One of Us (2 page)

I glanced away from Tommy, trying to come to grips with this latest revelation. Jack and I were the same age and more than that we’d both lost parents. My mom was still alive, but it didn’t matter much since she was locked up. Some days I’d tell myself I wouldn’t know the difference if she was dead or not, but I knew this wasn’t true, be
cause if she was dead, I wouldn’t have to worry about her all the time. My pain would be smooth and easy to hold, having been polished by the finality of irreparable loss, not surrounded by the jagged edges of possibilities.

“After they cut down Prosperity,” Tommy went on, “Fiona turned and walked toward a group of men in top hats and velvet-trimmed black coats standing off to one side behind the gallows. She walked up to one man in particular who wore a small white rose in his buttonhole and a single ruby stud in his shirtfront and stared him directly in the face.”

“Walker Dawes,” I whispered.

“What she was doing would have been unthinkable to most of the people there, but it was a day already filled with the unthinkable and Fiona was a woman who thrived on such situations.

“She pushed little Jack forward. He was terrified and sick to his stomach but he went. He craned his neck back and took in the tall, dark figure that loomed above him and regarded him without pity, kindness, or even the instinctual affection adults usually feel for children. He would tell me many years later that on the day he watched his father hang, Walker Dawes looked at him with amusement.”

“You talked to Jack?” I asked him, confused and a little excited by the idea.

He reached across the table and ruffled my hair.

“He didn’t stay a little boy forever. He grew up. Jack McNab was my father.”

“Did he try to get revenge?”

“No. Nothing like that. On the contrary, he worked for Lost Creek Coal for the rest of his life. It was Fiona who never stopped talking about revenge. According to her, Prosperity never killed anyone or committed any crime as crime was known to be in this country or any other. She saw it only one way from beginning to end: her husband had stood up to Walker Dawes and for that he was murdered. The mortal sin and legal iniquity aside, she was not the type of woman who allowed others to mess with her own.

“Most people eventually came to regard her threats as the ravings of a deranged old woman, but some bought into the story that she had
turned to the Devil to get what she wanted and had become a powerful witch.”

“Was she? Was she a witch?”

“Truth be told, the only black art she ever practiced was the burning of the pot roast every Sunday, yet I trusted her predictions. I was certain injustice would be avenged. But not because I believed in curses or kismet.”

“What did you believe in?”

“For the longest time I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t put a name to it. It was just a feeling I had that our family would get back a little of our own someday. But now I know.”

He stood up from the table and walked out the kitchen door onto his back stoop. It was a warm night in late September with just a tinge of autumn chill in the air. I joined him and followed his gaze past the roofs of the row homes to the worn-down mountains crouched on the horizon. Soon they’d be a riot of color when the leaves changed. Tonight, bathed in the glow of a full moon, they were the deep dark purple of a fresh bruise.

It was an amazing story, terrible and wonderful at the same time, like my mother’s love, like these precious, poisoned hills that were the source of our survival and our ruin. I didn’t want it to end.

“What, Tommy?” I asked again. “What do you believe in?”

He didn’t look down at me but said to the sky, “I believe in you, Danny.”

one

I
WATCH THE CORRECTIONS OFFICER
with his back to us standing outside the Plexiglas-encased interview room. The fingers on his right hand hanging next to his pepper spray occasionally flex the same way a dog’s paws twitch while he dreams of chasing a rabbit. I wonder if he’s asleep.

Over the years I’ve come in contact with a countless number of men in law enforcement, a phenomenon that began when my mother was first incarcerated. I’ve developed great respect for some, but most have proven to be variations on a theme, adult versions of the boys who tortured me when I was a child, with the same no-neck bulldog compression of head to torso, the same tightly wired yet somehow easy manner that would enable them to crack open a few skulls then go home and eat a bologna sandwich.

“You seem distracted,” Carson Shupe says. “Thinking about your trip?”

I pull my attention away from the guard and focus on the convicted killer of four young boys sitting across the table from me.

“How are
you
feeling?” I ask him.

“I’m fine. I’m good.”

He looks at me with his strangely jaundiced brown eyes, the color of watery beef broth, and as usual I don’t find anything there except normalcy. Despite what he’s done, this has always been a relief to me be
cause it confirms my faith in the mentally ill. They are rarely violent. On the contrary, the desire to harm others is deeply rooted in the psyche of the sane. We’re all capable of killing someone, although everyone isn’t capable of killing just anyone.

Carson unclasps his fingers and tries to spread out his hands and raise them in a sign of acceptance, but his restraints shackled to a bolt in the metal tabletop keep him from doing this.

I glimpse his mutilated fingertips, shiny and pink with smooth scar tissue. Since he was a child, long before he began his career of unspeakable crimes, he’s been obsessed with removing his fingerprints. He’s tried rubbing them off with sandpaper, coating them with Krazy Glue and peeling them off, slicing them off with a razor. Even here in a maximum-security prison he’s been able to get hold of matches and lighters and burn them off. The few times he’s been in solitary, he’s gnawed his fingers with his own teeth. His compulsion has nothing to do with a desire to conceal his identity, but originated from a wish to erase the one thing about him that made him unique from others. Carson has always desperately wanted to be like everyone else.

