Sycamore Row - John Grisham

“He’s been in the hospital for a week. He’ll go from there to the jail, so his doctors are
in no hurry. A cracked skull is a cracked skull.”
“If you say so.”
“The locals there are curious about the discharge paperwork from the Navy. It appears
to be authentic and it doesn’t really fit. A fake driver’s license and a fake passport might
take you places, but a discharge that’s thirty years old? Why would a con man like this
need it? Of course it could be stolen.”
“So we’re back to the same old question,” Jake said. “How do we verify him if we find
him?”
“You got it.”
There were no helpful photos of Ancil Hubbard. In a box in Seth’s closet they had
found several dozen family photos, mainly of Ramona, Herschel, and Seth’s first wife.
There were none from Seth’s childhood; not a single photo of his parents or younger
brother. Some school records tracked Ancil through the ninth grade, and his grainy,
smiling face appeared in a group photo taken at the Palmyra junior high school in 1934.
That photo had been enlarged, along with several of Seth as an adult. Since Ancil had
not been seen in Ford County in fifty years, there was not a single person who could
offer an opinion as to whether he favored his older brother as a child, or looked
completely different.
“Do you have someone in Juneau?” Jake asked.
“No, not yet. I’ve talked to the police twice. I can have a man there within twentyfour
hours.”
“What’s he gonna do when he gets there? If Lonny Clark is not talking to the locals,
why would he talk to a complete stranger?”
“I doubt if he would.”
“Let me think about it.”
Jake hung up and thought about nothing else for an hour. It was the first lead in
months, and such a weak one at that. The trial started in four days, and there was no
way he could race off to Alaska and somehow verify the identity of a man who did not
want to be identified; indeed, one who’d apparently spent the past thirty years
changing identities.
He walked downstairs and found Lucien in the conference room studying index cards
with the jurors’ names in bold letters. They were arranged neatly on the long table,
alphabetized, all ninety-seven of them. They were rated on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10
being the most attractive. Many of them had not yet been rated because nothing was
known of the jurors.
Jake replayed the conversation with Albert Murray. Lucien’s first response was,
“We’re not telling Judge Atlee, not yet anyway. I know what you’re thinking—if Ancil’s
alive and we might know where he is, then let’s scream for a continuance and buy some
more time. That’s a bad idea, Jake.”
“I wasn’t thinking about that.”
“There’s a good chance the old boy might be locked up for the rest of his life. He
couldn’t show up for a trial if he wanted to.”