All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 121

121

Heavy doors unlatched, the chambers between big enough for two.

Bars sliced sunlight as she waited on the waxed floor in the kind of silence she had not imagined possible in such a place. Saint shivered a little, steeled herself, and was led into a long, thin room, empty but for a table and two chairs.

Tooms was waiting, shackled at the hands and feet.

Still, he smiled.

“You wanted to see me?” Saint said. The letter had arrived at the tall house. Norma had called her right away.

He had lost so much weight. His skin dull. When she looked into his eyes, she did not see the man that had once scooped her up when she fell

from her bike.

“I got your letters,” he said.

“You ignored them.”

“The future starts today, right.”

Above, the light was too harsh, the bulb caged behind black wiring. She smelled it, that captivity, beneath sweat and detergent and vinegar.

“You’re a police officer,” he said and managed to smile. “I always

thought you might make a fine doctor.”

“Why?”

She stared at his mouth as he spoke, a slight cut on his upper lip, a welt on his neck.

“I saw you married Jimmy Walters. I remember when you used to eat your lunch beneath the oak. Always smiling. Feels like another life. My house—”

“Gone,” she said.

He must have known, but still she caught the flinch. “Memories lie in

people, not places and things.”

“You wanted to see me,” she said again.

“Joseph writes to me.”

“Do you know where he is?”

He shook his head, closed his eyes. When he opened them again she saw something.

“Tell me,” she said, quiet like it would stay between them.

“I see the postmarks. He’s traveling. Last one came from Baton Rouge.

He’s south now.”

Sometimes at night she would close her eyes and see him on a beach, maybe with kids his own age, a girl on his arm.

“He’s looking for her,” Saint said, holding his eye. “Not just looking…

he’s dying without her.”

“I wanted him to be okay,” he said.

“You know how that sounds?”

“You ever feel like you’re living someone else’s life? Paying for mistakes you don’t even remember making?”

“The missing girl. Grace.”

“His medical reports back then, they all came to me as his family physician. His mother, maybe she wasn’t fit to care for him. I had a duty to report it. I weigh these decisions. Each night when I don’t sleep.”

“He can’t move on from this until he knows. Give him his life back.

You’ve taken enough already.”

Tooms looked at her, pleading in his eyes, in his voice. “I can’t wash the blood from my hands.”

“Tell me where she is. Do it for Patch. Let him go now. My grandmother said we’re all capable of compassion. It’s not too late for you.”

“There’s no way he’ll let this drop?”

She heard such desperation, such pain as she shook her head.

He took a deep breath and talked.

If she had known she might have braced, might have held her breath, grit her teeth, not crumpled for Patch, not run out of that room, past the warden and his men, just keeping it together till she made it outside and vomited in the dirt.

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