Fox River

“You’d do that?”

“I sure would.”

There wasn’t much Bertha Petersen wouldn’t do for her inmates. She believed in every one of them, despite all evidence to the contrary. She was as comfortable with murderers as she was with Bible-thumping evangelists. She wasn’t foolish, she simply believed that God held her life in his hands.

“About that phone call?” She turned to Christian.

He shrugged. He was dismayed to find that for a moment he had almost been suckered by hope. But unlike the good pastor, he had no illusions that God cared one way or the other what happened to Christian Carver. The prison walls were too thick for lightning to strike here.

“I’ll take it that’s a yes,” she said with a smile. “I’ll leave you gentlemen to your work.”

“She don’t know what bad asses we really are, does she?” Javier said, once the minister was out of earshot.

“Oh, she knows. She just doesn’t care.” Christian grimaced. “God doesn’t deserve a woman like that one.”

“Hey, man, you could go to hell for saying that.”

“Been there, doing that.” Christian walked away.

5

Julia longed to pace, but that was a recipe for disaster. She’d been raised in this house, but nothing had ever stayed the same. As a child she might return home from school to find that Maisy had rearranged bedrooms or turned the dining room into an exercise studio. Furniture mysteriously traveled from room to room, and carpets soared to new locations like props from the Arabian Nights.

With her eyesight intact, the changes had been mere annoyances. Now they were lethal. She didn’t know where to step or sit. Even with Karen’s help, she hadn’t yet mastered the small first-floor bedroom where Jake had made her welcome.

“I’m facing the window that looks over the front driveway.” Julia lifted her arm cautiously, but if she was indeed facing the window, it was still more than a length away.

“Good.” Karen’s voice sounded calmer than it had since their escape from the clinic.

Julia felt sympathy for the nurse, but right now she was too worried about Callie to offer much support. Maisy had gone to Millcreek to fetch her, and Julia was afraid there might be trouble. “I’ve got it right?”

“You’re right on target. We’ll get this room memorized, then I’ll talk to your parents about setting up the rest of the house so you can move around easily.” Karen paused. “This really isn’t my area of expertise, Mrs. Warwick. You’d do better to hire someone who has experience with the blind.”

“Call me Julia. And you have a job with me as long as you want one.”

“Your eyesight could return tomorrow. I hope it does.”

“Me, too. And if it does, then you automatically become my personal assistant. And don’t think I don’t need one. I’ve been threatening to hire somebody, and now I have.”

“Just remember I warned you.”

“Didn’t you tell me you have a son at home? Do you need to get back to him?”

“Brandon. My mother takes care of him.”

“Why don’t you go ahead and leave for the day? You’ve done more than enough. But we’ll see—” She stopped and wondered how long she’d continue to use that expression. “We can expect you in the morning?”

“Eight? Nine?”

“Nine will be terrific.” Julia managed a smile. “I’m turning now and facing the bed.” She started forward, stopping after several steps. She put out her hands but didn’t touch anything. Karen wisely kept silent.

She took two more steps before feeling for the bed again. This time she felt the spread under her fingertips. “I can make myself comfortable. Go on, now.”

“Nine, then. I’ll come right after I get Brandon off to school. Sleep well.”

“Better than I have in weeks.”

“If you have trouble, try herbal tea or warm milk.”

Julia liked that prescription better than the ones the doctor had issued. “A shot of whiskey in the milk might work wonders.”

Karen squeezed her shoulder. In a moment Julia heard the door close behind her.

She was home. But not in the upstairs room where she had danced to Depeche Mode and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” where she had sketched a thousand portraits of her schoolmates and landscapes of her beloved hills, suffered over trigonometry defeats, talked on the telephone for hours to Fidelity…and Christian.

Her hands rested in her lap, but she felt them ball into fists. She hadn’t slept under this roof since her marriage. Even though she’d only been twenty when she married Bard, she had packed away her childhood and stored it in the attic of her unconscious.

She remembered it, of course. If she had the need she could pull pieces of it from mental suitcases and trunks. When Callie asked, Julia told stories of growing up at Ashbourne, of the winter when she’d had the chicken pox and to cheer her Maisy had dressed up like Santa Claus to deliver Valentine candy nestled in a lavender-and-yellow Easter basket.

