“Quite an effort, C-Bird,” she said.
“You’ve read it?”
“Yes. We all have.”
I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t know what to say.
“You understand, some folks might be hurt by what you describe,” she said.
“Hurt?”
“Reputations. Careers. That sort of thing.”
“It’s dangerous?”
“It might be. Always a little hard to tell.”
“What should I do?” I asked.
Lucy smiled again. “I can’t answer that for you C-Bird. But I have brought you several presents that might help you to make a decision.”
“Presents?”
“I guess, for lack of a better word, that is what you might call them.” She gestured with her hand at a simple brown cardboard box that was pushed up against the wall. I walked over to it and reached inside and took out some items collected inside.
The first was a package of large yellow legal notepads. Next to that was a box of Number 2 pencils with erasers. Then, below those, there were two cans of eggshell white, flat latex wall paint, a roller, a tray, and a large, stiff paintbrush.
“You see, C-Bird,” Lucy said carefully, measuring her words with a judge’s precision and pace. “Just about anyone could come in here and read the words you’ve put up on the wall. And they might interpret them in any number of ways, not the least of which is to wonder just how many bodies are buried in the old state hospital graveyard. And how those bodies happened to get there.”
I nodded.
“But, on the other hand, Francis, this is your story, and you have the right to tell it. Hence the notepads, which have a slightly greater permanence, and significantly more privacy to them than the words scrawled on the wall. Already those are starting to fade, and pretty soon, they are likely to be illegible.”
I could see that she was telling the truth.
Lucy smiled, and she opened her mouth as if to add something else, but then stopped. Instead, she simply leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek.
“It’s good to see you again, C-Bird,” she said. “Take better care of yourself from now on.”
Then, leaning heavily on her cane, dragging her ruined right leg with every step like a memory of that night, Lucy slowly limped from the room. Big Black and Little Black watched her for a moment, then they, too, wordlessly, reached out, shook my hand, and followed after her.
When the door closed shut, I turned back to the wall. My eyes raced over all the words there, and as I read, I carefully unwrapped the pencils and the pads of paper. Without hesitating for more than a few seconds, I quickly copied down from the very top:
Francis Xavier Petrel arrived in tears at the Western State Hospital in the back of an ambulance. It was raining hard, darkness was falling rapidly, and his arms and legs were cuffed and restrained. He was twenty-one years old and more scared than he’d ever been in his short, and to that point, relatively uneventful life…
The painting, I thought, could wait for a day or so.
About the Author
John Katzenbach has written eight previous novels: the Edgar Award-nominated In the Heat of the Summer, which was adapted for the screen as The Mean Season; the New York Times bestseller The Traveler; Day of Reckoning; Just Cause, which was also made into a movie; The Shadow Man (another Edgar nominee); State of Mind; Hart’s War, which was also a motion picture; and The Analyst. Katzenbach has been a criminal court reporter for The Miami Herald and Miami News and a featured writer for the Herald’s Tropic magazine. He lives in western Massachusetts.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Ballantine Book Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2004 by John Katzenbach
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.
eISBN: 978-0-345-47847-4
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