Emilie Richards - Fox River

She shook her head. “No, I’m going to find it on my own, thanks.”

She waited for someone to argue. No one did.

“We’ll leave you to it, then,” Jake said. “And just so you know, if you happen to knock that particular mug to the floor, that would be fine with me.”

“Not one of my better efforts,” Maisy agreed.

“Definitely not.”

Julia could picture Jake, his arm slung over Maisy’s shoulder, leading his wife from the room. Tears filled her eyes again.

She took a moment to mourn all she had lost. Then she swallowed her tears and began her search.

Fidelity Sutherland, her long blond hair woven in a flawless French braid, came to Christian that night. Her smile was as sassy as ever, her throat a gaping caricature, a hideously grinning half-moon that spouted a river of blood down the front of a tailored white shirt.

He awoke without a sound and sat up quickly, but Fidelity would not be purged. In death, as in life, she was tenacious. As a young woman she had found ways to have everything she wanted. Dead almost ten years, she hadn’t lost her touch.

By the faint lightening of the sky Christian saw that dawn was perched on the horizon. There was a small barred window in his cell, too high for any purpose other than to let in slivers of light. He’d often wondered why windows had been included in the prison’s design. To remind the refuse of society that the sun rose and set without them?

Christian pillowed his head on his arms and stared up at the window. One year a red-winged blackbird had taken a liking to the narrow ledge and landed there intermittently all summer, vocalizing his own version of “nevermore,” which had seemed all too appropriate to Christian. He’d found himself looking for the blackbird whenever he was in his cell, but the moment Christian had begun to count on finding it there, the bird disappeared.

Blackbirds had darkened the skies at Claymore Park. Christian had grown up with them. Telephone lines crowded with glistening feathered bodies like endless ropes of Tahitian pearls. Once he had told Julia Ashbourne that her hair reminded him of a blackbird’s wing.

Once he had been a foolishly romantic young man with no idea of how quickly everything in his life could change.

“You awake?”

Christian didn’t take his eyes from the window. His cell mate, a man named Landis, always woke early. Landis, not yet twenty-one, was getting a head start on a lifetime of mornings like this one. Like Christian, his chances of encountering dawn any place else were almost nonexistent.

“Go back to sleep,” Christian said. “You have time.”

“Shit, I don’t sleep. You don’t know what can happen to you when you’re sleeping.”

“Nothing’s going to happen in here. You’re not my type.”

“You got a type?”

Christian’s type had been female and deceptively fragile, black-haired, blue-eyed and much too serious. In the company of the more flamboyant Fidelity Sutherland she had been easy for some people to overlook. He hadn’t been one of them.

He thought the sky was growing lighter quickly, which was too bad. “My type is female. Which means you’re safe.”

“Shit, most people got that idea when they come in here. But look what goes on.”

“Don’t look. You’ll be better off.”

“How you get to be so bored with all this? You don’t care about bein’ here?”

“What good would it do to care?”

“I never met nobody as alone as you.” Landis continued, buoyed by Christian’s silence. “You got no family?”

“All gone.”

“No woman waiting?”

“That would be a long wait, wouldn’t it?”

“You get mail, but you don’t even read it.”

Christian shifted, easing the pressure on his forearms. “You’re paying attention to things that aren’t your business, Landis.”

Landis bristled. “So? You gonna make something out of it?”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass what you notice, but other people might.”

“So?”

“I’ve seen men stabbed for less.”

“I just said you don’t read your mail. That’s all I said. How come you don’t?”

“No reason to.”

“It makes you homesick, don’t it? Mine makes me homesick.”

On a night when he’d been high on drugs and sure he was invincible, the young veteran of the streets of Southeast D.C. had killed a cop in a car chase, just within the Virginia border. Unfortunately he was also the proud owner of a rap sheet as long as the list of foster homes he’d paraded through from the time he was three. This wasn’t Landis’s first time in jail, but it would almost certainly be his last.

“I got me a girl back home,” Landis said. “I’m gonna get out of here someday. She’ll be waiting.”

Christian was silent.

“Your mail from a woman?”

Maisy Fletcher was certainly that. A warm earth mother who had taken Christian under her wing the first time she laid eyes on him. Now, all these years later, she hadn’t given up on him, even though her daughter had tossed him away like so much spoiled paté.

Maisy wrote Christian faithfully, averaging a letter a month. The letters appeared as regularly as beans and corn bread on Wednesday nights. There was nothing else Maisy could do for him.

He had gotten one yesterday, hence Landis’s question. He never read the letters anymore. In the first years of his sentence, he had read them all until he realized that the letters were like acid burning holes through his thickening defenses. She talked about people he’d grown up with, talked around Julia’s marriage to Lombard Warwick, told funny stories about life in Ridge’s Race. As a letter writer Maisy, who in everyday life was often inarticulate and unfocused, came into her own. She captured the life he’d left behind too perfectly.

“Chris, you awake?”

“What chance do I have to sleep with you talking?”

“I’ll stop reading letters, too, won’t I? One day, I’ll stop reading them. Just like you.”

Christian closed his eyes.

“Heel, Seesaw.” Seesaw obediently took up her place beside Christian and started down the track.

She was a particularly pretty puppy, clever and bursting with energy. But Christian knew better than to get attached to any of the dogs who came through the Pets and Prisoners program. He had grown up with dogs and horses. He’d seen both at their best and worst, trained them, nursed them, even put them down when required.

He kept his distance here. The dogs he trained went on to new masters. He knew from reports how well they were cared for and how invaluable they were. Sometimes he found himself wishing he could watch a puppy like Seesaw grow up, but he knew how lucky he was to have this chance to work with her at all. Training guide dogs was as close to his past as he was liable to come.

Timbo signaled from the side of the track, and Christian stopped and turned. Seesaw waited beside him as he unsnapped her leash. Timbo called her name, and she trotted toward him. Christian followed.

“Okay, Timbo. If you had to rate her chances of getting through the advanced training, what would you say?”

Timbo studied the puppy as he petted her. “Good. No, better than good. I’d say nine out of ten.” He looked up. “What do you say?”

“Eight out of ten. She’s a party girl. We may have some trouble teaching her to ignore other dogs. But it’s a small problem at this point, and I expect it will go away as she matures. I’ll mention it to her new family.”

“They’re taking her tomorrow?”

“In the morning. We’ll get another batch of puppies next week. I’ll finish the paperwork tonight.”

“She’ll have a good home?”