The Silent Hour

somebody with a knife, I’d probably put that one on the list.”

“Are you going to let me in?” he said.

I hesitated for a moment, then sighed and swung the door open and walked back to my chair behind the desk. He sat across from me, on one of the stadium chairs. He gave it a curious look, as most people do.

“From the old stadium?”

I nodded.

“When I was a child I saw Jim Brown play there,” he said.

“Lots of people did.”

He frowned at that, bothered by my unfriendliness, and said, “I have six thousand dollars. A little more than that, but roughly six thousand. I meant to lead off with that, do this properly, with the retainer and all.”

“I’m not really looking for work right now, Harrison. Pretty backed up, actually.”

He looked at my desk then, perhaps noting the absence of paperwork, and I reached out and turned the computer monitor to hide the ESPN screen. Like I said, pretty backed up.

“I read about you in the papers,” he said.

“Terrific. I wasn’t real happy about being in them.”

“I felt the same way when I made the front page.”

I cocked my head and stared at him. “Is that supposed to be amusing?”

“No, it’s supposed to be serious.”

Neither of us said anything for a minute. I was studying him, that scar on his cheek and the steel in his eyes. He had a soft voice. Too soft for the eyes and the scar.

“When I read about you,” he said, “I knew you were the right person for this. I knew it. You’ve shown compassion for people who have done wrong. You’ve done wrong yourself.”

He seemed to want a response to that, but I didn’t offer one. After a pause, he spoke again.

“I knew that you wouldn’t treat me as worthless, as diseased, simply because one day I made a terrible mistake and somebody died.”

A terrible mistake and somebody died. That was one way to phrase it. I pushed back from the desk and hooked one ankle over my knee, keeping my silence.

“You’re looking at me with distaste,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

“It bothers you very much. Being in this room with me, knowing that someone died at my hand.”

“Being in the room doesn’t bother me. Knowing that you killed someone does. Are you surprised by that?”

“You’ve never killed anyone, I take it?”

My hesitation provided his answer, and I disliked the look of satisfaction that passed over his face. Yes, I’d killed, but it was a hell of a lot different than what Harrison had done. Wasn’t it? Of course it was. He’d murdered someone in a rage. I’d killed in self-defense—and never reported the death.

“Mr. Harrison, I’d like you to go on your way. I’m just not interested in continuing this conversation, or in doing any work for you. I’m sorry if that upsets you. There are plenty of PIs in this town, though. Go on and talk to another one of them, and do yourself a favor this time and keep the murder story quiet.”

“You won’t work for me.”

“That’s correct.”

“Because I told you that I killed someone.”

I was getting a dull headache behind my temples and wanted him out of my office. Instead of speaking, I just lifted my hand and pointed at the door. He looked at me for a long time and then got to his feet. He turned to the door, then looked back at me.

“Do you believe that prison can change someone?” he said.

“I’m sure that it does.”

“I mean change them in the way that it is supposed to. Could it rehabilitate them?”

I didn’t answer.

“You either don’t believe that or you aren’t sure,” he said. “Yet you were a police officer. You sent people to prison. Shouldn’t you have believed in that idea, then?”

“I believe that we don’t have any better ideas in place at the current time. Does that satisfy you?”

“The question is, does it satisfy you, Lincoln.”

“If all you wanted was a discussion about the system, you could have had it with your parole officer.”

“I didn’t want a discussion about the system. I wanted you to treat me like a functioning member of society. You’ve chosen not to do that.”

I rubbed a hand over my eyes, thinking that I should have left for lunch ten minutes earlier.

“Prison didn’t rehabilitate me,” he said, “but another place did. Some other people did.”

He was still standing there, hadn’t moved for the door, and now I gave up. It apparently would be easier to hear him out than throw him out.

“The job,” I said. “What is it? What do you want from me?”

He gestured down at the chair from which he’d just risen, and I sighed and nodded, and then he sat again.

“I got out thirteen years ago,” he said. “Spent the first year working for the most amazing woman I ever met. She was someone who operated on a level above most of the world. Kind, compassionate, beautiful. She and her husband built a house in the woods that was as special a place as I’ve ever seen on this earth, just a gorgeous, haunting place. If you go to it, and I hope you will, you’ll understand what I mean. There’s an energy there, Lincoln, a spirit I know you’ll be able to feel. They came up with the idea for the home themselves, and it was incredible. Built underground on one side, so that when you came up the drive all you saw was this single arched door in the earth.”

He lifted his hands and made an arch with them, revealing tattoos on the insides of both wrists.

“The door was this massive piece of oak surrounded by hand-laid stone, and it was all you could see. Just this door to nowhere. Then you could walk up over the door, stand on a hill, and even though the house was directly beneath you, you couldn’t tell. There were trees and plants growing all over the place, and no sign that a home was under your feet. At the top of the hill they built a well house out of stone, styled in a way that made you think it was two hundred years old. There was no well, of course, because the house was beneath. If you kept walking past that, you’d come to this sheer drop.”

Again he lifted his hands, making a slashing motion this time. “That was the back wall. Two stories of glass, all these windows looking out on the creek and the pond and the woods. It was only from the back that you could see the house. From the front, it was just the door in the hillside. Alexandra wanted it to feel that way. She wanted it to be a place where you could escape from the world.”

I had a strong sense that he was no longer seeing me, that I could stand up and do jumping jacks and he wouldn’t blink. He was back at this place, this house in the earth, and from watching his face I knew that he recalled every detail perfectly, that it was the setting of a vivid movie he played regularly in his head.

“I helped them grow vegetables, and I kept the grass cut and the trees trimmed and the creek flowing and the pond clean,” he said. “In the fall I cleared the leaves; in the winter I cleared the snow. No power tools, not even a mower. I did it all by hand, and at first I thought they were crazy for requiring that, but I needed the job. Then I came to understand how important it was. How the sound of an engine would have destroyed what was there.”

“Who were they?” I asked, and the interruption seemed as harsh to him as a slap in the face. He blinked at me a few times, then nodded.

“The owners were Alexandra and Joshua Cantrell, and while I was not close to Joshua, I became closer to Alexandra in a year than I would have thought possible. She was a very spiritual person, deeply in touch with the earth, and when she learned I had Shawnee ancestry, she wanted to hear all of the stories I’d heard, was just fascinated with the culture. I learned from her, and she learned from me, and for that one single year everything in my life seemed to have some harmony.”

He paused, lifted his head, tilted it slightly, and looked me in the eye.

“They left that place, that beautiful home they’d built, without any warning, just drove away and left it all behind. I never saw them or heard from them again. That was twelve years ago.”