The Innocence Game (7 page)

“We’ll talk tomorrow.”

I clicked off, got out of the car, and walked up the path to my house. The lawyer had told me to sell the place. Bank the money. Buy a condo downtown. Or both. What do lawyers know? I went into the kitchen and sat at the table. I could hear her key in the door. A yell that she was home. My mom wasn’t much of a cook, so we’d go out and get McDonald’s. When I got older, high school age, she told me I should go out with friends. But I didn’t care. I liked to eat with my mom. Then college came. Right on schedule, she got sick. I got up from the chair and opened a cabinet. There was a can of soup there and some crackers. I poured the soup into a pot and lit the stove with a match. It was an old stove. Lawyer probably wanted to get rid of that, too.

I walked into the living room. The wooden floor creaked under my feet. I sat on the couch and reread the letter she’d left with the lawyer. Then I put it down and picked up a framed picture I kept on an end table. It was an old print ad for Tide that ran in the
Trib
. My mom was the star, a young girl pulling sheets off a clothesline. Her eyes were wrinkled, and the sun was on her face.

“What are you staring at, Ian?”

I fumbled the picture and heard the crack of glass as it hit the floor. My mom stood in front of me.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said and began to pick up the pieces of glass, jagged and smeared with blood. Then she got a bandage from the bathroom and wrapped my hand where I’d cut it. When she was finished, she looked up at me. Her mouth was stitched into a frightened smile, and I could see my reflection in the black of her eyes.

“How are you?” she said.

“I’m fine, Ma.”

“You look thin.”

“I started school this week. Graduate school at Medill.”

“Is it fall yet?”

“Summer quarter, Ma.”

“That’s nice.” She sat down beside me. Memories flocked and swarmed around us. She crooked a finger and drew me closer. I moved as if on a string.

“I should have protected you, Ian. Both of you.”

The wind rattled a window somewhere in protest.

“You did what you could.”

“I should have done better.”

Her voice was unraveling. I leaned in, trying to catch the words as they crumbled in my hands. And then I was outside her bedroom, in the hallway upstairs, my palm flat against the door. She stood on the other side, fingers tracing mine against the worn wood, listening to the rise and fall of my chest, counting each breath as her own.

“Ma?” My voice was that of a boy, still drawing warm terror from his mother’s breast. The door creaked open and she stood there, in a black wind, one hand resting on a small, white coffin.

I woke with a start. The light outside was almost gone, houses across the street edged in thin lines of pink. The smell of smoke crept through the house. I got up and ran into the kitchen. The soup had cooked off, and the pot was burned on the bottom. I cleaned up as best I could and opened a window. Then I sat at the kitchen table and rubbed my temples with my fingers. Every now and then it happened. She’d be there, picking up the thread of a conversation we’d never had. Dreams like jagged pieces of shrapnel, cutting the wounds fresh. The doorbell rang, and I jumped. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard it ring. I put my mom’s letter away and hustled to the door. Sarah Gold stood on the porch. First, a visit from my dead mother. Now, Sarah.

“Just thought I’d come by,” she said. “See how you were doing.”

“Thanks. I just woke up.”

“Oh. Maybe I should come back?”

“No, no. Come on in.”

And so Sarah Gold walked into my house. She seemed larger than life at school. In my living room, her smile threatened to melt the wallpaper off the walls. She sat on the couch and looked around. I sat across from her.

“Sorry,” I said, waving away the smell of scorched metal and plastic. “I was cooking something and it burned.”

“You live alone?” she said.

“Pretty much, yeah. How about you?”

“I live in the city. North Side. You seem a little out of it.”

I gave myself an invisible shake. “I’m fine. Just half asleep.”

Sarah gave the place another look. I felt an urgent need to fill the yawning chasm of quiet.

“I grew up here,” I said. “I know, it’s weird. A guy living in the house he grew up in.”

“I didn’t say that.” Her voice had softened; her smile invited me in.

“My mom lived here,” I said. “She lived here with me.”

“Oh…”

“She passed last year.”

Sarah reached out and touched my sleeve. “I’m so sorry, Ian.”

