The Silent Hour

remember him. Every single day, I think of him, and of what I took from him and those who loved him. It’s important to remember.”

“You know that she left the house so Joshua would be remembered. You’re sure of that.”

He nodded.

“Do you know who killed him?”

He shook his head. I watched for the lie and couldn’t find it.

“I wanted to know,” he said. “That’s why I came to you. You wish I never had, and I’m sorry about that. I picked you because I hoped you’d see past my prison sentence, see past my crime. The police can’t do that. Neither could you, and that’s all right. I took a chance with you. It didn’t work out. Sometimes they don’t.”

“It didn’t work out for you? Ken’s dead, Harrison.”

“That wasn’t me. I’m sorry about it, more sorry than I can probably make you believe, but it was not me who killed him.”

A car passed on the road, circling slowly through the cemetery, and neither Harrison nor I spoke until it was gone.

“Why were you talking to Dominic Sanabria?” I said.

“When?”

“Any of the times. You called him when Cantrell was killed, you called him when the body was found, you called him just before Ken was killed.”

He hesitated before saying, “At first I was trying to get information out of him. Trying to get in touch with Alexandra.”

“What did you tell him the day before Ken was killed?”

“I told him that you were done with the case. He’d called me earlier to say that his sister and her memory needed to be left alone. That was when I asked you to quit. I was worried for you, and I didn’t want to be the one who put you in harm’s way. I didn’t trust Dominic.”

“All of that might be believable, Harrison, but there’s one call missing in that explanation. Why did you call him when the body was found? When it was found and before it was identified.”

He looked uncomfortable, failed to meet my eyes for the first time. “I really can’t speak of that.”

“You piece of shit.” I shook my head in disgust. “You know things that could help, and you won’t say them. You don’t really want to see anything resolved, don’t give a damn about Ken or Cantrell or anybody else. It’s all some sort of sick game to you.”

“It’s not that at—”

“Then tell the rest of it!” I got to my feet, shouted it at him.

He stood in silence and watched me. I waited for him to speak, and he did not. After a few minutes of staring at him, I shook my head again.

“I made a promise,” he said, his voice very soft, “to someone who mattered more to me than anyone I’ve ever known. Can you understand that? I gave my word.”

“To Alexandra? She’s gone, Harrison. Gone, and maybe dead. She’s been gone for twelve years. You want to let your promise to her prevent justice?”

No confirmation, no denial, no response.

“Why do you have such loyalty to that woman?” I said, weariness in my voice.

He didn’t answer right away. I stood beside the Daykin monument, resting one hand on the lion’s side, and I waited. Finally he spoke.

“It’s never really quiet in prison,” he said. “People think of it as a quiet place, solitary, but it’s not. Doors bang, and guards walk around, and the other prisoners talk and shout and laugh and cough. It’s loud all the time. Even at night, you hear sounds of other people. You’re never really alone.”

He paused, and I didn’t say anything. Another car drove past.

“You’re never alone,” he said again, “and it’s not an easy place to be. It shouldn’t be, right? It’s a place where you’re sent to be punished, a place that’s supposed to painful. You walk around with other murderers, with rapists, drug dealers. Some violent people, some crazy people. You’re one of them, and you’ve got a role to play. You’ve got to seem more violent and more crazy than them. You got to be the craziest man in the place, understand? Because otherwise you will not survive.”

He wet his lips, shifted in the grass.

“I’d been in for four years before I decided I couldn’t finish. I just gave up, knew there was no way I could make it to the other side. There was a cleaning detail, and I got assigned to that, and I started stealing Drano. They had a big bottle, I knew I’d never get that out, so I emptied toothpaste tubes and filled them with the stuff, brought them back to my cell. You have any idea how hard it is to fill a toothpaste tube with Drano? Takes dedication, I assure you. I waited until I had three of them filled. I did not want to have too little to do the job. I thought there would probably be enough in those three tubes to kill me.”

“You’re still here,” I said. “So it wasn’t enough?”

“I think it would have been. I didn’t take it.”

“Why not?”

“It got quiet,” he said. “The night I was going to take it, the place got quiet. For one hour. I can tell you that almost exactly. I was waiting, and I was scared, and then it got quiet. I had one silent hour. I couldn’t believe it. Nobody was talking, or moving, or screaming, and in that hour I remembered, for the first time in a long time, that this was not all that I was. I’d killed somebody, and it was a terrible thing, and I was in this terrible place and I would be for years to come, but that was not all I was. If I committed suicide in there, though, if I died in that place, then it would be different. That would be my identity, all the world would ever know or remember about me, that I was another murderer who died in the place where murderers belong.”

He took the rag off his belt again, ran it over his face, soaked up the fresh sweat on his forehead.

“I told that story to Alexandra Sanabria a few weeks before I was released,” he said. “She put out her hand and took mine, and she promised me that we would take that one hour and make it my life. That everything I had been and pretended to be aside from it would no longer matter.”

He squeezed the rag in his hand, and drops of sweat fell into the grass.

“She kept her promise, Lincoln. So I’ll keep mine. I’m sorry, but I’ll keep mine.”

PART THREE

HONORS AND

EPITAPHS

34

__________

The summer went down quietly. The heat broke and the humidity dropped and the kids went back to school. The Indians put together one of their classic late-season runs to ensure you’d spend the winter with that bitter oh- so-close taste in your mouth. The gym attracted a few new members. The PI office stayed closed and locked.

Joe came back to town in the middle of September. He’d been gone for more than nine months without a single trip back, and when he opened up his house and stepped inside and looked around, I couldn’t read his feelings.

“So much dust,” he said. He’d left Florida at the end of August but headed west instead of north, making the drive to Idaho with Gena. Just keeping her company on a long drive, he’d said. He spent two weeks there, though, and I wondered if it had been a scouting trip of sorts. He’d told me the two of them had not made any future plans but had also not closed any doors. I left it at that.