Edmund exited his plane at the Missoula airport shortly before noon. As he blearily stood at the luggage carousel waiting for his bag to slide around, he was, without warning, grabbed around the waist from behind.
“Ed, I saw it! It was perfect!”
He dropped the carry-on bag containing his laptop to the grey tile floor and turned to hug Molly back. She kissed him a long moment, and when he pulled back, Edmund savored the feeling of having someone to welcome him home, someone who would miss him if he didn’t come back.
They talked about his various flights and the general unpleasantness of airports until his dark blue suitcase slid around on the luggage carousel. Having collected that, they turned to go. Molly said she had something he needed to try in the crock pot at her apartment.
As they headed out to the parking lot, Molly had a strangely self-satisfied air about her, an “I know something you don’t know” kind of attitude.
“So, I’ve been looking up some things about the trial.”
Edmund looked at Molly sideways. This was not something they talked about much. Edmund knew what he had to do, but chewing over what had happened did not seem helpful.
“I found something you might like to see.”
“Okay…?”
“There’s this small dissident right podcast out of Durham by these two brothers.”
“Okay…?”
They arrived at Edmund’s truck. Molly had asked a friend to drop her off at the airport to meet him so they were riding back to her place together. Edmund got in and tossed his gym bag behind the seats so Molly had a place and they hit the road.
“Not long after the trial, they had an interview with one of the jury members.”
This was a subject Edmund preferred to avoid thinking about. Obviously, he held them responsible too, but even with his intelligence and resources, that would be a tall order to deal with.
Molly saw the stony look growing on his face and rushed ahead: “The guy was the holdout, the last one to vote not guilty.”
He glanced over at her and raised an eyebrow, then looked back to the road.
“Trust me. You’ll want to hear this. Right after we have some of the banana habanero chili.”
“The what?”
“I found it on this website Tablespoon. It sounded so weird I had to try making it.”
“Molly.”
“Yes?”
“You worry me.” After driving another minute, he added, “It’s chili?”
“Yes.”
“With bananas?”
“Yes.”
They had stopped at a traffic light, and he turned and looked at her until the light turned green. At which point, he resumed driving and repeated, “You worry me.”
Molly squeezed her lips together in a tight line. “I’m not just making things up. It’s a recipe from a website.”
“Yeah, so is mixing gasoline and styrofoam to make napalm. I wouldn’t recommend you try that one either.”
She punched him on the shoulder. “Well maybe I just shouldn’t let you have any.”
Once they arrived at her apartment, though, Molly did let Edmund try the chili, and he retracted everything he’d said. It was thick and meaty with chunks of pork and just a little sweet and it had a spiciness that slowly built up as you reached the bottom of the bowl.
“Okay, okay,” he said as he rinsed out the dishes. “That was a win. I will, in the future, reserve all judgment about something you decide to cook until I’ve tried it.”
Molly’s face was study in smug satisfaction, but she elected to not rub it in, merely scratching his back in passing as she went to put the cheese back in the fridge.
“So like I said, I have something to show you.”
Ed felt his shoulders tensing. He did not want to think about this. But he’d hear her out.
Molly opened her Acer laptop—for her birthday, he’d have to get her something nicer—and pulled up a page she had bookmarked. It was a YouTube video from “Not Yet Outlaws.” It looked like they had about 1,700 subscribers. The video was dated two years ago.
Molly started the video. Like she said, the two were clearly brothers, with the same hawkish nose and triangular chin. They had similar, close-cropped, almost military haircuts. If Edmund had to guess, he’d say they were a few years younger than him.
In a chair facing them, in what Edmund guessed was a spare room or garage that had been fitted into a “studio,” sat a man that Edmund recognized. He was a slightly overweight white guy with wavy blond hair in a mullet. Yes, this was one of the jury members. He was dressed a little sloppy next to the brothers, but everyone seemed to be getting along fine.
After what seemed like their standard show opener and introductions, the older brother, Daniel asked him, “So you were on the jury for the Simmons trial, correct?”
Logan, the jury member, said, “Yeah, that’s right.” He spoke with a thick southern accent.
Micah, the second brother, said, “So we’ve all seen the public parts of the trial. What can you tell us about the jury deliberations? That’s the part we’d really like to hear about.”
Logan nodded. “I’ve never been on a jury before, so I’ve got nothing to compare it to. But I gotta say something didn’t seem right with how that court was being run.”
Micah asked, “What about the other jury members? How did they react?”
“Well, two of them black ladies, they made it quite clear from the minute we entered the jury room that they were not going to come around to votin’ guilty. And if that’s where you stand, you really shouldn’t even be on a jury in the first place. I mean, you have to follow the facts. You have to reason things out. They weren’t interested.”
Daniel said, “And what did everyone else think about this?”
“A bunch of us were mad at first, but they pretty quickly got about half the jury on their side. It’s amazin’ what you can do if you’re damned stubborn ‘nough.”
Edmund listened through the whole forty-five minute interview.
Near the end, Logan said, “I feel real sorry for that guy. He was right. That [bleep] killed his son. And me and the whole court let ‘im down.”
He turned to Molly sitting beside him. “Yeah…. Yeah, I did want to hear this.”
The Mayor of Christ Mountain 
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