I felt a dry patch in my throat and sudden tears stinging the backs of my eyes. Outside of the undertakers, not many people had ever told me they were sorry. But Sarah Gold had. And it caught me good.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Is your dad around?”

“He passed a long time ago.”

“I don’t mean to pry…”

I brushed her concerns aside. “She suffered from early-onset dementia. Be there one minute and gone the next. Everyone at the funeral told me it was a blessing.”

We were quiet again.

“Was this all going on…during undergrad?”

“Yeah. But it’s cool.”

It wasn’t cool. Nothing about coming home every night to a nurse we couldn’t afford and my mom, semiconscious and hooked up to a bunch of tubes, was cool. Not at any age. And definitely not when you were eighteen and a freshman in college. I let myself touch the anger for a moment. Allowed it to mingle with the grief. Then the guilt set in, and I put it all away.

“I’m so sorry, Ian.”

“Like I said, don’t worry about it. But now you know why I live here.” I got up from the couch. “You want something to drink?”

“No, thanks.” A car passed by the front of the house. Sarah seemed to watch it through the living room walls. “Yeah, okay. Maybe a glass of water?”

I got her some water with ice. Myself, a Coke.

“You want to talk about today?” she said.

“You first. Tell me about the records center.”

“Pretty boring, actually.”

“Really?” I took a sip and felt the spring inside unwind a little. Boring was exactly what I needed.

“They had a file on Harrison,” Sarah said. “Briefs, pleadings, trial transcripts. Some documents that were entered into evidence.”

“And?”

“It had been redacted to hell. Almost all of the substantive information was blacked out.”

“Is that unusual?”

“I asked the clerk, but she had no idea.” Sarah zipped open her backpack and pulled out a stack of papers. “I made copies of some things, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up.”

“You show Havens what you got?”

She nodded.

“What did he say?”

“He said he was working on an angle.”

“Huh.” I thumbed through her stuff. Sarah was right. It seemed pretty much useless.

“I think we might be wasting our time,” she said.

I looked up. “On Harrison?”

“Yes.”

“I disagree.”

“Why?”

“First of all, if you believe the cops stopped me to get that paperwork, then someone’s scared.”

“But it’s not evidence.”

“Second, there might be a way to get back some of the stuff I lost today.”

“How?”

“Hang on.” I went into the kitchen and came back with a pen and pad of paper.

“You going to write something?” she said.

“Not yet. For right now we need to sit and be quiet.”

A light flush stained her cheeks and a small smile played across Sarah’s lips. “Quiet, you say?”

“Absolute quiet.”

“What are we going to do?”

“
We
aren’t going to do anything. I’m going to relax. You just sit.”

I settled myself in an old leather recliner and closed my eyes. My body softened. My heart slowed. I counted forty-two beats a minute. Then thirty-seven. Somewhere Sarah fidgeted, but I was already slipping under. Thirty-five beats. I focused on my breathing. Inhale through one nostril. Exhale out the other. Flesh and bones melted away until only the core remained. The thump of my heart. The pump in my lungs. The third floor of the Cook County warehouse flickered across the back of my eyelids and came to life. I watched patiently, as if through a sheer curtain. Files from the Wingate case sat on a crooked wooden table. Havens stood to one side, making his copies. I pushed the curtain aside. The colors flared and hurt my eyes until I had to retreat. I waited a moment and tried again. This time the images came into a slow focus. The Wingate files were laid out on the table. Lines of dark print. Drawings. Scrawled notes and numbers. I saw each page distinctly. And yet all at once. My scalp tingled. My fingers itched. The images flashed past until they became a blur. Then there was nothing but heaviness. The download had finished.

I blinked my eyes open. Sarah was staring at me.

“How long has it been?” I said.

She checked her phone. “Ten minutes?”

I picked up a pen and began to write. She started to say something, but I stopped her. A half hour later, I’d finished. Sarah leafed through a dozen pages of scribble. Not perfect, but I figured I’d gotten back 60 percent of what the cops had taken.

“You have a photographic memory?” She was looking at me like I might be radioactive.

“If only. I have what they call a highly selective, short-term memory that has some eidetic components to it. If I focus and visualize, I can sometimes recall things for a very short period of time. Then they’re gone forever. I can also do numbers. See different combinations of digits, equations in my head.”