“Are you coming?” he asks me in a casual, pleasant tone, as if he is inviting me to dine with him instead of watch him die.

“Do you want me to?”

He shrugs.

“It would be nice to have a friend there.”

My mind wanders back to my childhood again at the mention of the word “friend” and my complete lack of one. In all fairness to the boys who bullied me, they couldn’t help themselves. My very existence practically begged for it. I was tall, spider-limbed skinny, skittish, bookish, pale, with a shock of almost black hair and equally dark eyes smudged with purple exhaustion that gave my face an otherworldly appearance.

Kids who called me anything called me the Ghost. I liked to think the nickname was meant as a compliment to my athletic prowess, referring to my ability to disappear on a cross-country course as much as my pallor, but I knew this wasn’t the case. I was spooky. I had murder in my present and my past and someday in my future I’d choose to make the study of it my profession.

“I’ll do my best,” I tell him, “but I can’t promise. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.”

“This sick grandfather you’re going to take care of . . . Is he the one who watched his father hang?”

“It was
his
father who watched
his
father hang.”

“I guess a lethal injection is better than hanging. Anything is better than drowning,” he adds when I don’t comment.

I know where this observation comes from. He found his mother passed out drunk in the bathtub when he was ten years old. This fact alone didn’t traumatize him nearly as much as his own decision not to try and help her. He walked down the stairs of their apartment building, out into the moist Miami sunshine, and took a bus to the nearest public beach, where he sat in the searing sand and watched the hypnotic ebb and flow of a much larger body of water bringing dead fish to shore.

He pictured his mother as he had left her and was amazed by her resemblance to them: her mouth dangling open and her skimpy sequined cocktail dress clinging wetly to her skin, giving her the same opalescent sheen as their scales. He knew when he returned he might find her in the kitchen, raw and shaky, wrapped in a faded, tattered aqua bath towel making a Bloody Mary; or he might find her submerged in the bathwater glassy-eyed and bloated like the fish. Either way he had made the conscious decision to no longer interfere. Leaving her alone in the tub had been his participation in the act of natural selection. Since then he’s become almost obsessed with the concept and convinced that it doesn’t work.

His thoughts continue down their expected path.

“Have you had any luck contacting my mother?” he asks me.

“I’m afraid not.”

“There has to be an address where her publisher sends all those royalty checks.”

“Apparently the money is electronically transferred to a bank account in her name, but she’s no longer at her last known physical address.”

He presses his fingertips together and begins to flex the digits like a bellows.

“Do you want her to be there?” I ask.

“No. If she’s there she’ll embarrass me.”

“Then why is it so important that I find her?”

“I want her to know. That’s all. I want her to be reminded.”

It’s a difficult question for me to ask but one I feel I must for both of us.

“Do you blame her?”

His lips twitch slightly while he considers my question, pursing and relaxing as though he’s contemplating blowing a smoke ring. He’s a calm, quiet man, intelligent, personable, compact, fastidious about his appearance and almost prim in his outlook on life; the kind of man the neighbors will defend on the six o’clock news even after the facts begin to come to light.

A pained expression passes over his face and he leans toward me across the table. His eyes darken and he lowers his voice to a lewd whisper that makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

“Everything bad that happens in this world is the fault of someone’s mother,” he says.

“Time’s up, Doc,” the guard announces, entering the room along with an almost identical version of himself. “He’s gotta go.”

I stand and so does Carson, who waits patiently while they unfasten his handcuffs from the table and his ankle chains from the floor. His lips begin their nervous puckering again. Perspiring scalp glimmers beneath the thinning hair on top of a head that looks too heavy for the thin neck straining forward from a pair of soft, hunched shoulders in a flesh-colored prison jumpsuit he somehow remarkably manages to keep spotless and wrinkle-free. Beneath the harsh glare of the fluorescent overhead light, he casts the pitiable shadow of a turtle outside his shell.

I stop in front of him. He bobs his head toward me. Before the guard intervenes and jerks him backward he’s able to blow on my shoulder.

“Lint,” he says.

“Thank you,” I reply, brushing at the sleeve of my navy Ralph Lauren suit jacket, originally worn years ago during my first appearance on
Larry King Live
at the height of the Wishbone Killer trial. It’s
since been relegated to prison visits and weddings of people I barely know.

“You’re the only one out there who doesn’t think I’m crazy,” he adds. “I appreciate that.”

One of the guards glances in my direction with a smirk on his face.

I realize this is a seemingly bizarre comment considering my testimony at his trial and ongoing expert insistence that this man is in complete control of his mental faculties is leading directly to his death.

