The Life We Bury / Жизнь, которую мы потеряли (by Allen Eskens, 2015) - аудиокнига на английском

I remember being pestered by a sense of dread as I walked to my car that day, pressed down by a wave of foreboding that swirled around my head and broke against the evening in small ripples. There are people in this world who would call that kind of feeling a premonition, a warning from some internal third eye that can see around the curve of time. I've never been one to buy into such things. But I will confess that there have been times when I think back to that day and wonder: if the fates had truly whispered in my ear—if I had known how that drive would change so many things—would I have taken a safer path? Would I turn left where before I had turned right? Or would I still travel the path that led me to Carl Iverson? My Minnesota Twins were scheduled to play the Cleveland Indians that cool September evening in a game to crown the central-division champion. Soon the lights of Target Field would flood the western horizon of Minneapolis, shooting up into the night like rays of glory, but I would not be there to see it. Just one more thing I couldn't afford on my college-student budget. Instead, I would be working the door at Molly's Pub, stealing glances at the game on the television above the bar as I inspected driver's licenses and tamped down drunken arguments—not my career of choice, but it paid the rent. Oddly enough, my high-school guidance counselor never mentioned the word “college” in any of our meetings. Maybe she could smell the funk of hopelessness that clung to my second-hand clothing. Maybe she had heard that I started working at a dive bar called the Piedmont Club the day after I turned eighteen. Or—and this is where I'd place my bet—maybe she knew who my mother was and figured that no one can change the sound of an echo. Regardless, I didn't blame her for not seeing me as college material. Truth is, I felt more comfortable in the dinge of a bar than I did in the marbled halls of academia, where I stumbled along as though I wore my shoes on the wrong feet. I jumped into my car that day—a twenty-year-old, rusted Honda Accord—dropped it into gear and headed south from campus, merging with a stream of rush-hour traffic on I-35 and listening to Alicia Keys on blown Japanese speakers. As I hit the Crosstown, I reached over to the passenger seat and fumbled through my backpack, eventually finding the piece of paper with the address of the old folks’ home. “Don't call it an old folks’ home,” I mumbled to myself. “It's a retirement village or senior center or something like that.” I navigated the confusing streets of suburban Richfield, eventually finding the sign at the entrance to Hillview Manor, my destination. The name ceded to that place had to be some kind of a prank. It viewed no hills and lacked the slightest hint of grandeur suggested by the word “manor.” The view from the front was of a busy four-lane boulevard, and the back of the building faced the butt end of a rickety, old apartment complex. The bad name, however, may have been the cheeriest thing about Hillview Manor, with its gray brick walls streaked green with moss, its raggedy shrubs run amok, and its mold, the color of oxidized copper, encasing the soft wood of every window sash. The place squatted on its foundation like a football tackle and seemed equally formidable. As I stepped into the lobby, a wave of stale air, laden with the pungent aroma of antiseptic cream and urine, flicked at my nose, causing my eyes to water. An old woman wearing a crooked wig sat in a wheelchair, staring past me as if expecting some long-ago suitor to emerge from the parking lot and sweep her away. She smiled as I passed, but not at me. I didn't exist in her world, no more than the ghosts of her memory existed in mine. I paused before approaching the reception desk, listening one last time to those second thoughts that had been whispering in my ear, petulant thoughts that told me to drop that English class before it was too late and replace it with something more sensible like geology or history. A month earlier, I'd left my home in Austin, Minnesota, sneaking off like a boy running away to join a circus. No arguments with my mother, no chance for her to try and change my mind. I just packed a bag, told my younger brother that I was leaving, and left a note for my mom. By the time I made it to the registrar's office at the university, all the decent English classes had been filled, so I signed up for a biography class, one that would force me to interview a complete stranger. Deep down I knew that the clammy sweat that pimpled my temples as I loitered in the lobby came from that homework assignment, an assignment I had avoided starting for far too long. I just knew the assignment was going to suck. The receptionist at Hillview, a square-faced woman with strong cheeks, tight hair, and deep set eyes that gave her the appearance of a gulag matron, leaned over the countertop and asked, “Can I help you?” “Yes,” I said. “I mean, I hope so. Is your manager here?” “We don't allow solicitations,” she said, her face becoming brittle as she narrowed her focus on me. “Solicitations?” I gave her a forced chuckle and held out my hands in an imploring gesture. “Ma’am,” I said. “I couldn't sell fire to a caveman.” “Well, you're not a resident here, and you're no