Like most of the city, she’d been following the Pettit-Wells trial, in which a ruffian innkeeper had been shot—by his mistress, the DA alleged; by himself, the defense insisted—and Ella found herself thinking the distinctly un-Christian thought, That man probably deserved it. While nobody wanted to find themselves at the business end of a shotgun, maybe the hard-drinking wastrel who’d found himself in exactly that undesirable spot had earned his way there.