She thought now that she had been a pensive child in a happy home. A quiet child in a home where nothing ever went unsaid. A secretive child in a home with no mysteries. No one here had belittled her or tried to change her. She had been accepted and loved, and though at times she had yearned for the more traditional households and parents of her friends, she had also realized just how lucky she was.

Until the day her world turned upside down.

Her reverie was broken by a knock at her door. “Come in,” she called too loudly, grateful to be interrupted.

“I brought you some tea. I remember the way you liked it as a little girl.”

She smiled in the direction of Jake’s voice. “You’re too good to me.” She heard his footsteps.

“No one could ever be too good to you, Julia.” He set something, probably her cup, on the table beside her bed. “It’s our largest mug, about half full. I baked cookies last weekend, and there are two on the saucer beside it. Shall I put the mug in your hand?”

“Please.” She extended her hand and closed it around warm pottery, probably one of Maisy’s projects. Maisy had gone through an unfortunate ceramics era, and the cupboards were still filled with lopsided mugs and plates that couldn’t survive the microwave.

Jake waited until she was secure before he released it. “Two lumps of sugar and plenty of milk.”

“I haven’t had it that way in years. What a treat.”

The bed sagged. She could tell he was sitting at the foot now. “You’ve had quite a day.”

She hadn’t thought of it for years, but now she remembered the many times Jake had come to her room as a teenager, making himself available if she wanted to talk, departing without comment if she didn’t. He never probed, never criticized. Jake had always simply been there. No real father could have been kinder.

“Dr. Jeffers was threatening to have me committed if I didn’t agree to stay there on my own.”

“Could he do that?”

“I don’t know the law, something I’m sure he was counting on. I guess he thought that was his ace in the hole.”

“Well, about now he’s playing fifty-two pickup, isn’t he?”

“I couldn’t get better there. But maybe I won’t get better here, either.”

“What would be the worst thing that could happen?”

“I might never see again.”

“Highly unlikely, but let’s say it’s possible. Then what?”

“I learn to live with being blind.”

“Could you?”

“Would I have a choice?”

“Only a very extreme one.”

She realized he was talking about suicide. “This is terrible. Unthinkable. But I still have my life, my family. I’m not going to do anything foolish.” Tears filled her eyes. “Jake, what is Callie going to think of me?”

He was quiet a moment. “I believe we’re about to find out.”

She heard the pickup, too. “I don’t want her to see me crying.”

“Drink some tea and wipe your eyes.”

The tea tasted like childhood, like rainy afternoons and Black Stallion novels and the wind whistling through evergreen hedges. She had regained her composure, at least outwardly, by the time she heard the old heart of pine floors creaking with excitement.

Then her door burst open. She felt Jake remove the cup from her hands, and she opened her arms wide just in time to catch her daughter’s soft body in a fierce bear hug. She pictured her as she held her.

Callie Warwick had pigtails the color of butterscotch and brown eyes rimmed with thick black lashes. Like her mother she was small-boned and petite. Unlike Julia, she was spontaneous, open and unafraid to show her feelings.

“Mommy!”

Julia wondered if she would ever see her daughter’s sweet face again. “I’m so glad you’re here!”

“Maisy came and got me. And she got Feather Foot, too. I mean she told Ramon to get her and bring her here so I can ride at Ashbourne. Isn’t that neat?”

Feather Foot was Callie’s pony. At eight, like most local children, Callie was an accomplished rider. “Maisy is the world’s best grandma,” Julia said.

Callie giggled. “We played hide-and-seek with Mrs. Taylor.”

Julia imagined it was more like hide, then hide some more. She was sure that once Callie’s suitcases were packed, Maisy hadn’t wanted to run into Millcreek’s housekeeper.

“Everything go okay, Maisy?” Julia lifted her face from Callie’s hair. She knew her mother was standing there by the scent of violets.

“No problems at all. And we stopped by the stables to make arrangements to have Feather Foot loaded and delivered within the hour.”

“Are we really going to stay here, Mommy?”

Julia brushed Callie’s bangs back from her forehead. “Yes, we are. Maisy and Jake say they want to take care of us until my eyesight returns, but I think they just want more time with you.”