visitor, and you sure don't work here. So, what's left?” “My name's Joe Talbert. I'm a student at the University of Minnesota.” “And?” I glanced at her name tag. “And…Janet…I'd like to talk to your manager about a project I have to do.” “We don't have a manager,” Janet said through her squint. “We have a director, Mrs. Lorngren.” “I'm sorry,” I said, trying to maintain my pleasant fa?ade. “Can I talk to your director?” “Mrs. Lorngren's a very busy lady, and it's suppertime—” “It'll only take a minute.” “Why don't you run your project by me, and I'll decide if it's worth disturbing Mrs. Lorngren.” “It's an assignment I'm doing for school,” I said, “for my English class. I have to interview an old person—I mean an elderly person and write a biography about them. You know, tell about the struggles and forks in the road that made them who they are.” “You're a writer?” Janet looked me up and down as if my appearance might answer that question. I straightened up to the full extent of my five-foot, ten-inch height. I was twenty-one years old and had accepted that I was as tall as I was ever going to be—thank you Joe Talbert Senior, wherever the hell you are. And while it was true that I worked as a bouncer, I wasn't the big meat you normally see at the door of a bar; in fact, as bouncers go, I was on the puny side. “No,” I said. “Not a writer, just a student.” “And they're making you write a whole book for school?” “No. It's a mix of writing and outline.” I said with a smile. “Some of the chapters have to be written out, like the beginning and the ending and any important turning points. But mostly, it'll be a summary. It's a pretty big project.” Janet wrinkled her pug nose and shook her head. Then, apparently persuaded that I had nothing to sell, she picked up the phone and spoke in a lowered voice. Soon a woman in a green suit approached from a hallway beyond the reception desk and took up a position next to Janet. “I'm Director Lorngren,” the woman announced, her head held erect and steady as if she were balancing a tea cup on it. “Can I help you?” “I hope so.” I took a deep breath and ran through it all again. Mrs. Lorngren chewed over my explanation with a puzzled look on her face and then said, “Why did you come here? Don't you have a parent or grandparent you can interview?” “I don't have any relatives nearby,” I said. That was a lie. My mother and my brother lived two hours south of the Twin Cities, but even a brief visit to my mom's place could be like a walk through a thistle patch. I never met my father and had no idea if he still stained the Earth. I knew his name though. My mom came up with the brilliant idea of naming me after him in the hope that it might guilt Joe Talbert Senior into staying around awhile, maybe marrying her and supporting her and little Joey Jr. It didn't work out. Mom tried the same thing when my younger brother, Jeremy, was born—to the same end. I grew up having to explain that my mother's name was Kathy Nelson, my name was Joe Talbert, and my brother's name was Jeremy Naylor. As for my grandparents, the only one I ever met was my mom's father, my Grandpa Bill—a man I loved. He was a quiet man who could command attention with a simple glance or nod, a man who possessed equal parts strength and gentleness and wore them, not in layers, but blended like fine leather. There were days when I sought out his memory, when I needed his wisdom to deal with the tidal swells in my life. There were nights, however, when the sound of rain splashing against a windowpane would seep into my subconscious, and he would visit me in my dreams—dreams that would end with me bolting upright in my bed, my body covered in a cold sweat and my hands trembling from the memory of watching him die. “You do understand that this is a nursing home, don't you?” Mrs. Lorngren asked. “That's why I came here,” I said. “You have people who've lived through amazing times.” “That's true,” she said, leaning into the countertop that separated us. From up close, I could see the wrinkles that branched out from the corners of her eyes and creased her lips like a dry lake bed. And I could smell the faint aroma of scotch in the stream of her words as she spoke. She continued in a lowered voice. “Residents live here because they cannot take care of themselves. Most of them are suffering from Alzheimer's or dementia or some other neurological condition. They can't remember their own children, much less the details of their lives.” I hadn't thought of that. I could see my plan starting to falter. How could I write the biography of a war hero if the hero can't remember what he did? “Don't you have anybody with a memory?” I asked, sounding more pitiful than I would have liked. “We could let him talk to Carl,” Janet piped up. Mrs. Lorngren shot Janet a glance akin to the glare you'd give a buddy who'd just screwed up your perfectly good lie. “Carl?” I asked. Mrs. Lorngren crossed her arms and stepped back from the counter. I pushed on. “Who's Carl?” Janet looked to Mrs. Lorngren for approval. When Mrs. Lorngren finally nodded, Janet took her turn leaning across the countertop. “His name is Carl Iverson. He's a convicted murderer,” she said, whispering like a schoolgirl telling a story out of turn. “The Department of Corrections sent him here about three months ago. They paroled him from Stillwater because he's dying of cancer.” Mrs. Lorngren