Death Row novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Man at the Counter
Eleven days before her execution, Leah sees her dead husband signing in at the prison lobby as his own brother, and screams his name. That night Dorrie says through the vent: my Neil tapped twice too.
The warden read my execution date aloud in the dayroom, so all nine women on the row heard it with me.
It would be in eleven days, at six in the evening.
He folded the page along its crease and left without looking at anyone.
Nobody spoke.
At the table by the window, Dorrie Holst put down her playing card and kept her hand flat on top of it.
Dorrie lives in the cell next to mine.
For three years we have talked through the air vent over my sink, because it is the one place on this row where nobody stands between you and the other person.
She didn't look at me now.
She turned the card over and went back to her solitaire, and that was how Dorrie said she was sorry.
An officer came twenty minutes later to walk me to the lawyer booths.
My lawyer had driven four hours to tell me the board would not help me.
I already knew it.
The way to the booths runs along the front lobby, behind a long glass wall.
Visitors sign in at a counter there.
I have walked past that glass for six years and never once turned my head.
That afternoon six people in good coats stood at the counter, and a woman from the warden's office read names off a clipboard.
"Family of the victim," she told the officer beside me.
"They're here for the witness orientation."
Witnesses.
The family of the dead gets chairs behind a window, and they watch.
I kept walking, because that is what I do.
For six years I have been the calm one on this row.
I never shouted at a guard or wrote to a newspaper, and I kept my voice low in every hearing, because my husband told me once that calm wins and loud loses.
I believed him for a very long time.
Then the last man in line leaned over the counter and signed his name.
When he finished, he tapped the counter twice with two fingers.
My husband did that.
He did it when he won an argument, when a waiter got our order right, when a plan went the way he wanted.
Two taps and a small smile at nobody.
I stopped walking.
The man had a short grey beard and wire glasses.
He was heavier through the shoulders than I remembered, and his hair was cut close.
It didn't matter.
I had slept next to that face for three years.
He lifted his head and looked straight at me through the glass.
He wasn't surprised.
He nodded once, politely.
Beside him a woman in a black coat laid her hand on his sleeve.
Marlene.
Blaine's sister, who sat in the second row at my trial and cried on the stand every time she said his name.
Blaine died in a fire seven years ago.
I have been waiting six years for someone to ask whether I did it, and nobody ever has.
So I stopped being quiet.
I pulled against the officer's grip and hit the glass with both palms and screamed his name.
"Blaine! Blaine, look at me! That's my husband!"
The woman with the clipboard went white.
The officer got an arm across my chest and I kept screaming, and every head in that lobby turned toward me except two.
Marlene looked at the floor.
Blaine looked at me, and he tapped the counter once more with his two fingers.
"Ma'am, that's Dean Fell," the woman from the warden's office said.
She said it to the officer, not to me.
"He's Mr. Fell's brother. He flew in last night from Portland."
"Blaine has no brother!"
"I have his identification."
"I'm telling you, he has a sister and nobody else. Marlene told me herself at our wedding. She said I was the only family he had left besides her."
The officer pulled me back.
My shoes squeaked on the tile.
"Ask him," I said. "Ask him about the lake house. Ask him what he does with his hand."
"Easy, Marwick."
"I can't even show you a photograph. I don't have a single picture of him from before we met. He told me a basement flood took them all."
Nobody answered.
Blaine picked up his clipboard.
He said something to the woman beside him, and she smiled and led the six of them toward the elevator.
He didn't look back.
They put me in a holding cell for an hour, then walked me back to my own.
The lights went down at ten.
I sat on my bunk with my forehead against the cold wall.
My lawyer was gone, and the guards were not going to believe me.
Eleven days.
Then the vent clicked, and Dorrie's voice came through it, very low.
"Leah. What does he do with his hand?"
I looked at the grate.
"Two fingers. Twice. On whatever's closest."
She didn't say anything for a long time.
I could hear her breathing on the other side of the wall.
"Leah," she said at last. "My Neil tapped twice too."
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