Then she remembered the day almost ten years ago when she’d heard that Danny Branson had dropped dead while jogging, and Danny, only thirty-two at the time, had always been a major jock, running track all through their high school years. So what was life, anyway? Just a big lottery? Even if you did everything right, did you just drop dead?
The terrible feeling of fear and helplessness that had come over her as she listened to Rita Alvarez’s report of Glen’s heart attack began to transform into a calm determination: what had happened to Danny Branson would not happen to Glen. He would recover; together, they would learn everything there was to know about heart attacks, and they would see to it that he didn’t have another one. As the last of the terror faded from her mind, her fingers finally left the phone and she turned around to find Mark Blakemoor watching her, his eyes betraying a concern he rarely allowed to be exposed, either on the job or off.
“Has something happened, Anne?” the detective asked.
“It’s my husband,” she replied. “He’s had a heart attack. I have to get home right away. My flight’s not till tomorrow.” She felt panic rise. “I have to get home!”
Mark Blakemoor reached into the inside pocket of his rumpled gabardine jacket and handed her an envelope. “My flight leaves in a couple of hours,” he told her. “If there isn’t room for both of us, you fly, and I’ll go home on your ticket tomorrow.”
Anne’s brows rose a fraction of an inch. “And in return?” she asked. There had to be a catch: in all her years of dealing with cops, Mark Blakemoor had been the single individual who refused to divulge anything unless he was promised a future favor as the price. Now, to her surprise, he shook his head.
“This isn’t work,” he said. “This is personal. With personal, everything’s a freebie. Okay?”
“Let’s go,” Anne replied, instinctively knowing that he didn’t want to be thanked for the offer.
Five minutes later they were out of the prison, being driven through the crowd of demonstrators and reporters in a car the warden had supplied.
At least, Anne reflected as she heard the muffled questions the press was shouting after the closed vehicle, I don’t have to keep talking about the execution. One more article for the Herald and then, perhaps, she would take a leave of absence, and concentrate on Glen’s recovery.
As the car sped away from the prison, the thought lingered in her mind, and the more she thought about it, the more it appealed to her.
After all, soon it would be summer, and school would be out, and the whole family would be together. Then her mood darkened: how much of the family would there still be?
What if Glen didn’t make it? What would she do? How would she cope? How could she live without Glen?
CHAPTER 7
Total silence hung over the tenth grade journalism class at Maples School, named for the grove of trees within which it had been constructed back in 1923. Heather Jeffers and her classmates gazed fixedly at the television set that had been brought into the room so they could watch and discuss the coverage of Richard Kraven’s execution; the set had been on since eight-thirty, and until the stroke of nine — noon in Connecticut, where the execution was taking place — several of the students had been speculating on how close to the deadline it would get before the execution was stayed. Maude Brink, who had been leading the discussion of both the media coverage of the execution and capital punishment itself for the last week, had warned them that this time a stay was unlikely, but some of the kids clung to their hopes right up until the end. What struck Mrs. Brink as most interesting was that those students most strongly opposed to capital punishment were the most certain that the execution would inevitably be delayed, while those who were the execution’s strongest supporters were convinced it would take place as scheduled.
Obviously, each faction believed that in the end the system would validate his or her own view.
Yet when the execution had taken place and the first word had come out of the prison that Richard Kraven was dead, the entire class had finally experienced the reality of it. This was not a television show, or a movie, or a book, in which the execution affected only a man who was the invention of a writer’s mind. This time it was real, and a man who had only a few seconds ago been as much alive as each of them was now dead. As they all watched numbly, the news anchor on the screen began cutting to correspondents around the country, each of them interviewing someone whose life would be directly affected by the execution.
First there was Edna Kraven, being interviewed in her small home in the south end of Seattle, not far from Boeing Field.
As the camera’s relentless eye zoomed in on the tear-stained face of Richard Kraven’s mother, Heather and her friends squirmed uncomfortably, watching the woman’s most private emotions exposed for all the world to watch.
“He was always a good boy,” Edna whispered, her fingers twisting a crumpled handkerchief with which she blotted at red-rimmed eyes every few seconds. “Smarter than all the other kids, always interested in everything, and always helping everyone. Everybody liked my Richard. How could they do this to him? Why did they want to? He never hurt anyone — never! It isn’t right! It just isn’t!” The camera held steady on the distraught woman as a fit of sobbing overcame her; then, in what seemed an almost reluctant retreat from her, so she could grieve in private, it cut away to Richard’s brother Rory, who sat across a worn coffee table from his mother.
“It must be almost as hard for you as for your mother,” the pretty blond correspondent said, her face carefully composed into an expression designed to tell the viewers that this job was not easy for her. “Tell us, what went through your mind as the clock at the prison struck noon?”
Rory Kraven, visibly nervous in front of the camera, glanced at his mother, then shrugged. “I–I guess I didn’t really think anything,” he stammered. “I mean, I know what my brother did, and—” But before he could continue, his mother cut him off.
“Nothing!” she flared. “My Richard did nothing, and you know it! How dare you speak ill of your brother? If you were half the man he was—”
As some invisible director at the network decided that Edna Kraven’s furious outburst was less compelling than her grief, the image on the screen abruptly switched to an elegantly dressed and perfectly coiffed woman of perhaps sixty, who was being interviewed by another attractive young network correspondent.
“I’m with Arla Talmadge in Atlanta. Mrs. Talmadge, how do you feel today?”
Arla Talmadge touched the corner of one eye with a perfectly pressed handkerchief, then sighed and shook her head. “I’m not sure what I feel anymore. Ever since Richard Kraven killed my son, I — well, there’s just an emptiness inside me. Did he say anything before they — well, before they did what they did?”
“Early indications are that he didn’t,” the reporter replied.
“Then we’ll never know why he did it, will we?” Mrs. Talmadge asked. “And I can’t help wondering, what was really accomplished today? After all, killing that man won’t bring my son or any of the others back, will it? I keep wondering if maybe he wouldn’t have — I don’t know — explained it all someday, I suppose. But now …” She drew in a shaky breath, let it out, then shook her head again. “I just don’t know,” she went on. “I suppose there’s nothing to do now except try to go on living.”