huffed and said, “Apparently, pancreatic cancer is a perfectly reasonable substitute for penal rehabilitation.” “He's a murderer?” I asked. Janet glanced around to be sure that she wouldn't be overheard. “Thirty years ago he raped and murdered this fourteen-year-old girl,” she whispered. “I read all about it in his file. After he was done killing her, he tried to hide the evidence by burning her body in his tool shed.” A rapist and a murderer. I had come to Hillview looking for a hero and instead I'd found a villain. He would certainly have a story to tell, but was it a story I wanted to write? While my classmates would turn out tales of Grandma giving birth on a dirt floor, or Grandpa seeing John Dillinger in a hotel lobby, I would be writing about a man who raped and killed a girl and then burned her body in a shed. The idea of interviewing a murderer didn't sit well with me at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I warmed up to it. I had put off starting this project for too long. September was almost over and I'd have to turn in my interview notes in a few weeks. My classmates had their horses out of the starting gate and my nag was still back in the barn munching on hay. Carl Iverson would have to be my subject—if he agreed. “I think I'd like to interview Mr. Iverson,” I said. “The man is a monster,” Mrs. Lorngren said. “I wouldn't give him the satisfaction. I know this isn't a Christian thing to say, but it would be best if he just stayed in his room and passed on quietly.” Mrs. Lorngren recoiled at her own words, words a person might think, but must never say out loud, especially in front of a stranger. “Look,” I said, “if I can do his story, maybe…I don't know…maybe I can get him to admit the error of his ways.” I was a salesman after all, I thought to myself. “Besides, he has a right to have visitors, too, doesn't he?” Mrs. Lorngren looked cornered. She had no choice. Carl wasn't a prisoner at Hillview; he was a resident with the same right to have visitors as anyone else. She unfolded her arms, placing her hands once more on the countertop between us. “I'll have to ask him if he wants a visitor,” she said. “In the few months that he's been here, he's only had one visitor come to see him.” “Can I talk to Carl myself?” I said. “Maybe I can—” “Mr. Iverson.” Mrs. Lorngren corrected me, eager to regain her superiority. “Of course.” I shrugged an apology. “I could explain to Mr. Iverson what the assignment is about, and maybe—” A jingling of electronic chimes from my cell phone interrupted me. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I thought I shut it off.” My ears turned red as I pulled my phone out of my pocket and saw my mother's number. “Excuse me,” I said, turning my back to Janet and Mrs. Lorngren with the pretense of acquiring privacy. “Mom, I can't talk now, I—” “Joey, you gotta come get me,” my mother screeched into the phone, the drunken slur in her voice melding her words together, making them hard to understand. “Mom, I have to—” “They fucking handcuffed me.” “What? Who—” “They arrested me Joey…they…those pricks. I'm gonna sue ’em. I'll get the baddest fucking lawyer.” She yelled her words at someone near her. “You hear me you…you prick! I want your badge number. I'll have your job.” “Mom, where are you?” I spoke loud and slow, trying to get my mother's attention back. “They put me in handcuffs, Joey.” “Is there an officer there?” I asked. “Can I talk to him?” She ignored my question and spiraled from one unintelligible thought to another. “If you loved me you'd come get me. I'm your fucking mother god dammit. They handcuffed…Get your ass…You never loved me. I did…I didn't…I should just cut my wrists. No one loves me. I was almost home…I'm gonna sue.” “Okay, Mom,” I said. “I'll come get you, but I need to talk to the cop.” “You mean Mr. Prick?” “Yeah, Mom. Mr. Prick. I need to talk to Mr. Prick. Just give him the phone for a second, then I'll come get you.” “Fine,” she said. “Here, Prick. Joey wants to talk to you.” “Ms. Nelson,” the officer said, “this is your time to contact an attorney, not your son.” “Hey, Officer Prick, Joey wants to talk to you.” The officer sighed. “You said that you wanted to talk to an attorney. You need to use this time to call an attorney.” “Officer Prick won't talk to you.” Mom belched into the phone. “Mom, tell him I said please.” “Joey you gotta—” “Dammit, Mom,” I yelled my whisper, “tell him I said please.” A moment of silence, and then, “fine!” My mom turned the phone away so that I could barely hear her. “Joey says please.” There was a long pause, but then the officer got on the phone. “Hello.” I spoke quickly and quietly. “Officer, I'm sorry about all this, but I have a brother who's autistic. He lives with my mom. I need to know if my mom's getting released today because if she's not, I gotta go take care of my brother.” “Well, here's the deal. Your mother's been arrested for DUI.” I could hear my mother cursing and wailing in the background. “I have her at the Mower County Law Enforcement Center to give a breath test. She invoked her right to call an attorney before taking the test, so she's supposed to be using this time to contact an attorney, not calling you to come get her out.” “I understand,” I said. “I just need to know if she's getting released tonight.” “That would be no.” The officer limited his response