His lawyers mounted a vigorous insanity defense, but his heart was never in it. If they had been able to successfully convince a jury he was out of his mind, he would have been allowed to remain alive in a secured psychiatric facility, but it was obvious to me he’d rather die than have his sanity doubted.

I know why he feels this way. I have a crazy mother, too.

One of the officers escorts Carson back to his cell. The other walks me out.

I watch Carson go and I’m hit with a wave of loneliness. I admit I’ve come to depend on him. I find it easier to talk to him than to anyone else I know, and his suggestions for dealing with my problems have proven to be remarkably insightful. Still, I’m not sure I could ever be comfortable having a serial killer for a life coach.

“You coming for the big day?” the guard at my side asks me.

I glance at his name tag: Pulanski. I remember him. The last time I was here he wanted my opinion on the legitimacy of type 2 bipolar syndrome. His wife had suddenly become afflicted with it in the middle of their divorce and was using it as the reason she couldn’t hold down a job and required substantial spousal support. He wanted to know if it was similar to type 2 diabetes and would go away if she lost weight.

“I don’t know,” I answer him.

“You ever seen one?”

“An execution? No.”

“You ever been responsible for one before?”

“If you mean is this the first case I’ve worked on where someone has
been sentenced to death and exhausted his appeals, the answer is yes,” I reply. “But I’m not responsible.”

“The guys say you’re gonna write another book. That’s why you’ve been spending so much time with Shupe.”

“I have no plans to write a book about him. His mother already did that.”

“Yeah, I know. Did you read it?”

“Yes.”

“What was it she called you?”

His eyes dart in my direction. I can tell by the barely suppressed mirth in the look he gives me that he knows exactly what she called me; he just wants to hear me say it out loud.

“A pedantic buffoon and a spotlight-grabbing windbag.”

His face splits into a broad grin before immediately returning to the humorless blank mask required by his profession.

“I’ve never met the woman,” I tell him. “I’ve never spoken to her. And I’m sure she doesn’t know what any of those words mean. Of course, she had a ghostwriter.”

“Maybe the ghostwriter’s an ex of yours?”

I smile but it’s merely a nervous tic. He’s making fun of me. My means of dealing with abuse has never evolved from childhood. Whether verbal or physical, my instinct has always been to run.

Carson assures me this is a perfectly healthy response and probably one of the reasons why I’ve survived so nicely, but it’s not appropriate in every situation. I can’t very well take off sprinting down the sterile prison corridor, my jacket flapping behind me, the hard soles of my shoes making rat-a-tat echoes, inmates pressed against bars whooping and cheering on my flight.

We pass through a security checkpoint. The moment I see my iPad, my BlackBerry, my neatly folded burgundy cashmere scarf, the shiny gold of my special credentials provided by the Philadelphia County District Attorney’s Office, and a hardcover copy of my latest book with my name, Dr. Sheridan Doyle, finally larger than the print of the title sitting safely inside my briefcase, my panic diffuses.

I used to try to get people to use my full name instead of Danny, not
out of any love for the former or dislike for the latter, but as a way to be taken more seriously and to distance myself from my past. But after years of listening to comments about me being named after a Sheraton Inn (i.e., “Ho-ho, is that where you were conceived?”), I finally abandoned the project.

Outside a January gust of swirling snow hits me in the face. My car is already packed with my laptop, clothing, toiletries, running gear, and a garment bag with several suits and jackets. There will be no call for the suits, but I always like to have a few with me no matter where I go.

When the doctor called to tell me that Tommy was being released after having been hospitalized with pneumonia, the conversation felt like a slap in the face. I never knew about his illness. I’d never considered the possibility that my grandfather could die. He may be in his nineties, but he’s still as strong as an ox, and if his health ever began to finally fail him, I’ve always been confident his stubbornness would continue to keep him alive. His father and grandfather both died young under tragic circumstances, and I’ve often thought much of his longevity has been due to his unflagging belief that Death owes him.

I still need to swing by my office to pick up some case files and have a final meeting with my secretary, Max.

I’ve already locked up my apartment. It’s a spacious two-bedroom with only a few pieces of carefully selected furniture and even fewer personal items. I like to think my style of decorating is a study in tasteful minimalism, but not everyone sees it this way. My cleaning woman calls my apartment the Tomb.

I’ve lived in Philadelphia for over twenty years, beginning when I came here to attend Penn, and with the exception of doing my graduate work at Yale, I’ve never resided anywhere else. I’m not sure why. I don’t have any great loyalty or attachment to this particular city, but I do like my neighborhood. It’s upscale and trendy but not too much of either. Gentrified brownstones are interspersed with gastropubs and tiny overpriced boutiques where no more than two customers can enter at a time to browse through one rack of clothing while being snubbed by a texting salesgirl. But there’s also a seedy bodega on the
corner that gets robbed weekly and a tattoo parlor across the street from me catering to pierced, shaggy-haired women I’d never approach but love to watch who come and go in a stream of tight leather, ripped jeans, and unapologetic cleavage.