Death Row novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: The Soot

The next visitor on my list was a name I hadn't seen in six years.

"Lyle Hauck," the officer read off her sheet. "Says he's a friend of the family. I told him you don't have friends."

"Is he a big man with a bad leg?"

"He's got a limp."

"Then I'll see him."

I knew that limp.

He had followed me up and down the corridors of the county courthouse for eleven days of trial, a heavy man in a brown windbreaker, with a way of standing close to a witness that made them tell the truth.

He had built the case against me.

He took the chair on the other side of the glass and picked up the phone slowly.

He was grayer now.

Six years had put a deep line from his nose to his chin.

"Mrs. Fell," he said.

"It's Marwick. I went back to my own name."

"Ms. Marwick." He stopped.

He seemed to be looking for the next sentence somewhere on the counter.

"I'm retired," he said. "Fourteen months. I don't have any reason to be here and nobody sent me."

"Then why did you come?"

"Because a man I used to work with called me three nights ago to tell me a death row inmate screamed in the visitor lobby that her husband was alive."

"And?"

"And I've been sitting in my kitchen for three nights."

I didn't say anything.

I had spent six years imagining what I would say to this man.

None of it came.

"I put you here," he said. "I want that said before anything else. I stood up in front of a jury and I said it was you."

"You did."

"I did it with the evidence I had."

"I know."

"No," he said. "You don't. I'm not asking you to forgive me. I'm telling you I did the work honestly and I've never been able to sleep right since."

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