in a way that my mother would not hear what was in store for her. I played along. “Is she going to detox?” “Yes.” “How many days?” “Between two and three.” “Then she'll be released?” I asked. “No.” I thought for a moment. “From detox to jail?” “That is correct, until she makes her first appearance in court.” Mom heard the word “court” and began to yell again. In her inebriation and exhaustion, her words swung and lurched like a decrepit rope bridge. “Dammit Joey…get down here. You don't love me…you ungrateful…I'm your mother. Joey, they…they…get down here. Get me out.” “Thanks,” I said to the officer. “I really appreciate the help. And good luck dealing with my mom.” “Good luck to you, too,” he said. I ended the call and turned back around to see Janet and Mrs. Lorngren looking at me like I was a toddler who had just learned that dogs can bite. “I'm sorry about that,” I said. “My mother…she's…not well. I'm not going to be able to meet Carl—uh, Mr. Iverson—today. I have to take care of something.” Mrs. Lorngren's eyes softened, her stern expression dissolving into sympathy. “That's fine,” she said. “I'll talk to Mr. Iverson about you. Leave your name and number with Janet and I'll let you know if he is agreeable to meet with you.” “I really appreciate that,” I said. I wrote my information on a piece of paper. “I might have my phone turned off for a while, so if I don't answer, just leave a message and let me know what Mr. Iverson says.” “I will,” Mrs. Lorngren said. A block away from Hillview, I pulled into a parking lot, gripped the steering wheel with all my strength, and shook it violently. “God dammit!” I yelled. “Dammit! Dammit! Dammit! Why can't you just leave me alone!” My knuckles turned white, and I trembled as the wave of anger passed through me. I took a deep breath and waited for the throbbing in my throat to subside, for my eyes to clear. Then, once I had calmed down, I called Molly to let her know that I wouldn't be able to work the door. She wasn't happy, but she understood. After I hung up, I tossed the phone on the passenger seat and began the long drive south to get my brother. Most people have never heard of Austin, Minnesota, and those that have heard of it know it because of Spam, a salted pork product that never rots and feeds soldiers and refugees all over the world. It's the crown jewel of the Hormel Foods Corporation and the nickname-sake of my home town—Spam Town. They even have a museum in Austin devoted to the greatness of Spam. And if that didn't stamp Austin with the equivalent of a prison tattoo, there was the strike. It happened four years before I was born, but kids growing up in Austin learn about the strike the way some children learn about Lewis and Clark or the Declaration of Independence. A recession in the early 1980s had taken a chunk out of the meat-packing industry, so Hormel asked the union to take a big pay cut. Of course, that went over like a kick to the nuts, and the strike began. Pushing and shoving on the picket line led to riots. The violence attracted the networks, and one television crew clocked out by crashing a helicopter into a cornfield up near Ellendale. The governor finally sent in the National Guard, but by then the violence and animosity had left a mark on the town that some would say gave it character. I just saw it as an ugly scar. Like any town, Austin had its good points, too, although most people don't see the skin beside the pimples. It had parks, a pool, a decent hospital, a Carmelite monastery, its own municipal airport, and it was only a hop away from the famous Mayo Clinic in Rochester. It had a community college where I had been taking classes while, at the same time, working two part-time jobs. In three years, I had saved up enough money and racked up enough credits to allow me to transfer to the U of M as a junior. Austin also had thirteen bars, not counting hotel bars and service clubs, and with a population of twenty-three thousand—give or take—Austin had one of the highest bar-to-citizen ratios in greater Minnesota. I knew the bars well, having been in every one of them at one point or another. I stepped into my first bar when I was a mere nub of a kid, probably no more than ten years old. My mother left me at home to keep an eye on Jeremy while she went out for a drink or two. Being two years older than my brother and him being autistic—making him such a quiet kid and all—Mom felt that I was plenty old enough to babysit. That night, Jeremy sat in an arm chair in the living room watching his favorite video, The Lion King. I had geography homework to do, so I locked myself in the tiny bedroom he and I shared. I don't remember most of the rooms we shared over the years, but I remember that one: walls as thin as crackers, painted the same bright blue that coats the bottom of every public swimming pool in the world. You could hear the slightest sound from one room to the next, including the songs of The Lion King, which Jeremy played over and over and over. I sat atop our bunk bed—a second-hand piece of crap with springs so useless that our mattresses had to rest on sheets of plywood—covering my ears to try and block out the noise. But it did little to muffle the incessant, repetitive music kicking through the porous wall of my concentration. I'm not sure if this next part is true or an embellishment of my memory born of guilt, but I