But now...
The buzzer sounds. Guards step into the room. Curly puts his hand on my shoulder.
“Time’s up.”
Rachel quickly slides the photograph back into the manila envelope. I feel a longing when she does, a thirst to keep staring at the photograph, a fear that it was all an apparition, and now that I couldn’t see it, even for a few seconds, it all felt wispy, as though I were trying to hold on to smoke. I try to sear the image of my boy into my brain, but his face is already beginning to ebb away, like the final vision of a dream.
Rachel stands. “I’m staying at the motor lodge down the road.”
I nod.
“I’ll be back tomorrow.”
I manage another nod.
“And for what it’s worth, I think it’s him too.”
I open my mouth to thank her, but the words won’t come out. It doesn’t matter. She turns and leaves. Curly gives my shoulder a squeeze.
“What was all that about?” he asks me.
“Tell the warden I want to see him,” I say.
Curly smiles with teeth that resemble small mints. “The warden doesn’t see prisoners.”
I stand. I meet his eye. And for the first time in years, I smile. I really smile. The sight makes Curly take a step back.
“He’ll see me,” I say. “Tell him.”
Chapter 3
“What do you want, David?”
Warden Philip Mackenzie does not appear pleased by my visit. His office is institutionally sparse. There is an American flag on a pole in one corner along with a photograph of the current governor. His desk is gray and metal and functional and reminds me of the ones my teachers had when I was in elementary school. A brass pen-pencil-clock set you’d find in the gift area at TJ Maxx sits off to the right. Two tall matching gray metal file cabinets stand behind him like watchtowers.
“Well?”
I have rehearsed what I would say, but I don’t stick to the script. I try to keep my voice even, flat, monotone, professional even. My words would, I know, sound crazy, so I need my tone to do the opposite. To his credit, the warden sits back and listens, and for a little while he does not look too stunned. When I finish speaking, he leans back and looks off. He takes a few deep breaths. Philip Mackenzie is north of seventy years old, but he still looks powerful enough to raze one of those steel-reinforced concrete walls that surround this place. His chest is burly, his bald head jammed between two bowling-ball shoulders with no apparent need for a neck. His hands are huge and gnarled. They sit on his desk now like two battering rams.
He finally turns toward me with weathered blue eyes capped by bushy white eyebrows.
“You can’t be serious,” he says.
I sit up straight. “It’s Matthew.”
He dismisses my words with a wave of a giant hand. “Ah, come off it, David. What are you trying to pull here?”
I just stare at him.
“You’re looking for a way out. Every inmate is.”
“You think this is some ploy to get released?” I struggle to keep my voice from breaking. “You think I give a rat’s ass if I ever get out of this hellhole?”
Philip Mackenzie sighs and shakes his head.
“Philip,” I say, “my son is out there somewhere.”
“Your son is dead.”
“No.”
“You killed him.”
“No. I can show you the photograph.”
“The one your sister-in-law brought you?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, sure. I’m supposed to know that some boy in the background is your son Matthew who died when he was, what, three?”
I say nothing.
“And let’s say, I don’t know, that I did. I can’t. I mean, it’s impossible, even you admit that. But let’s say it’s somehow the spitting image of Matthew. You said Rachel checked it with age-progression technology, right?”
“Right.”
“So how do you know she didn’t just photoshop his age-progressed face into the picture?”
“What?”
“Do you know how easy it is to doctor photographs?”
“You’re kidding, right?” I frown. “Why would she do that?”
Philip Mackenzie stopped. “Wait. Of course.”
“What?”
“You don’t know what happened to Rachel.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Her career as a journalist. It’s over.”
I say nothing.
“You didn’t know that, did you?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. But of course, it does. I lean forward and pin the man I’ve known my whole life as Uncle Philip with my eyes. “I’ve been in here for five years now,” I say in my most measured tone. “How many times have I come to you for help?”
“Zero,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean I haven’t given it to you. You think it’s a coincidence that you ended up in my prison? Or that you got so much extra time in the isolation wing? They wanted you back in regular population, even after that beating.”
It was three weeks after the start of my incarceration. I was in general pop, not here in the isolation wing. Four men whose bulk was only outsized by their depravity cornered me in the shower. The shower. Oldest trick in the book. No rape. Nothing sexual. They just wanted to beat the hell out of someone to feel some sort of primitive high — and who better than prison’s new celebrity baby-killer? They broke my nose. They shattered my cheekbone. My cracked jaw flapped like a door missing a hinge. Four broken ribs. A concussion. Internal bleeding. My right eye only sees fuzzy images now.
I spent two months in the infirmary.
I pull the ace out of my deck. “You owe me, Philip.”
“Correction: I owe your father.”
“Same thing now.”
“You think his marker passes down to his son?”
“What would Dad say?”
Philip Mackenzie looks pained and suddenly weary.
“I didn’t kill Matthew,” I say.
“An inmate telling me he’s innocent,” he says with an almost amused shake of the head. “This has to be a first.”
Philip Mackenzie rises from his chair and turns toward the window. He looks out into the woods past the fence. “When your father first heard about Matthew... and even worse, when he found out you were arrested...” His voice trails off. “Tell me, David. Why didn’t you plead temporary insanity?”
“You think I was interested in finding a legal loophole?”
“It wasn’t a loophole,” Philip says, and I hear sympathy in his tone now. He turns back to me. “You blacked out. Something inside of you snapped. There had to be an explanation. We would have all stuck by you.”
My head begins to throb — another product of that beating, or perhaps his words are the cause. I close my eyes and draw a deep breath. “Please listen to me. It wasn’t Matthew. And whatever happened, I didn’t do it.”
“You were set up, huh?”
“I don’t know.”
“So whose body did you find?”
“I don’t know.”
“How do you explain your fingerprints on the weapon?”
“It was my bat. I kept it in the garage.”
“And what about that old lady who saw you burying it?”
“I don’t know. I only know what I saw in the photograph.”
The older man sighs again. “Do you realize how delusional you sound?”
I stand now too. To my surprise, Philip takes a step back as though he’s afraid of me. “You have to get me out of here,” I whisper. “For a few days anyway.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“Get me a bereavement leave or something.”
“We don’t offer those to your class of felon. You know that.”
“Then find a way to help me break out.”
He laughs at that. “Oh sure, no problem. And let’s say hypothetically I could do that, they’ll come after you with everything they got. Brutally. You’re a baby-killer, David. They’ll gun you down without a second thought.”