“I’ve got some advice for you, Doe.” He licked his pale, cracked lips. “Your fasting program is going to kill you. You might like it better here in the infirmary, but you’re going to end up in a body bag if you don’t start eating.”
I thought of the mound of colorless mush prisoners were served twice a day, accompanied by a paper cup of a transparent purple liquid, and knew I’d stick with the fasting no matter how many times I ended up in here.
“Big day for you, Doe, you’re moving,” he announced. “So up and at ’em. Your infirmary vacation is over. You’re headed to solitary.”
“What? Why?” I tried to sit all the way up, but the room spun around me. “I haven’t done anything!”
“You’re in here because of a fight, right?”
“I’d hardly call it a fight!”
“Whatever,” the doctor said. “The State doesn’t consult with me on the rules or the room assignments.”
A female guard appeared at the end of the narrow bed and began separating me from it.
“You have fifteen minutes to clean yourself up.” The doctor nodded toward the adjacent infirmary facilities as he none-too-gently yanked the needle out of my arm. “You have a visitor downstairs. Your counselor’s going to let you have fifteen minutes of visitation before the transfer.”
I almost passed out again at the thought of a visitor. No one could show up and ask to see you in prison; they had to be on your list unless they were clergy. I had a list—a short, short list that was a long, long shot. Chances were a Bible thumper was waiting patiently in the visitation room to save my degenerate soul. Well, I could work with that. And if he believed me, he might save my incarcerated butt.
The shower was wonderful, private (if your definition of private is no curtain or door and a guard watching), and the infirmary toiletries almost up to EconoLodge standards. The female guard passed me what would be my new uniform: granny panties, a sports bra laundered within an inch of its life, hospital-type scrubs in a pale blue color, and slip-on plastic shoes. After the shower and the merciful time with a real toothbrush and a real squeeze of Crest, I fingered my wet hair, dressed, and honestly felt as good as I had the first time I’d donned a Natalie outfit. Thank God someone finally knew I was here.
* * *
I spotted him right away, alone at a cafeteria-style table in a corner. Wasting a full one-fifteenth of my time, I found a wall to hold me up and drank him in. I made my way across the room on wobbly legs and fell into the chair opposite him. We stared at each other for another precious minute, him scanning my face, looking for anything familiar.
“Bradley Cole.” I could hardly breathe. “Thank you for coming.”
“I got your note,” he said, his cautious eyes smiling.
What note?
“The one you left on the fridge. That you had to go to work, and you’d be right back.”
I closed my eyes to squeeze in the humiliation. I opened them one at a time, and he looked, more than anything else, amused.
“I would have called,” he said, “but my phone was in the refrigerator.”
I crawled under the table.
(No, I didn’t.)
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“You left a lot of clues,” he pushed the sleeves of my favorite green sweater of his up an inch. “To tell you the truth, I can hardly move around the clues. I hope you don’t mind, but I put your copy machine in a storage unit.”
In spite of everything, and for the first time in weeks, I smiled. Then laughed. “My lease said no pets. It didn’t say anything about office equipment.”
He nodded slowly, smiled, then he shrugged. “I guess you’re right.”
“So the copier led you straight to me?”
“Not exactly.”
Bradley Cole laced his fingers, and his clasped hands were dangerously close to mine on the table between us.
“I found more than a few sets of identification, a hundred wigs, several Bellissimo uniforms, and two destroyed slot machines. I pieced it together with the six-o’clock news, and,” he surrendered, “here I am.”
“Here you are.” I whispered the words.
My joy, my gratitude, and my thankfulness overwhelmed me. It didn’t help that he was such a perfectly gorgeous man, more so in person than any photograph had ever thought of capturing.
“And you’ve gotten messages,” he said.
“Messages?”
He nodded. “There was an envelope under the door when I got home, and someone threw a rock with a note through the window.”
“Did you bring them?”
“I didn’t bring the rock.”
That did it. If I wasn’t completely in love with Bradley Cole before, I certainly was now.