“You’re
Good Will Hunting
.”

“Hardly.”

Sarah scooted a little closer. “Names, phone numbers. You’ve even reconstructed some of the autopsy sketches.”

I went to the bathroom for some aspirin. Whatever kind of memory I had, it always gave me a headache. This one seemed especially bad. When I returned, Sarah was typing away on her iPhone.

“What are you doing?”

She hit
send
and looked up. “Just told Jake Havens we’ve gotten back our notes from the evidence warehouse. And we have a genius in the class.”

“I only got sixty percent of what we lost.”

“Close enough. Besides, the genius stuff will kill him. You want to go through all this? Maybe try to clean it up?”

“Might as well.”

For the next three hours Sarah and I translated what I’d written into a coherent narrative. When we were finished, we sat back and read. The first few pages were mostly descriptions of the crime scene, comments by investigators on pieces of evidence and possible leads. I’d been able to recall some details from Harrison’s arrest report and the bare bones of a memo I’d glimpsed from the files of the Cook County state’s attorney. The latter summarized the blow-by-blow of James Harrison’s trial. Best I could tell, there hadn’t been much of one.

The county’s case against Harrison consisted of an eyewitness named Bobby Atkinson who saw a man and a boy near Peterson Avenue at four-thirty in the afternoon on the day Skylar disappeared. The man fit Harrison’s description and was wearing a black T-shirt and jeans. According to Atkinson, the boy looked a lot like Skylar. The state also presented evidence of a bloodstain on Harrison’s jeans that was matched for type to the boy. DNA testing was available in Cook County in 1998, but neither the state nor the defense requested it. Harrison declined to take the stand in his own defense and offered no clear alibi. The entire proceeding took a day and a half. The jury deliberated for less than an hour. I dropped my notes onto the coffee table.

“Guilty or not, this guy didn’t get the trial he deserved,” I said and rubbed my eyes. “What time is it?”

“A little past eleven. You must be tired.”

“I’m not that bad.”

“How about we get out of here? Go get a drink?”

“Nevin’s?”

“I’ve got something better in mind.” Sarah was smiling when she said it.

The vodka was cold, and the bottle passed easily between us.

“I love it out here at night.” Sarah dug her feet down into the sand. We were sitting on an empty beach, less than a mile from Fisk Hall. The wind was up, and the lake was crested in white. The surf moaned in the darkness.

“You come here a lot?” I said.

“Sometimes. When it’s like this.” She held out her hand, and I passed the Absolut. I’d found it, cold and lonely, in my freezer. Sarah took a sip and handed it back.

“You ever been in love, Ian?”

My response was a grin that was lopsided and leaking at the edges.

“What was her name?” Sarah said.

“Never mind.”

“Why do you hold back?”

“What does that mean?”

“You hold back. Pieces of yourself. In class. Out of class. Now, when we’re just talking.”

I waggled the bottle in front of her. “I think you’ve had enough.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

“Four years in school and no one ever knew you. Hardly anything.”

“And you think that’s my fault?”

“I didn’t say that.” She edged a toe through the sand and kept her eyes down as she spoke. “Is it because of your mom?” She looked up. “I’m sorry. Should I not talk about that?”

“If you shouldn’t talk about it, then don’t. If you do talk about it, don’t ask for permission after the fact.”

“Ian…”

“You think I just started existing because you’re suddenly aware of me?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

I knew it wasn’t what she meant. And I hated that it had turned ugly. “Don’t worry about it.” I wiped my mouth. She looked over carefully.

“I’m serious, Sarah. My mom’s situation was what it was. Did I keep to myself because of it?” I shrugged. “Maybe, but I’m not complaining.”

“It’s okay to complain.”

“I know that.” I took another hit from the bottle, desperate to regain that Absolut glow. “Let’s talk about something else.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t care.”

“Ian…”

“It all right, Sarah. Really.”

We sat some more and let the night settle around us. We were close by the water, and the breeze kept us dry.

“Can I tell you something else?” she said.

“Sure.”

“I’m glad we met. Even if it did take four years plus.” Her smile lit up the darkness between us, and suddenly everything was all right again.