After Before and After

Phase 4: Chapter 77

July 5, 1993. 3:09 PM.

About two hours after court was brought back into session after lunch, Jack Merridew was starting to feel paranoid. It was hard to keep the flashes of memories from creeping into the forefront of his mind; him and Ralph over the last two years. The prosecutor was strongly forcing the issue against the brunette boy today. Jack too knew that she had no real evidence against him, and that he was charged entirely based on what the other boys said about him in their Flag State interviews.

That afternoon, Barnes played a series of the other boys' Flag State interviews; snippets of them telling the interviewers that Ralph was there on the beachfront the night Simon was killed. Not only that, but also that Ralph brought a hunting stick with him to the feast, and participated in the attack that ended Simon's life.

Fourteen of the twenty-two boys interviewed claimed with confidence that they saw Ralph participate in killing Simon. Another four of them claimed not to remember for sure, that it was all a blur. Two of them were Sam and Eric, who stuck to not having been there long enough to know for sure. The other two unsure boys claimed that it wouldn't make sense for Ralph to have sat out. Only four boys in total, three of which were under the age of nine at the time, told the Flag State that Ralph was not involved in what happened to Simon at all.

Barnes argued that the probability that fourteen or eighteen boys were remembering what happened wrong, or banded together in a lie, was unlikely. Instead, it was far more probable that only four of them misremembered, especially given how young they were at the time. Jack wasn't expecting it to look so bad for Ralph. He was innocent, he knew, and so did the others when they lied about him in their Flag State interviews.

The breakup between Jack and Ralph had the former worried about the missing piece of this puzzle coming out of the dark. The thing that would exonerate Ralph Langley, and prove that the eighteen boys who made false claims against him were lying. The only thing Ralph had to do to exonerate himself was tell his lawyer the truth about what happened on the island. Jack and the others turned against him, and attempted to kill him, a premeditated act that couldn't be argued as accidental. The reason they didn't find a stick with his DNA on it was because it never existed, because he was never one of them, and the only monster he believed in was Jack and the hunters who followed him. Ralph could tell his lawyer all of it, and the case against him wouldn't have a leg to stand on.

But instead, Jack watched the Langley family sit together in the courtroom, quiet and complicit as Barnes spun a false narrative against the boy. Ralph just sat and took it, without even telling his own parents the truth. Was he still protecting Jack? Even after everything Jack's done to him, how he thoughtlessly ended their relationship without an explanation? If that was true, Ralph was a better person than Jack ever would be. He deserved to walk away from all this, maybe the only one who did.

But it was starting to look like he might not get to.

After presenting her strongest form evidence against Ralph; the other boys claiming on tape that he stood next to them and killed Simon, Barnes shifted gears and introduced her first character witness against Ralph.

The first two were teachers at Bainbridge Military Academy. Surprisingly, Barnes didn't make a spectacle of Ralph's life before the academy. Jack figured that it was because he had no disciplinary records at that age, or even involvement in any incidents that could make him look bad. Jack was starting to wonder why Barnes even bothered with character witnesses against Ralph. That was, until one question she asked of a lunchroom supervisor at the academy revealed the truth backbone of her pursuit to make Ralph look bad.

"Who did Ralph Langley tend to hangout with at lunch and recess periods, Mrs. Clare?" Barnes asked her current witness.

"Sometimes he sat with his roommate and his friends. They were all a year behind Ralph. He spent most of fifth and half of sixth grade sitting at Jack Merridew's table though" she revealed.