“The guards wouldn’t let me through with the notes.”
“Tell me you read them,” I said.
“I did,” he answered, “not being nosy, more like seriously trying to figure out who you were and where you’d run off to.”
I nodded.
“You must really like Pop Tarts.”
For the second time since my incarceration, I laughed. Glorious laughter. Maybe I would try prison food; this man made me want to stay alive long enough to get out.
There was so much commotion in the large room—kids everywhere—that no one kept a clock on me, and I spent twenty-eight minutes with Bradley Cole, who was decidedly more impressive in person than in spirit. Too soon, though, a guard shouted, “Doe. Time’s up.”
If Bradley Cole and I marry and have a posse of children, this story will be repeated as often as my mother likes to tell the one about me ruining her life: “Daddy came to see Mommy at the prison. And that’s where we met. There was a big table. And nine months later, you were born.”
He was Robin Hood. He was Officer John McClane. Bradley Cole was Dudley Do-Right, and I was Nell, tied to the tracks.
The first thing we talked about was my father. Bradley promised me he’d know my father’s status an hour from right now, and he’d get news to me as quickly as the prison system would allow.
I was without words. I kept my lips pressed tightly together, and gripped the seat of the chair I sat in with both hands to keep myself from tackling Bradley Cole and smothering him with my unwavering love and eternal gratitude.
“That being said, let’s try to talk about your situation.”
My father’s health was my situation.
“Richard Sanders,” he said.
And there was that.
“Is he going to make it?” I held my breath.
“Absolutely,” Bradley Cole said.
I exhaled and patted my chest.
“He took the shot above the ear, through and through,” Bradley said, “and it hit his optical nerves and a retinal artery.”
I covered my eyes with my hands. “Owww!”
“It looked,” he said, “being a head-shot, a lot worse than it really was, which led to a ridiculous amount of sensationalized media, and he was taken by helicopter to the Shreveport Cranial Trauma Center for a seven-hour surgery, which in turn made the story even bigger. The media had him fighting for his life, when he was in fact,” Bradley said, “fighting for his eye.”
“The surgery, was it successful? Did they save his eye? And what about his hair?”
“His what?” Bradley asked.
“Never mind.” I waved. “Can he see?”
Bradley shook his head. “No word on that yet, but it’s only the one eye. Worst-case, he’s lost vision in one eye.”
“Are you reading all this in the paper?”
“No.” Bradley shifted in his seat, and I got a whiff of his sandalwood soap that I loved to shower with. Make that used to love to shower with. I wondered, for a split-second, if the prison would let him bring me some. Then I thought of razor blades and bars of soap, and decided they wouldn’t.
“I’m getting it at work,” he said.
“The soap?” I asked.
Bradley blin
ked several times.
“The messages,” I switched gears quickly. “What did they say?” The weeks of famine must have brought out my inner idiot. I forced myself to ignore how shockingly handsome Bradley Cole was in person, and to snap back into the here (prison), now (attempted homicide charges), and why (would he be here to help me?).
“Right,” Handsome said, “the messages.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, “why anyone would’ve come to the condo to leave me a message. They have to know I’m here.” I held my hands out like a Price Is Right model, displaying the magnificence of the Mississippi prison system. “Yet no one has made any attempt to help me.”
“From what I understand,” he said, “mine is the only name on your visitor list. How do you know they haven’t tried?”
“Until I can figure out how I ended up here,” I said, “the wrong person coming to see me would do more harm than good.”
“Do you know who the wrong person is?” he asked.
“I have a guess,” I said, “but it’s a frightening one. Other than that, I’m pretty sure Mr. Sanders’ wife is in it up to her eyeballs.”
He processed the information, then he closed what little space there was between us. His green eyes had a gold tint, which played perfectly off his five-o’clock shadow, golden as well. “What is your name?”
“It’s Davis,” I said. “Davis Way.”
“I like it,” Bradley Cole sat back. “Davis Way,” he tried it on. “Nice.” And then he smiled, honestly, a first-date smile. I felt it, I swear, all the way from my dyed-blonde hair to my new slip-on plastic shoes.
