water. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. And I felt, I don’t know the word… beckoned by it. Called. I… I decided that I wanted to try it.”
She didn’t specify what the
“It’s not as high as it looks,” she said. “I thought it would be high enough. It wasn’t. The fall was very fast, and I had imagined it would be peaceful, but it was too quick to be peaceful. I don’t remember fear. I just remember knowing that it was too fast, that I’d counted on more time and wasn’t going to get it.”
She took a long, deep breath, chest filling, her breasts swelling against the faded prison uniform, and said, “There are rocks under the water in that spot. Not too far below. I hit one of them.”
Kimble looked away. He couldn’t help it. He couldn’t stand to think of her like that, falling from that bridge into the dark and the rocks.
“It was Wyatt who found me,” she said. “Late in the night.”
“You didn’t go to the hospital,” Kimble said. “Or at least he didn’t call the police for you.”
If he had, there should have been a record. There was no record.
“No,” she said. “We didn’t call the police, and I didn’t go to the hospital. He brought me up, and I got into my car and drove home. He tried to stop me from that, but I didn’t listen. That was the last time I saw him until his visit five weeks ago.”
Kimble said, “Wait a second. You said you landed on a rock.”
“Yes.”
“How did you just drive home, then? Weren’t you hurt?”
She looked away from him. “I guess I was lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“Doesn’t feel like it now.” She waved her hand around the room. “Not after years in here. But I guess I was lucky.”
There was something in her eyes that he wasn’t familiar with, couldn’t read, and he waited for more, but no words came. She just watched him with a detachment he’d never seen from her before.
“Jacqueline? Is that all there is to the story?”
She held her silence for a long beat, then nodded. “Yes.”
He matched her nod, but it was difficult. Just as they’d discussed when he sat down, there had always been a relationship of trust, no matter how bizarre that seemed. In all these years, all these visits, in every encounter they’d ever had, even from before the trial, even when she was refusing to tell him a damn thing about her husband’s violence, she’d never lied to him. Until now. How could you feel so betrayed knowing that a woman who’d once shot you in the back had now lied to you? The logic didn’t track, but emotions often didn’t choose to follow logic. This lesson Jacqueline Mathis had ingrained deeply in Kimble.
“So when he came here,” Kimble said, “he came to apologize?”
“That’s right. The lighthouse had been off that night. It seems Wyatt had done some drinking the previous night. He was arrested. You can verify that easily enough. By the time he got out and made his way home, it was dark, but the light wasn’t on. He went up and got it going and then he saw me.”
“So he wanted to apologize that he didn’t have the light going?”
“Yes,” she said. “I guess he thought it would have helped. He seems to understand the place very well. Much better than I do. He said if I spent time there, I’d understand it better myself.”
“Well, I’ve been out there. I don’t understand a damn thing.”
She said, “Take me there, then.”
“What?”
“That might help. If Wyatt was right, I’ll be able to understand what you can’t.”
“Jacqueline, I can’t
“I’m aware of that. But you’re a police officer. You can get me out there.”
The thought of it was alluring and frightening. The two of them, outside these walls and alone together. No guards.
He said, “I don’t think that’s an option.”
“Then I don’t know what to tell you,” she said.
He leaned forward, braced his forearms on his knees, and looked her in the eyes. It was not an easy thing for him. Meeting her eyes had a way of tightening his lungs, a way of shrinking the walls around him, making doors seem impossibly far away.
“Please,” he said, “tell me what you’re holding back.”
“Kevin, I would like to make parole. Do you understand that?”
“Of course.”
“Do you know how much my chances will be hurt if I begin telling stories that make me sound like a lunatic?”
“It’s you and me in this room. Not your parole board.”
“They’ll ask your opinion.”
“So did the prosecutor,” he said.
She knew well what that meant. She remembered the details he’d chosen to forget during her trial. Some of them, at least. Others—
“I’ve earned this from you, damn it,” he said, thinking of the months of physical therapy, the nights of insomnia, the constant ache in his back that lived within him like a draft in an old house. “This much I have
She winced, then nodded. “Fine. That’s fair enough. You want to hear the story? Wonderful. It’s a ghost story.”
“A ghost story.”
“That’s right. Still want to hear it, or shall I save us both the embarrassment?”
When he didn’t answer, she said, “You asked me how I wasn’t hurt, landing on a rock like that. I was hurt badly. I was dying when he came for me.”
“Wyatt?”
She shook her head. “Oh, no, Kevin. Not Wyatt. Not anyone you’re going to be able to find and interview. There will be no testimony from him, there will be no fingerprints. Still want me to go on?”
“Go on,” he said.
20
HE WAITED. She looked at him with an uncomfortable level of poignancy, as if she knew she might not see him again and wanted to preserve the moment, a woman watching her lover board a troopship and head off to war. Or ordering him aboard the ship. True to form with Jacqueline Mathis, he was never quite sure of her role.
“You’ve been there,” she said.
“The lighthouse? Yeah.”
“What about the rest of the area? The ridge, the woods, the trestle. Have you walked around there at all?”
“Just yesterday. Looking for a cat.”
“A
“Not the kind in the Friskies commercials, Jacqueline. A black panther. But yes, I’ve seen the place.”
She nodded. “You can picture the base of the trestle. It would be on the… eastern shore, I think. Closest to the road.”
“I can picture it.”
“There’s a fire down there,” she told him calmly.
He raised his eyebrows. “There was a fire?”