asked Jeremy to turn down the volume, and I swear he turned it up instead. A guy can only take so much. I stomped into the living room and pushed Jeremy out of his chair, causing him to fall hard against the wall. The impact knocked loose a picture above his head, a picture of me holding him when I was three and he was a baby. The picture popped off of its nail, fell down the wall, and crashed into the top of Jeremy's blonde head, the glass shattering into a hundred spikes. After Jeremy brushed the debris off of his arms and legs, he looked at me. A wedge of glass stuck out of the top of his head like an oversized coin jammed in an undersized piggy-bank slot. His eyes narrowed, not in anger, but in confusion. Jeremy rarely looked me in the eye, but that day he stared at me like he was on the verge of solving some great riddle. Then, abruptly, as if he'd found his answer, his eyes softened and his gaze shifted to the blood drops accumulating on his arm. I grabbed a towel from the bathroom, carefully removed the glass from his head, which hadn't penetrated as deep as I had feared, and wrapped the towel around him like a turban. I used a washcloth to wipe the blood off his arm and waited for the bleeding to stop. After ten minutes, blood still trickled from the cut, and the white towel had become blotched with large, bright-red patches. I rewrapped the towel around Jeremy's head, put his hand on the end of the towel to hold it in place, and ran out the door to find our mother. Mom didn't need to leave a trail of bread crumbs for me to find her. Our car sat in the driveway of the duplex with two flat tires, which meant that Mom had to be within walking distance. This limited my options to a couple bars. It didn't strike me as odd at the time that my mother left me alone to look after an autistic brother and never bothered to mention where she was going, or that I automatically knew to look for her in the bars. Then again, a lot of what I considered normal in my childhood appears so completely messed up when I look back now. I found her on my first try, at the Odyssey Bar. The emptiness of the place caught me by surprise. I'd always envisioned my mother stalking off to join an army of beautiful people who joked, laughed, and danced like they did on the TV commercials. But this place had bad country music crackling through cheap speakers, uneven floors, and reeked of feckless mediocrity. I saw my mother right away, chatting with the bartender. At first, I couldn't tell if the look on her face showed anger or concern. But she answered that question by grabbing my arm with a blood-cutting grip and dragging me out of the bar. We walked at a brisk pace back to the apartment and found Jeremy watching his movie, his hand still on the towel where I'd left it. When Mom saw the bloody towel, she lost a hinge. “What in the hell did you do! Jesus Christ. Look at this mess!” She pulled the towel off his head and lifted Jeremy off the floor by his arm, dragging him into the bathroom and lifting him into the empty bath tub. Blood matted his fine blonde hair. She threw the bloody towel into the sink and went to the living room to scrub three tiny spots of blood from the rust-brown carpeting. “You had to use my good towel,” she yelled. “You couldn't just grab a rag. Look at this blood in the carpet. We could lose our damage deposit. Did you ever stop to think about that? No. You never think. You just make the goddamn mess, and I have to clean it up.” I went into the bathroom, half to get away from my mother and half to be with Jeremy in case he got scared. He didn't get scared though; he never got scared. Or if he did, he never showed it. He looked at me with a face that, to the rest of the world, would appear expressionless, but I could see the shadow of my betrayal behind his eyes. No matter how much I have tried to put that night behind me, to bury it someplace deep inside and let it die, the memory of Jeremy looking up at me continues to breathe. Jeremy was eighteen now, old enough to stay alone in the apartment for a few hours, but not for a few days. As I pulled into the driveway of Mom's apartment that night, the Twins and the Indians were all tied up at one run apiece in the third inning. I let myself in with my spare key and found Jeremy watching Pirates of the Caribbean, his new favorite movie. He looked surprised for only a second, then he looked at the floor between us. “Hey Buddy,” I said. “How's my little bro?” “Hello Joe,” he said. When Jeremy started middle school, the district assigned him a teaching assistant named Helen Bollinger. She knew about autism, understood Jeremy's need for patterns and routines, his preference for solitude, his aversion to touching or being touched, and his inability to understand much beyond primal needs and black-and-white instruction. While Mrs. Bollinger struggled to bring Jeremy out of his darkness, my mother encouraged him to be seen and not heard. That wrestling match went on for seven years, with Mrs. Bollinger winning more than she lost. By the time he graduated from high school, I had a brother who could carry on something akin to a conversation, even if he had to struggle to look at me when we talked. “Maybe I thought you were at the college,” Jeremy said, speaking in a strict staccato cadence, as if he were placing each word in careful order upon a conveyor belt. “I came