“Why are you back in Biloxi, Bradley? I thought you were out of town until June.”
“I had a long weekend,” he said, “so I came back to evict you.”
“What?”
“Davis.” He threw his hands in the air. “My phone rings off the hook about you. I’ve taken calls from neighbors,” he ticked the list off on his fingers, “from the building super, and then a few weeks ago about forty calls asking me about Marci somebody, and none of the calls were particularly nice.”
“Well, your neighbors aren’t exactly nice either, Bradley. And neither is your dry-cleaning guy.”
With a wide smile across his handsome face, he came across the table again, making my heart pound again. “Did you send my mother a hundred tulips for her birthday and sign the card from me?”
I could feel myself turning several shades of red.
“How in the world did you know it was my mother’s birthday?”
Oh, dear.
In the twenty-eight minutes we spent together, he never asked me if I shot Richard Sanders.
* * *
One thing I found in Solitary that I hadn’t found anywhere else in this entire institution was a human.
Her name was Fantasy Erb: five-foot-ten, thirty-one-years old, mother of three boys, and she should have been a runway model in New York, not a prison guard, or CO as they were called, Corrections Officer, in Mississippi. She worked the day shift, and the only way I knew that in my timeless world was because she delivered the first of my two food trays, the one that had the boiled egg (green yolk) beside the mound of gruel instead of the later-in-the-day side of gray mushy stuff, which might have been mutated cauliflower or potato, beside the mound of gruel.
Fantasy was the one who told me why I had been placed in solitary.
“They didn’t have anywhere else to put you, honey. We’re built out for twelve hundred guests, and we’re busting at the seams with twice that.”
“That’s a relief.”
“Depends on how you look at it,” she said. “Mississippi’s not so relieved.”
“It’s most likely all the casinos around,” I offered in a friendly tone. “Cash brings out the criminal in otherwise law-abiding citizens.”
Fantasy’s eyes narrowed.
“I didn’t mean me!”
She took a retreating step, as if to separate herself from her new homicidal ward. She turned to walk away, her keys clanging, then stopped, spun, and took two long strides back to my cell. She looked left and right. “I will say this,” she kept her voice soft, “if you listen to local chatter, there’s a whole lot of confusion as to what happened on this Bellissimo thing.”
“I didn’t shoot him.”
“Of course not, honey.”
Right. Everyone in prison was innocent.
“No, seriously,” Fantasy said, “you seem harmless, and I’m not just saying that because you’re two feet tall. Believe me, honey, I know the difference.”
She looked like she was about to stroll away, and I had to keep her here, if for nothing else, just civil conversation. “How long have you worked here?”
“Too long,” she said. “I’ve climbed up the pay ladder to the point of being stuck. I can’t go anywhere else and make this money,” she said. “And I’ve got a kid with bone-plate problems that would be a pre-existing anywhere else. So here I am,” she said. “Stuck.”
I knew exactly how she felt.
She locked a laser beam on me. “And I won’t do anything that might get me unstuck.”
I got it—boundaries. Or in this case, bars. So instead of asking her to pass me her Sig Sauer P238, I asked about my father. I’d see her again before Bradley Cole would cut through the solitary-confinement red tape.
I couldn’t sleep that night, waiting for Fantasy’s shift to start.
“I’m so sorry, honey,” she said. “My boys had homework coming out their ears last night, and the only thing I can tell you is that there isn’t anything bad on the Internet. The only story I could find says what you already know: He had a heart attack and a triple bypass.”
* * *
Thanks to Fantasy, I began eating again.
“Girl, tell them you’re diabetic.”
“But I’m not,” I said.
“So? Everyone in here lies out their ass. Tell them you are, and until your next physical when they find out you aren’t, which could be when pigs fly, you’ll get fresh fruits and vegetables,” she explained, “instead of Mystery Casserole.”
