They came for PeePoo at 3:47 in the morning. The hour matters, because 3:47 is exactly when the forgeries were timestamped — every one of the seventeen checks logged to the same impossible minute, as if a single frog had signed them all in one sitting and wanted the record to say so. It said so. It just named the wrong frog.
At 3:47 that morning, PeePoo was not near a check. He was three ponds over, flat on a cool leaf, admiring one (1) genuinely very nice gnat. This is not a figure of speech and it is not, whatever the prosecution implied, a euphemism. There was a gnat. It was nice. He admired it for the better part of an hour without once attempting to eat it, which anyone who has met a frog will tell you is the single most exculpatory thing a frog can do. The gnat has since declined to testify in person. The moonlight, eventually, did not.
The frame was perfect because it was built out of the truth.
The knock, when it came, was not really a knock. It was a raid. They booked him fast, the way you book a frog when the paperwork is already written, and somewhere in the blur of it they slid the seventeen checks across the mud and asked him to explain his own signature. He looked at them. He looked for a long time. And then he said the only thing an honest frog can say, which was also, unfortunately, the truth: 'that's not my tongue. That's clearly my brother's tongue. Please look at his tongue.'
Nobody looked. This is the sentence the defense would like carved somewhere permanent. Nobody looked at the other tongue. The hook was three ponds away and available for inspection, and the entire machinery of swamp justice, having a confession-shaped signature already in hand, elected not to walk over and check. It is easier to close a face you already have than to go find the one you don't. PeePoo had the borrowed face. That was, in the end, his whole crime — owning the original of a thing someone else had copied.
They walked him into Cell Block C of Lily-pad Lockup, a real place with real algae on the glass, and the door made the sound doors make. Someone, meaning perhaps to be kind, slid a tray of flies under it. They were accidental flies — the kind that wander into a cell on their own — and PeePoo, who had just been framed for seventeen felonies, thanked them, because he could not help it, because his tongue does not bend toward rudeness any more than it bends toward a forged check. Then they turned off the lights.
This is the chapter where the trap closes, and the awful symmetry of it is complete: the honest twin behind glass at 3:47, the guilty one three ponds away at the same minute, both of them wearing the same face, only one of them awake to a nice gnat. The frame was perfect because it was built out of the truth — PeePoo's real, borrowable, unbendable innocence, timestamped and filed against him. He asked them to look at the other tongue. They will. It only takes the swamp a while to get around to looking.