back to see you,” I said. “Oh, okay.” Jeremy turned back to watch his movie. “Mom called me,” I said. “She's got a meeting, and she's not gonna be home for a while.” It was easy to lie to Jeremy, his trusting temperament being incapable of understanding deceit. I didn't lie to him to be mean. It was just my way of explaining things to him without the complexity or nuance that came with the truth. The first time that my mother found her way to detox, I came up with the lie that she was at a meeting. After that, I told Jeremy that Mom had a meeting every time she ran off to one of the Indian casinos or flopped at some guy's house for the night. Jeremy never asked about the meeting, never wondered why some meetings lasted a few hours and others lasted a few days, never wondered why these meetings happened so suddenly. “This meeting is one of those long meetings,” I said. “So you get to stay with me for a few days.” Jeremy stopped watching TV and began looking around the floor, a thin furrow forming above his eyebrows. I could tell that he was building up to making eye contact with me, a task that did not come naturally to him. “Maybe I will stay here and wait for Mom,” he said. “You can't stay here. I have to go to my classes tomorrow. I gotta take you with me, to my apartment.” My answer wasn't what he wanted to hear. I could tell because he stopped trying to look me in the eye, a clue that his anxiety was on the rise. “Maybe you can stay here and go to your classes in the morning.” “My classes are at the college. That's a couple hours away from here. I can't stay here, Buddy.” I remained calm but firm. “Maybe I will stay here by myself.” “You can't stay here, Jeremy. Mom told me to come get you. You can stay at my apartment at college.” Jeremy began to rub his left thumb across the knuckles of his right hand. He did this when his world made the least sense. “Maybe I can wait here.” I sat on the couch next to Jeremy. “This'll be fun,” I said. “It'll just be you and me. I'll bring the DVD player, and you can watch any movie you want. You can pack a whole bag of nothing but movies.” Jeremy smiled. “But Mom's not gonna be back for a few days, and I need you to come to my apartment. Okay?” Jeremy thought hard for a bit then said, “Maybe I can bring Pirates of the Caribbean?” “Sure,” I said. “It'll be fun. We'll make it an adventure. You can be Captain Jack Sparrow, and I'll be Will Turner. What do you say?” Jeremy looked up at me and did his favorite imitation of Captain Jack, saying, “This is the day you'll always remember as the day you almost caught Captain Jack Sparrow.” Then Jeremy laughed until his cheeks turned red, and I laughed with him, the way that I always laughed when Jeremy cracked a joke. I grabbed some garbage bags and gave one of them to Jeremy to fill with DVDs and clothes, making sure that he packed enough to last a while, just in case Mom didn't make bail. As I pulled out of the driveway, I contemplated my work and class schedules, trying to find gaps that would allow me to keep an eye on Jeremy. On top of that, distracting questions tripped through my brain. How would Jeremy get along in the unfamiliar world of my apartment? Where would I find the time or the money to bail my mother out of jail? And how the hell did I become the parent in this wreck of a family? On the drive back to the Twin Cities, I watched the anxiety pace back and forth behind my brother's eyes, his brow and forehead creasing and relaxing as he processed what was happening. As the miles fell behind my tires, Jeremy grew more comfortable with our adventure until finally he relaxed with a deep exhale, the way I've seen dogs sigh in that moment when vigilance surrenders to sleep. Jeremy—the boy who laid his head on the bottom level of our bunk bed and shared my room, my closet, and my dresser drawers for eighteen years—was with me again. We had never been apart for more than a night or two in all our lives until a month ago, when I moved to campus, leaving him behind with a woman who swam in chaos. As far back as I could remember, my mom had been prone to wild mood swings—laughing and dancing across the living room one minute, throwing dishes around the kitchen the next—classic bipolar from what I understand. Of course that diagnosis was never made official because my mother refused to get professional help. Instead, she lived her life with her fingers in her ears, as though the truth would not exist if she never heard the words spoken aloud. Add to that cauldron an ever increasing measure of cheap vodka—a form of self-medication that quelled the inner scream but amplified the outer crazy—and you get a picture of the mother I left behind. She hadn't always been that bad though. In the early years, my mother's moods used to have a ceiling and a floor that kept the neighbors, and Child Protective Services, out of our lives. We even had some good times. I can remember the three of us going to the Science Museum, the Renaissance Festival, and the Valley Fair Amusement Park. I can remember her helping me with my math homework when I struggled to multiply double digits. I could sometimes find a crack in the wall that had grown between us and remember her laughing with us and even loving us. When I tried, I could remember a mother who could be warm and soft on those days when the world stayed off her back. That all changed the