. She has constructed, over the two years since that night, several versions of those ten minutes, each internally consistent, each contradicted by a detail she cannot reconcile. In one version, she checked Petra’s pulse and found nothing and stood frozen in the doorway unable to move. In another, she spoke to Jonah, who was standing over the fire with an expression she has variously remembered as horrified, exalted, and blank. In a third, she simply stood in the dark of the chapel with its smell of old apples and woodsmoke and watched the four surviving students look at her as if she were the thing they had summoned.

“I was in shock, Ms. Cavallo. I don’t have a precise account of those minutes.”

Cavallo nods, not unkindly. Then, without transition: “Professor Gould, I’d like to introduce Defense Exhibit 14.”

She knows before Cavallo holds it up. She has known since the discovery phase, since her attorney warned her, since the investigator catalogued the contents of her office and found, among the Post-its and marginalia and drafts of lectures never delivered, the note. Three words in her own handwriting. She has had two years to prepare an explanation. She has six.

The note is displayed on the courtroom’s screen. Yellow square, blue ink, the handwriting unmistakably hers — she makes her L’s with a small serif, a habit from years of copying Greek manuscripts, and the L in Let has the serif, and everyone in the room can see it.

“Do you recognize this note, Professor Gould?”

“I do.”

“It was recovered from your office desk during the investigation into Ms. Alderman’s death. Is that your handwriting?”

“It is.”

“Please read it for the jury.”

“‘The chapel. Walpurgis. Let them try.’”

“Professor Gould, what did you mean by this note?”

The prosecution objects. Renard is on his feet, arguing that the defense is inviting speculation, that the note speaks for itself. The judge overrules.

“I was making a note to myself about a seminar discussion. My students had been discussing the idea of experiential engagement with ancient ritual forms. Walpurgis Night — April thirtieth — was approaching. The chapel on Route 112 had come up in seminar as an example of sacred architecture repurposed for secular use. ‘Let them try’ referred to the academic exercise of designing a hypothetical ritual framework.”

She delivers this in the voice she uses for conference presentations — measured, slightly depersonalized, each clause weighted equally. It is, as far as it goes, true. They had discussed it. Walpurgis was approaching. The chapel had come up. Let them try could mean what she says it means.

“A hypothetical ritual framework,” Cavallo repeats.

“Yes.”

Cavallo pauses. Lets the jury sit with it. Then: “Nothing further.”

Linnea’s hands are steady. She notes this. Hands steady, breathing even, voice within acceptable parameters. She had practiced this testimony in her kitchen, standing at the counter with the saucepan catching the drip overhead, addressing the empty chair where no one sits because no one has sat in her kitchen in a long time, and the empty chair had been a better jury than this one because the empty chair did not need her to be innocent. It needed nothing from her at all.

The afternoon recess. Linnea in the corridor with her hands around a paper cup of water. The courthouse is a Beaux-Arts building from 1909, built to impress — columns, cornices, the whole civic vocabulary — and it does impress, in the way that all institutional architecture impresses, which is to say it makes the individual feel appropriately small.

She thinks about Jonah. Not the Jonah at the defense table, who has lost weight and whose suits no longer fit and who sits with the careful stillness of someone who has been told not to react. The other Jonah. The one who came to her office in September of that year, six weeks before any of it, and sat in the chair across her desk and said: I want to understand what it would have meant to actually do it. Not study it. Do it.

She had asked what he meant.

The ritual. Orphic initiation. Not as a reading exercise. As a practice.

And she had felt — what? Not alarm. Something closer to the feeling she’d had when her first monograph was accepted for publication, before the second was rejected as meticulous but airless, like a cathedral with no congregation: the feeling that an idea she had carried privately for years was suddenly loose in the world, embodied in a person who intended to act on it. Jonah Alcott at twenty-two was the most intellectually serious person she had encountered since her own graduate work, and his seriousness was not her seriousness — hers was the seriousness of documentation, of fidelity to text; his was the seriousness of the convert, the person who reads the manual for living and then attempts to live.

She had said, The ancient rituals involved risk, Jonah. Physical risk, sometimes mortal. You understand that the Bacchic rites included animal sacrifice, sleep deprivation, states of genuine psychotic derangement.

He had said, Yes.

She had said, And the point was not the risk itself but what the risk made possible.

He had said, Yes, that’s exactly it, and the light through her office window had caught the edge of his face, and she had felt what the Greeks called enthousiasmos — the god entering — not as a metaphor but as a physical event, a warmth in the chest, a quickening.