From that day on, I had a banana, a small container of fat-free peanut butter, and a slice of wheat toast for breakfast. My second meal was almost always tomato soup, five stale crackers, and an apple or an orange. Starvation problem solved, and more than that, she snuck me food.
“Up and at ’em, Doe. Inspection.”
She came in, flipped my mattress, pretended to frisk me, shined a light down the sink drain and in every corner, and when she left I had a glorious cornbread muffin, warm, swimming in butter, and a Dr. Pepper over crushed ice. I almost cried.
She snuck me to the shower, too, and even allowed me a small slice of privacy, in the room with me, but with her back turned. I was allowed two showers a week; she got me out of there every day. “What are you doing scratching that head, Doe? Get up. We’re going to the showers.”
She brought me a second set of prison digs, and a between the cotton top and drawstring pants was a zipped plastic bag, sandwich size, with a tablespoon of thick liquid green stuff in it. “Wash the one you’re wearing in the sink,” she said, “then spread it out under your mattress to dry.”
When I wasn’t eating, showering, worrying about my father, or planning my jailbreak, I was thinking about Bradley Cole.
My history with men was pathetic. The stuff of nightmares. Four years passed between my life-altering encounter with Mr. World Cultures Teacher and the next time I worked up the nerve. When I did it was a three-night stand, and as everyone knows, those don’t even count. Then another year passed before I dated a biology major, Geoff, for six boring months, immediately followed by a two-night stand (again, doesn’t count) with the coxswain on the UAB rowing team (he smelled funny), then the long, tumultuous decade of debauchery with (do I have to say it aloud?) Eddie the Ass. That’s it. Sum total. None of which had prepared me for Bradley Cole. Just like all the photographs hadn’t prepared me for the
3-D version.
For example, his hair wasn’t dark blond, like in the pictures. Bradley Cole’s hair was gold. Fourteen subtle shades of gold, including sunshine, candlelight, and honey. It was neat, short, very lawyerly, and looked soft. His green eyes weren’t just green; they were green flecked with gold, and they like the rest of Bradley Cole: warm, engaging, and brilliant. The man glowed. (Maybe that was me glowing.) Past all the glow, he was five-foot ten, maybe eleven, with an athletic body, the tapering kind, that said baseball. (Bradley Cole’s body said Varsity Pitcher Throws Perfect Game No-Hitter Shutout in State Championship.)
I couldn’t stop thinking about his hands.
Sadly, my only true point of reference was Eddie the Ass. He was the physical man-bar in my life, and, admittedly, he was pretty. Bradley Cole wasn’t pretty—he was all the way handsome. It took days for me to figure out what was missing in Bradley Cole. Eddie the Ass had something Bradley Cole didn’t. I finally put my finger on it: the Sleaze Factor.
* * *
Day six of solitary confinement dawned to the music of Fantasy rolling a cart down the hall. I sat up, feeling the metal supports beneath the wafer-thin pad pretending it was a mattress, to see, first thing in the morning, the not-Fantasy guard, Jerry. “You got a package from your attorney, Doe.”
My bare feet hit the cold floor.
I have an attorney?
A shock of blonde hair fell into my face, while it all registered. I am a blonde, I am in prison, and this guy is in charge of me. And more than that, the glowing Bradley Cole is an attorney.
Jerry used a handheld device, trained a beam, and the opening in the gate that made up the fourth wall of my cell slid open, at the same time a rubber support protruded, the exact shape of the food trays, but this time instead of a bowl of soup, Jerry tossed in books. One slid into the floor, and seeing what I could attach to as a personal possession, I dove for it.
One afternoon I’d stretched out on the bed and taken mental inventory of all my stuff, both in Biloxi and at home. It was a crazy long list of things I owned, everything from an antique typewriter I’d swiped from Meredith’s shop, a Dutch Doll quilt Grandmother Way had hand-stitched, to Burberry rain boots I’d only worn once. In here, I was cut off from it all, both things that mattered and things that didn’t, and the three books being mine, I certainly didn’t want anything to happen to them.
Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper) Page 23