day my Grandpa Bill died. A feral restlessness descended upon our little trio that day, as though his death severed the one tether that gave my mother stability. After his death she let go of what little restraint she possessed and simply floated on the wave of her moods. She cried more, yelled more, and lashed out whenever the world overwhelmed her. She seemed determined to find the darker edges of her life and embrace them as some kind of new normal. Hitting was her first rule change. It started gradually, but eventually she took to slapping me across the face whenever her tea-kettle brain started to boil. As I got older and less sensitive to the slaps, she adjusted her aim to hit me in the ear. I hated that. Sometimes she would use implements like wooden spoons or wire flyswatter handles to make her point. Once, in seventh grade, I had to miss a wrestling tournament because the welts on my thighs were visible around my wrestling uniform and she forced me to stay home. For years she left Jeremy out of our battles, preferring to take all of her frustrations out on me. But as time went by, she began to lose control with him, too, yelling and cursing at him. Then, one day she went too far. When I was eighteen and out of high school, I came home to find my mother particularly drunk and angry and hitting Jeremy in the head with a tennis shoe. I dragged her into her bedroom and threw her down on the bed. She got up and tried to hit me. I grabbed her wrists, spun her around, and tossed her back onto the bed. She tried twice more to come at me and ended each attempt face down on her mattress. After the last attempt, she paused to catch her breath and ended up passing out. The next morning, she acted like nothing had happened, like she had no memory of her craziness, like our little family unit wasn't on the brink of its inevitable collapse. I played along, but I knew—I knew that she had reached a point where she could justify hitting Jeremy. I also knew that once I left for college it would likely get worse. Those thoughts made my chest hurt. And so, just as my mother pretended nothing was wrong after her blackout, I buried my thoughts deep inside, hiding them where they would remain undusted. But as we headed to my apartment that night, life was good. Jeremy and I listened to the Twins game as we drove—at least I listened to it. Jeremy heard the game but couldn't follow it from one minute to the next. I chatted with him, explaining things about the game as we drove, but he would rarely respond. When he did, he stepped into the conversation as if he had just come in from another room. By the time we pulled off I-35, up near campus, the Twins were laying a walloping on Cleveland, having scored four runs in the bottom of the eighth to take a six-to-four lead. I whooped as each run scored, and Jeremy whooped in imitation of me, laughing at my excitement. When we arrived, I led Jeremy up the steps to my apartment on the second floor, his garbage bags in hand. We bounded through the door just in time to turn on the TV and watch the Twins throw the final out to win the game. I held my hand up to high-five Jeremy, but he was turning a slow circle, taking in the smallness of my apartment. The kitchen and living room were at opposite sides of a single space; the bedroom was barely bigger than the twin bed it contained; and my apartment had no bathroom, at least not within the confines of its walls. I watched as Jeremy scanned the apartment, his eyes covering the same territory over and over again, as though the next pass might expose a hidden bathroom door. “Maybe I need to go to the bathroom,” Jeremy said. “Come on,” I said, motioning to Jeremy. “I'll show you.” My bathroom was across the hall from my front door. The old house had originally been built in the 1920s to hold one of those large, turn-of-the-century families that gave birth at a pace to outrun infant mortality rates. It had been subdivided in the 1970s with a three-bedroom apartment on the main level and two single-bedroom apartments upstairs, with only one of the upstairs units big enough to have its own bathroom. So at the top of the steep, narrow stairway, the door to the right was my apartment, the door to the left was my bathroom, and the door straight ahead was the other second-floor apartment. I dug Jeremy's toothbrush and flavored toothpaste out of one of the garbage bags and headed across the hall to the bathroom with Jeremy following at a cautious distance. “This is the bathroom,” I said. “If you need to go, just lock the door.” I showed him how to flip the deadbolt. He didn't walk into the bathroom. Instead, he examined it from the relative safety of the hallway. “Maybe we should go back home,” he said. “We can't, Buddy. Mom's at her meeting. Remember?” “Maybe she is home now.” “She's not home now. She's not gonna be home for a couple days.” “Maybe we should call her and see.” Jeremy began rubbing his thumbs across his knuckles again. I could see a slight tremor growing out of his anxiety. I wanted to put my hand on his shoulder to try to settle him down, but that would only exacerbate his reaction. Jeremy's autism was like that. Jeremy turned toward the steps, contemplating their steep pitch, pressing his thumb even harder into the back of his hand, kneading the knuckles like bread dough. I moved to block Jeremy from the steps. He was taller