him?'
Silent, Terri turned away.
She heard Chris switch the speaker back on. 'We understand,' he told the Governor. 'Thanks so much for your time. We hope you'll keep all this in mind—particularly about Eddie Fleet—should we bring you a clemency petition on behalf of Rennell Price . . .'
Terri glanced at her watch. In thirteen hours, Payton Price would die by lethal injection.
TWENTY-FIVE
THAT EVENING, THE PAGET FAMILY ATE LATER THAN USUAL, ABOUT seven-thirty, and the conversation was quieter, although Carlo, their frequent guest, tried to focus on Elena and Kit. But Carlo, too, was somber. Only Kit seemed unaffected; Elena, knowing her mother's plans for that evening, had lapsed into a silence Terri found ambiguous. Terri ate little, declining Chris's offer to open a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino, a favorite from their Italian honeymoon. In the midst of their dinner, softly lit by candles whose flicker refracted on the crystal facets of their chandelier, it struck Terri that by the unvarying protocol of San Quentin, Payton Price was being offered his last meal. She put down her fork.
'I'll read to Kit tonight,' she told her husband. 'I haven't in a while.'
In the event, this ritual of parenthood, usually Chris's domain, soothed her for a time. The current book was from the Lemony Snicket series, and Terri's rendering of its skewed humor was satisfactory enough that she was intermittently rewarded with the laughter in Kit's dark eyes, the play of humor around his mouth, which reminded her of Chris and yet was wonderfully Kit's own. Finishing, she kissed his forehead and repeated a prayer with him, as her own mother had with her, then went down the hall to Elena's room.
Terri's knock on her door was tentative, a mother's request for admission into the moody realm of a thirteen- year-old girl. But Elena's expression was opaque. 'Are you really going out there?' she inquired.
Nodding, Terri sat on the edge of her bed. 'No choice. Rennell asked me to.'
'Too bad,' Elena answered. 'But I guess you'd do anything for Rennell, wouldn't you. No matter what it does to us.'
Terri composed herself. 'I know you hate my work. But no one matters as much as you.'
The child-woman in the Winnie-the-Pooh T-shirt gave an indifferent shrug. 'I don't understand your work,' she said in an accusatory voice. 'And no one matters as much as it does. Rennell Price deserves to die, and it will just kill you when he does.'
Though this cutting remark was, at bottom, about something more, Terri had little will to surface that tonight. 'It will,' she answered finally. 'But not nearly as much as what happened to you.'
The look on her own face must be miserable, Terri realized; as Elena studied her mother, her expression changed. 'Then why,' she asked, 'do you spend more time on him than me?'
The accusation pierced Terri's heart. As with Kit, Terri kissed her forehead. 'I'm sorry about tonight,' she tried. 'I'm sorry about everything.'
Elena gazed at her, tears welling, and then she turned away.
Chris was in the kitchen, listening to Carlo describe his new girlfriend. Of Terri, Chris inquired, 'Did Kit induce you to read the entire series?'
'I was counting Elena's moods.'
Chris gave her the long, somewhat veiled look he reserved for efforts to gauge her own moods. 'Let me drive you, Terri. Carlo's volunteered to watch the kids.'
'No,' she said sharply, then saw the brief flicker of worry on Carlo's face, the residue of the child who feared conflict. In a more temperate tone, she added, 'Really, this is mine to do. I honestly don't want either of you holding my hand.'
She went to their bedroom to change. Reflecting on which of her suits was most suitable for an execution, she chose gray over black.
When she returned, Carlo was gone and Chris was sipping brandy. He looked up at her, openly concerned.
'I'm really not punishing you for the Governor,' she said.
'I didn't think you were.'
She walked over to him, resting a hand on his chair. 'I don't know how this is going to be for me. It just feels like I'll do better alone.'
Standing, Chris gave her a tentative hug. Then she went to the garage and backed her car out into what, even without the chill and drizzle, would have seemed a miserable night. Even the vigil outside the gates of San Quentin, deprived of candlelight, seemed dispirited and ill-attended. For a brief moment, in the cool breath of night, Terri felt the presence of Eddie Fleet.
* * *
At eleven-thirty, thirty-one minutes before Payton Price was to die, Terri was admitted to the viewing room.
The guard directed her to the far side of the chamber, reserved for the friends or family of the prisoner about to be executed. No one else stood with her. Several reporters and the warden separated her from Thuy Sen's family, huddled close together on the other side. Silent, they stared through the windows of the execution chamber.
The chamber itself was much as Terri had envisioned—an octagon roughly eight feet in diameter, with a padded table beside a cardiac monitor and a machine for intravenous injection. But for the straps, Terri thought, the table was eerily like the hospital bed in an intensive care unit, a site dedicated to preserving life. The large oval door at the rear of the chamber, through which Payton Price would enter, seemed to hypnotize those awaiting him.
With that thought, the strangeness of this setting hit Terri hard—the raised platform for the witnesses, the five windows of the chamber, their blinds raised to permit those assembled to view the state-sanctioned death of
