Dane laughed uproariously. “Hardly the same issue,” he said.
She shrugged. “Kind of feels like it though.”
“Well, don’t look at it as a punishment for me or for you,” he said with a smile. “There are a lot of reasons for us to stay here. Besides, I have a lot of computer work to catch up on.”
“Anything I can help you with?”
He frowned at her, considering the request. “I don’t know, maybe,” he said. “I actually need to know a little bit more about exactly what happened.”
“There isn’t a whole lot to tell you,” she said. “I saw three men, but really I only remember the one giving me the eye.”
“So you don’t think you would recognize the others if you saw them?”
She frowned. “I know this is wrong to say, but it’s the truth. They all kind of looked the same.”
He nodded in understanding. “Particularly when they have on similar clothing. Yes, I know,” he said. “It’s that much harder to tell them apart, and they do it partly for that reason.”
She shrugged. “Of course it’d be nice if bad guys just wore a Bad Guy sign.”
He burst out laughing at that. “It would be lovely,” he said, “but it’s not likely to occur.”
Just then her phone buzzed. She picked it up, looked at it, and smiled. “It’s Baylor telling me to behave.”
“Interesting,” Dane said. “Are you in the habit of misbehaving?”
“No, I wouldn’t have said so,” she said. “It’s not like I’ve led a blameless life, but I haven’t been out there wildly enjoying it too much either.”
“What do you normally do?”
“Make life miserable for lawyers,” she said, with a laugh. He stared at her in surprise. She shrugged. “I’m a lawyer myself actually. I work with wrongfully convicted felons,” she said. “So, when I say I make life difficult, that means the ones who wrongfully put them away—the prosecutors. If they’re still around, then I’m right there, haunting them with cases that they closed that maybe they shouldn’t have.”
“Ah, so law enforcement as well.”
“Injustice bothers me,” she said quietly.
“Good,” he said, “injustice should bother all of us, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to matter for a large cross section of society.”
“That’s because, as long as the liars and cheats are on their side, they don’t give a damn. They just want to see their own change happening and not have somebody go against their wishes. It’s all about power and progressing their own agenda.”
“A little bitter?”
“Not bitter so much,” she said, “but you don’t do the kind of work I do and not wonder just how much of the world out there is even thinking in terms of society as a whole, versus what they personally want.”
“I think everybody says they care about society,” Dane said quietly. “But, when it comes up against their own fundamental wishes and goals, all of that slides off to the side.”
She nodded emphatically. “Exactly. So we have hundreds and hundreds of files from felons who contact us, requesting that their cases be looked into. We have people who lie about their cases, implying that an injustice was done. Yet, when we read the files, we realize there was no injustice, and they are sitting right where they belong. But occasionally we come across those guys asking very nicely, pleading for someone to take another look. After reading the file, we realize that they were completely railroaded into confessions or railroaded into jail with absolutely zero forensic evidence, zero confessions, and zero witnesses. They just made a nice patsy to close a case.” She said, “That drives me nuts.”
Although Dane didn’t appear to have anything for her to do or to help with, he gave her a pad of paper and a pen and asked her to empty her mind of everything that she thought could possibly be connected with this. “It doesn’t matter how large or small you think it might be. Significant or not, anything that jars your memory when it comes to that boat and any conversations or even snippets of conversations involving those men, write it down.”
She nodded, as she sat here, a cup of tea cooling by her side. “What if nothing comes?” she muttered.
“Then start writing stuff that has nothing to do with it,” he said. “And pretty quickly you’ll see that your mind will start flowing back into this whole scenario, and you never know. Something might pop.”
She nodded and started doodling, and then her mind took over. She wrote down Father passed away unexpectedly. Mother held back cancer news, and now she’s gone too. And that just seemed to open a flood of stuff. She quickly wrote down the sense of betrayal and the lack of empathy that she found in her family. The pain and the lack of understanding. Wondering why her mother would do such a thing, and the words just poured. Dane looked up a couple times, and she ignored him. It wasn’t what he had asked her to do, but this was what was coming from her mind, so she was good with that.
Besides, if she would ever heal, at some point in time, this could be a start and just make it easier. When she slowly stopped and looked at what she had written, she was back on the ship, thinking about how they had treated her mom. The yelling, the names, and the slurs they had been called. Her mother had cried a lot during that time, and the gunmen had laughed. She wrote down the word albatross and frowned.
“What’s that look for?”
“They said something that sounded like albatross,” she said.
“And how did they mean it?” he asked, tilting his head.
“I thought they were pointing at my mother.”
“Ouch.”
“See? I don’t think it means anything though,” she said.
“Just keep going,” he said.
Quietly she studied the paper again, then stared at the window and back of the paper. “I don’t think anything else is coming,” she said. He just nodded and left her alone. She sat here with