“Is that true?” Callie said.

“Your mommy’s too smart for words,” Maisy said. “She always was. I could tell you stories.”

“And will if there’s even one moment of silence to give you a foothold,” Jake said.

“Maisy said I can pick out any room I want upstairs. Do you want to help?” Callie was silent as Julia tried to think how to gently remind her that picking things out right now was a difficult task. “Oh, you can’t,” Callie said matter-of-factly. “I forgot.”

Julia felt a weight lifting from her shoulders. She had nearly bought Bard’s warnings that her blindness would be an insurmountable hurdle for Callie.

She hugged Callie again, then released her. “I could go along anyway and tell you what I remember. Like the time I hid under the bed in the room beside the bathroom because I didn’t want to go to school.”

“You did?”

“Uh-huh. And Maisy pretended nothing was wrong all day. Nobody even looked for me.”

“Is that true?” Callie asked.

Maisy answered. “Absolutely. I figured if she needed a day under the bed, I’d let her have one.”

“Is the bed still there?”

“Don’t get any ideas,” Julia said. “You’ll be going to school every day. Besides, it was dusty and boring.”

“I’m going to see if it’s still dusty.” The clatter of feet disappearing down the hall announced her departure.

“Well,” Maisy said, “piece of cake.”

“She didn’t find it odd that you were practically kidnapping her?” Julia said.

“Not at all. She did wonder what Bard would say. Then she said maybe he wouldn’t notice.”

“He’ll notice,” Julia said. “The telephone will be ringing shortly.”

“How would you like us to handle it?”

“There’s a phone on my table, right?”

“I moved the cordless in here. It will be easier for you to use,” Jake said.

“Then I can handle Bard.”

“He’s always welcome here, Julia.” Maisy’s tone sounded sincere enough.

“When Bard is under stress the worst parts of him come to the surface. He gets more rigid and more assertive. But he’ll come around once he sees I mean business.”

“Will you go home, then?”

She was home. As strange as it felt, it also felt right. She wondered what that said about her. She was a grown woman with a husband and child of her own, but she needed the parents she had left behind. She had crawled back into the womb.

“Let her take it one step at a time,” Jake said, when Julia didn’t answer.

“Maisy, will you help Callie get settled upstairs?” Julia said.

“With pleasure. If she wants your old room?”

“It’s a room, not a shrine.”

“Maisy!” Callie’s voice drifted down the stairwell.

“Would you like your tea again?” Jake said.

Julia wanted her life again. She did not want to be a tormented, hysterical, sightless woman who was forced to depend on her stepfather to put a mug of tea in her hand.

She shook her head. “No, I’m going to find it on my own, thanks.”

She waited for someone to argue. No one did.

“We’ll leave you to it, then,” Jake said. “And just so you know, if you happen to knock that particular mug to the floor, that would be fine with me.”

“Not one of my better efforts,” Maisy agreed.

“Definitely not.”

Julia could picture Jake, his arm slung over Maisy’s shoulder, leading his wife from the room. Tears filled her eyes again.

She took a moment to mourn all she had lost. Then she swallowed her tears and began her search.

6

Fidelity Sutherland, her long blond hair woven in a flawless French braid, came to Christian that night. Her smile was as sassy as ever, her throat a gaping caricature, a hideously grinning half-moon that spouted a river of blood down the front of a tailored white shirt.

He awoke without a sound and sat up quickly, but Fidelity would not be purged. In death, as in life, she was tenacious. As a young woman she had found ways to have everything she wanted. Dead almost ten years, she hadn’t lost her touch.

By the faint lightening of the sky Christian saw that dawn was perched on the horizon. There was a small barred window in his cell, too high for any purpose other than to let in slivers of light. He’d often wondered why windows had been included in the prison’s design. To remind the refuse of society that the sun rose and set without them?

Christian pillowed his head on his arms and stared up at the window. One year a red-winged blackbird had taken a liking to the narrow ledge and landed there intermittently all summer, vocalizing his own version of “nevermore,” which had seemed all too appropriate to Christian. He’d found himself looking for the blackbird whenever he was in his cell, but the moment Christian had begun to count on finding it there, the bird disappeared.

