Anders tried to speak directly to John, and even when Emily blocked his way, he still made an attempt. “Son, you need to get on top of this and tell us what happened. I’m sure there’s a reason you—”

“He has nothing to say to you,” Emily insisted, her voice firm. John had only heard her speak this way once, when Joyce was ten and she’d tried to walk on the railing to the top deck at the house.

One by one, Emily looked them all in the eye. “Please leave.”

Paul Finney lunged for John, but the cop caught him. “You son of a bitch,” Mr. Finney spat at John. “You’ll fry for this!”

Mr. Finney had been an all-state wrestler. Anders and Waller had their hands full trying to keep him off John. In the end, they had to physically pick him up and carry him out of the room. As the door closed, he screamed, “You’ll pay for this, you fucker!”

His mother’s bottom lip was trembling as she turned back to John. He thought, oddly, that she had been upset by Mr. Finney’s language.

He asked, “Where’s Dad?” Richard was the one who took care of things, cleaned up the messes. “Mom?” John asked. “Where is he?”

Her throat worked, and she reached out, taking his hand. “Listen to me,” she said, urgent. “They’re going to come back any minute and take you to jail. We only have a few seconds.”

“Mom—”

“Don’t talk,” she said, squeezing his hand. “Listen.”

He nodded.

“Don’t say anything to the police. Don’t even tell them your name. Don’t tell them where you were that night, don’t tell them what you had for dinner.”

“Mom—”

“Shush, Jonathan,” she ordered, pressing her fingers to his lips. “Don’t talk to anyone in jail. No one is your friend in there. They’re all looking out for themselves and you should, too. Don’t say anything on the phone because they tape the conversations. There are snitches everywhere.”

Snitches, John thought. Where had his mother heard that word? How did she know about any of this? She wouldn’t even watch Kojak because she thought it was too violent.

“I want you to promise me, John,” she insisted. “Promise me that you will not talk to anyone until your aunt Lydia shows up.”

Aunt Lydia. Barry’s wife. She was a lawyer.

“John?” she prompted. “Do you promise? Not a word? Don’t even talk about the weather. Do you understand me? This is the most important thing I have ever told you to do and you must obey me. Do not talk to anyone. Do you hear me?”

He started crying because she was. “Yes, Mama.”

The door opened and Waller was back. He glanced at the scene, mother and child, and John saw part of him soften. He sounded almost kind when he told Emily, “Mrs. Shelley, you’re going to have to step outside now.”

Her hand tightened around John’s. She looked down at him, tears spilling out of her eyes. For some reason, he had been expecting her to say that she loved him, but instead, she mouthed, “No one.”

Talk to no one.

Anders let Emily leave before he reached into his pocket and pulled out the keys to the handcuffs. The moment of softness was gone as quickly as it had come.

He told John, “You listen to me, you little bastard. You’re gonna get out of that bed, get your clothes on and put your hands behind your back. If you give me a millisecond of trouble, I will come down on you like a ton of bricks. Do you understand me, you murdering piece of shit?”

“Yes,” John said, breathless with fear. “Yes, sir.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

OCTOBER 15, 2005

Coastal State Prison was located near Savannah in a town called Garden City, Georgia. The names sounded beautiful on paper, conjuring up a quaint seaside town you might find on a postcard. Whoever selected the spot for the state correctional department must have gotten a pretty good joke out of the whole thing.

Coastal was a maximum-security facility, only a few years old by the time John got there and remodeled ten years into his sentence to accommodate the influx of violent criminals. Today, the prison consisted of seven housing units with twelve two-man cells and twenty-four four-man cells. There were forty-four segregation cells, thirty disciplinary cells and fifteen protective custody cells. The L-building housed over two hundred men, N had another two hundred and O and Q were open dorms with bunk beds laid out like general military quarters. All told, around sixteen hundred men called it home.

John didn’t think he’d ever willingly go back to Coastal, but he had taken off work and boarded the Greyhound bus at six that morning. The ticket had cost him the rest of his television money, but that was hardly the point. He tried to sleep on the bus, leaning his head against the window, but all he could do was think about that first time he had made this trip in handcuffs and shackles. He couldn’t go back in. He could not die in prison.

He had brought a book—Tess of the D’Urbervilles—and he made himself read it during the nearly five-hour journey. John kept having to backtrack in the book, his mind wandering as each mile ticked past. How had his mother made this drive every two weeks, rain or shine? No wonder she had looked exhausted by the time she got there. No wonder she had looked so defeated that first time she was allowed to visit him. She did it for twenty years, though, and she had only missed three visits during all that time.

Tess had just confided her noble ancestry to Angel when the Greyhound pulled up outside of the state prison. John used his ticket to mark his place, then put the book in the plastic grocery bag he had brought along with him.

At visitor processing, John burned with shame as he was searched and questioned—not because he was above it all, but because he finally knew what his mother had gone through every time she had come to see him. He did the math as they searched his grocery bag, opening the carton of cigarettes, checking the book almost page by page. Over five hundred times she’d made this trip. How had Emily endured this? How could he have brought this humiliation down on his mother? No wonder Joyce had been so livid. John had never hated himself more than at this moment in time.

He sat on one of the plastic chairs as he waited for his name to be called. His knee was bobbing again, but everyone else in the room looked perfectly calm. Mostly, it was women with their children. They had come to see daddy. One kid near John held a crayon drawing of an airplane. Another was crying because they hadn’t let her bring her teddy bear in. Something unusual had shown up on the X-ray and the mother had refused to let them inspect it.

“Shelley?” a uniformed woman called. None of the guards had recognized him, but considering the volume of prisoners and visitors they had each week, this shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

“Shelley?” she called again.

John stood, clutching his grocery bag to his chest.

“Table three,” she said, nodding him in.

He put his bag on the X-ray belt, the third time it had been screened, and walked through the metal detector and into the visitors’ room. He stopped at the end of the belt, staring at the room, trying to see it the way his mother had. There were picnic-style metal tables bolted to the floor all around the twenty-by-thirty room. Men sat on one side, their wives or girlfriends or hookers they’d paid to come see them sitting on the other. Kids were running around laughing and screaming and, about every ten feet, there was a guard standing with his back to the wall. Cameras were everywhere, their lenses swinging back and forth in slow disapproval.