She had not said: Don’t do it. She had not said: This is an academic exercise. She had said something. She must have said something, because he left her office eventually and the conversation ended and she sat at her desk afterward for a long time doing nothing, and at some point she wrote the note. The chapel. Walpurgis. Let them try. She had already told the jury what it meant. The explanation she gave was plausible. Plausible was all her attorney had asked for.

What she cannot reconcile is this: Jonah wanted to enact the texts. Petra wanted to understand what enacting them would cost. Jonah’s question in her office was Can we do it? Petra’s question — the one about speculation, about the Bern bankers, about what happens when a trusted intermediary gambles with other people’s faith — had been Should we? And Linnea had answered neither. She had written a note. She had gone to bed.

A bailiff passes through the corridor. The marble floor is cold under Linnea’s thin-soled shoes. She finishes the water and crushes the cup and places it in the wastebasket by the water fountain, and the small civic act of disposing of a cup properly — the act of a person who follows rules, who uses wastebaskets — steadies her.

The final hour of testimony. Renard on redirect, working through the sequence again, tightening his questions, circling back to the night itself — the fire, the chanting, the four students, Petra on the ground.

He takes her through the seminar readings. He asks about the Orphic fragments. He asks about the unit on sacred spaces — and here she must mention Lopushna, because she mentioned it in her statement to police, and Renard has the statement, and he reads from it: In the seminar, I taught a comparative unit on sacred spaces that have been sites of violence. The Lopushna Monastery in Bulgaria, where refugees were burned alive. The Library of Alexandria. The sack of Delphi. He asks if the students responded to this material. She says they did. He asks how. She says with the seriousness that good students bring to difficult material. He asks if any student connected this material to the Stockbridge Chapel. She says Jonah did. He asks what Jonah said. She says Jonah observed that the chapel was itself a sacred space fallen into ruin, and that ruin could be a form of invitation.

She does not say what she thought when Jonah said that. She had changed the subject immediately.

“Professor Gould, did you want the ritual to take place?”

Renard waits. The jury waits. The court reporter’s hands are still.

She thinks of the nine years since her second monograph was rejected. The committee’s phrase — meticulous but airless — had stuck to the inside of her professional life like a label she couldn’t peel off. She thinks of Jonah’s willingness to take the texts seriously enough to act on them. Not agreement — she did not agree with Jonah about the ritual, not exactly — but the physical sense of being in a room where ideas had consequences.

She thinks of Petra. Not Petra dead, not Petra’s notes in the prosecutor’s hand, but Petra alive in seminar, Petra who said You speculate with us with the seriousness of someone delivering a diagnosis.

“I did not instruct my students to perform a ritual,” she says. “I taught classical texts. What they did with that knowledge was their own choice.”

It is technically true. She taught the texts. She did not issue instructions. The students made choices. Each of these facts is verifiable. Together they produce a sentence that sounds like an answer.

“Nothing further,” Renard says.

She is excused at four-seventeen. The judge says, “You may step down, Professor Gould,” and she steps down, and the distance from the witness box to the courtroom door is perhaps thirty feet but it takes a long time to cross because her legs have the particular stiffness of someone who has been holding still for hours. Her left knee pops on the third step. In the gallery, Jonah’s mother is looking at her now for the first time all day, and Linnea cannot read the expression and does not try.

In the corridor she passes a bailiff she does not recognize. She does not see Jonah. The hallway is longer than she remembered.

The parking lot. Rain — not heavy, but persistent. Linnea sits in her car without starting the engine. The seat is cold. The dashboard clock reads 4:31. She is still holding the copy of Hecuba, which she carried from the waiting room to the witness box to the corridor to the parking lot without noticing.

She opens the book to the underlined passage. The gods hear the just and the unjust alike; it is the listening that differs.

The handwriting. She looks at it. The soft pencil, the firm underline, the small serif on the L.

The serif on the L.

It is not Petra’s handwriting. It is her own. She underlined this passage years ago — maybe ten, maybe fifteen — back when she underlined passages in library books because she could not help herself. Before the seminar. Before Jonah. Before Petra. Before the chapel.

She closes the book. Sets it on the passenger seat. It doesn’t mean anything. She underlined things. Petra underlined things. People underline things.

She starts the car. The road to Aldwyn is forty minutes in good weather, longer in rain. The leak in the kitchen ceiling will be there. The saucepan. The syllabus she has already drafted for next semester, the same texts, because no one has told her not to.

The wipers come on. Through the clearing glass, the courthouse is a gray shape. She has a faculty meeting Thursday. She needs to call the roofer about the leak. She needs to return the Hecuba to the discard shelf, though she is not certain she will.

She pulls out of the lot. The rain does not stop.