Blackbirds had darkened the skies at Claymore Park. Christian had grown up with them. Telephone lines crowded with glistening feathered bodies like endless ropes of Tahitian pearls. Once he had told Julia Ashbourne that her hair reminded him of a blackbird’s wing.

Once he had been a foolishly romantic young man with no idea of how quickly everything in his life could change.

“You awake?”

Christian didn’t take his eyes from the window. His cell mate, a man named Landis, always woke early. Landis, not yet twenty-one, was getting a head start on a lifetime of mornings like this one. Like Christian, his chances of encountering dawn any place else were almost nonexistent.

“Go back to sleep,” Christian said. “You have time.”

“Shit, I don’t sleep. You don’t know what can happen to you when you’re sleeping.”

“Nothing’s going to happen in here. You’re not my type.”

“You got a type?”

Christian’s type had been female and deceptively fragile, black-haired, blue-eyed and much too serious. In the company of the more flamboyant Fidelity Sutherland she had been easy for some people to overlook. He hadn’t been one of them.

He thought the sky was growing lighter quickly, which was too bad. “My type is female. Which means you’re safe.”

“Shit, most people got that idea when they come in here. But look what goes on.”

“Don’t look. You’ll be better off.”

“How you get to be so bored with all this? You don’t care about bein’ here?”

“What good would it do to care?”

“I never met nobody as alone as you.” Landis continued, buoyed by Christian’s silence. “You got no family?”

“All gone.”

“No woman waiting?”

“That would be a long wait, wouldn’t it?”

“You get mail, but you don’t even read it.”

Christian shifted, easing the pressure on his forearms. “You’re paying attention to things that aren’t your business, Landis.”

Landis bristled. “So? You gonna make something out of it?”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass what you notice, but other people might.”

“So?”

“I’ve seen men stabbed for less.”

“I just said you don’t read your mail. That’s all I said. How come you don’t?”

“No reason to.”

“It makes you homesick, don’t it? Mine makes me homesick.”

On a night when he’d been high on drugs and sure he was invincible, the young veteran of the streets of Southeast D.C. had killed a cop in a car chase, just within the Virginia border. Unfortunately he was also the proud owner of a rap sheet as long as the list of foster homes he’d paraded through from the time he was three. This wasn’t Landis’s first time in jail, but it would almost certainly be his last.

“I got me a girl back home,” Landis said. “I’m gonna get out of here someday. She’ll be waiting.”

Christian was silent.

“Your mail from a woman?”

Maisy Fletcher was certainly that. A warm earth mother who had taken Christian under her wing the first time she laid eyes on him. Now, all these years later, she hadn’t given up on him, even though her daughter had tossed him away like so much spoiled paté.

Maisy wrote Christian faithfully, averaging a letter a month. The letters appeared as regularly as beans and corn bread on Wednesday nights. There was nothing else Maisy could do for him.

He had gotten one yesterday, hence Landis’s question. He never read the letters anymore. In the first years of his sentence, he had read them all until he realized that the letters were like acid burning holes through his thickening defenses. She talked about people he’d grown up with, talked around Julia’s marriage to Lombard Warwick, told funny stories about life in Ridge’s Race. As a letter writer Maisy, who in everyday life was often inarticulate and unfocused, came into her own. She captured the life he’d left behind too perfectly.

“Chris, you awake?”

“What chance do I have to sleep with you talking?”

“I’ll stop reading letters, too, won’t I? One day, I’ll stop reading them. Just like you.”

Christian closed his eyes.

“Heel, Seesaw.” Seesaw obediently took up her place beside Christian and started down the track.

She was a particularly pretty puppy, clever and bursting with energy. But Christian knew better than to get attached to any of the dogs who came through the Pets and Prisoners program. He had grown up with dogs and horses. He’d seen both at their best and worst, trained them, nursed them, even put them down when required.

He kept his distance here. The dogs he trained went on to new masters. He knew from reports how well they were cared for and how invaluable they were. Sometimes he found himself wishing he could watch a puppy like Seesaw grow up, but he knew how lucky he was to have this chance to work with her at all. Training guide dogs was as close to his past as he was liable to come.

Timbo signaled from the side of the track, and Christian stopped and turned. Seesaw waited beside him as he unsnapped her leash. Timbo called her name, and she trotted toward him. Christian followed.

“Okay, Timbo. If you had to rate her chances of getting through the advanced training, what would you say?”

Timbo studied the puppy as he petted her. “Good. No, better than good. I’d say nine out of ten.” He looked up. “What do you say?”

“Eight out of ten. She’s a party girl. We may have some trouble teaching her to ignore other dogs. But it’s a small problem at this point, and I expect it will go away as she matures. I’ll mention it to her new family.”

“They’re taking her tomorrow?”

“In the morning. We’ll get another batch of puppies next week. I’ll finish the paperwork tonight.”

“She’ll have a good home?”

Christian raised a brow. For a man who couldn’t imagine how he’d been assigned to train dogs, Timbo was evolving fast. “All the homes are good. Most have children and other pets to play with. She’ll be fine. And we’ll see her back here in a year.”

“Just wondering.”

“You’ve done your job with her.”

“Never had me no dog. But I fed some, you know? Dogs in the neighborhood nobody took care of. Used to buy sacks of dog food and leave ‘em in the alley at night.”

“You’re all heart, Timbo.”

Timbo grinned. “That’s me.”

“Do a good job here, and when you get out Bertha will help find you a job on the outside.”

“What, shoveling dog shit at some kennel?”

“You might aim a little higher than that.”

“I got big plans.”

Christian squatted beside the little retriever, scratching behind her ears. “A man’s plans have a way of changing.”

“Yeah? Looks like yours are about to.”

Christian glanced up and saw the guard on duty motioning for him. He stood. “Take her back to the kennel, would you? Then go on over and help Javier. I’ll see what he wants.”

“What he wants is to make you feel like you nuthin’.”

Silently Christian handed Timbo Seesaw’s leash.

Mel Powers was a skinny man who perspired like a heavy one. He wore an extravagant hairpiece, expensive suits that always looked cheap and gold-rimmed glasses with lenses that were as thick as his New Jersey accent. The effect was more ambulance chaser than high-powered attorney, but Mel Powers was the revered Great White of shark-infested waters. Mel, considered the best criminal attorney in Virginia, had been hired by Peter Claymore to represent Christian. He still took Christian’s conviction as a personal affront.

Peter Claymore, of Claymore Park, was a study in contrasts. At sixty, he was twenty years older than Mel, and if he sweated at all, it was only after hours of riding to hounds. His silver hair was thick and his eyesight so perfect he could detect movement in the forest when everyone else believed a fox had gone to ground. When he wore a suit, it was tailored to highlight the breadth of his shoulders and the good taste of his ancestors. Claymore Park, the largest and most successful horse property in Ridge’s Race, had been home to Claymores long before the War of Northern Aggression.

Christian hadn’t expected to find either man waiting for him in the tiny visitors’ room. Neither the guard who had summoned him to the warden’s office nor the warden who had brought him here had given him any indication. After shaking hands, he seated himself on the other side of the small rectangular table and waited for them to speak.

“You’re looking well, Christian.” Peter sat with one arm on the table, the other thrown over the back of his chair. He looked at home in this unlikely place, but in all the years Christian had known him, Peter had never seemed ill at ease.

“I’m doing as well as you could expect, sir.” Christian’s gaze flicked to Mel, who was patting his forehead with a folded handkerchief.

“I get the heebie-jeebies every time I come.” Mel wiped his hands. “I feel like I’m being smothered in cotton. Can’t breathe at all. I don’t know how you do it.”

“Breathing comes naturally to me.”

“I hear good reports about the Pets and Prisoners program,” Peter said.

“I doubt they’ll cut it any time soon.”

“You might not be here long enough to worry.” Mel shoved his handkerchief in his pocket, then thought better of it. He took it out, folded it and shoved it in again.

“Christian, we’ve had some encouraging news.” Peter put both hands on the table and leaned forward. “Very encouraging.”

Christian, who had been wending his way through the appeals process for too long to be hopeful, waited. But even though he struggled not to feel anything, something inside him tightened, a spring coiling in anticipation.