than me by two inches and outweighed me by a good twenty pounds. About the time he turned fourteen he surpassed me in height, weight, and looks: his golden hair curled around his head with a Nordic swirl, where my dirty blonde hair stuck out like straw if I didn't tame it with a touch of hair gel; his jaw was square, with a boyish dimple on the tip, where my chin was forgettable; his eyes sparkled ocean blue when he smiled, where my eyes were the hazel of weak coffee. Despite having every physical advantage over me, he remained my “little” brother, and therefore susceptible to my influence. I stood a step below him, my hands on his biceps, easing him back, trying to turn his attention away from the stairs and back toward my apartment. Behind me, at the bottom of the steps, I heard the door to the foyer open and close, followed by the cadence of feminine footsteps. I recognized the sound of her footfall, having listened to her pass by my door every day now for the past month. I knew her only as L. Nash, the name on the piece of tape that crossed her letter box. She stood all of five feet two, with short, black hair that whipped around her face like water dancing off rocks. She had dark eyes, a pixie nose, and a chilly penchant for being left alone. She and I had passed each other many times in the hall or on the steps. When I tried to engage her in small talk, she smiled politely, responded appropriately, but never stopped—always doing her best to pass by my interruption without seeming rude. She paused halfway up the stairs to watch me holding Jeremy by the arms, physically preventing him from leaving. Jeremy saw L. Nash and stopped moving, dropping his eyes to the floor. I stepped to the side to let her go by, the walls of the stairway squeezing together as she passed, the scent of her body wash and baby powder brushing my nose. “Hi,” I said. “Hi,” she returned, raising an eyebrow in our direction and walking the remaining few paces to her apartment door. I wanted to say something more, so I blurted out the first stupid thought that jumped into my head. “It's not what it looks like,” I said. “We're brothers.” “Yeah,” she said, as she turned the key in her lock. “I'm sure that line worked for Jeffrey Dahmer, too.” She stepped into her apartment and closed the door. Her quip left me dumb. I wanted to shoot back my own clever retort, but my mind had seized up like a rusty bolt. Jeremy didn't watch L. Nash like I did. He stood quietly at the top of the stairs, no longer rubbing his thumb to his knuckle. His emergency had passed. The stubbornness in his eyes had been replaced by fatigue, it being well past his normal bedtime. I guided him into the bathroom to brush his teeth and then to the bedroom, where I rolled my old television in so that he could watch his movie on the DVD player. Then I grabbed a blanket and settled onto the couch. I could hear Jeremy watching his movie, the familiar dialogue and music lulling him to sleep, distracting him from the insecurities of this new environment. Despite the drama at the top of the steps, I had to admire Jeremy for adapting as well as he did. Even small changes in his routine, like a new toothbrush or the wrong breakfast cereal, could knock him off kilter. But here he was, in an apartment he had never seen before, an apartment half the size of the one he called home, an apartment that didn't even have its own bathroom, falling asleep for the first time in a bed that didn't have a top bunk. I'd turned off my phone earlier in the evening to avoid the barrage of calls I expected from my mother, but now I pulled it out of my pocket, turned it on, and checked my missed calls. There were twenty-one calls from a number in the 507 area code, no doubt my mother calling from the detox center. I could just hear her screaming at me for shutting off my phone and for leaving her in detox and jail—even though I had no part in that decision. The first nine voice messages were from my mother: “Joey, I can't believe you'd treat your own mother like this—” [Delete] “Joey, I don't know what I did to deserve—” [Delete] “Well, now I know that I can't count on you—” [Delete] “I know I'm a terrible mother—” [Delete] “Joey if you don't answer your phone I'll—” [Delete] “You don't love me—” [Delete] “I'm sorry, Joey. I just wish I was dead. Maybe then—” [Delete] “You think you're some hot-shit college—” [Delete] “Answer your fucking phone—” [Delete] “Joe, this is Mary Lorngren from Hillview Manor. I just wanted to call and tell you that I spoke to Mr. Iverson about your project…and he has agreed to meet with you to discuss it. He wanted me to make it clear that he is not agreeing to do it, mind you. He wants to meet with you first. You can call Janet tomorrow to find out when is a good time to come by. We don't like to disturb the guests during their meal times. So, just call Janet. Bye-bye.” I turned off my phone, and closed my eyes, a slight smile creasing into my cheeks, absorbing the strange irony that I might soon be interviewing a savage murderer, a man who gave no thought to ending a young girl's life, a criminal who survived for more than thirty years in the worst hellhole prison in Minnesota, yet I did not dread that conversation nearly as much as I dreaded seeing my own mother again. Still, I could feel a wind at my back, one that I chose to see as favorable, one that I hoped would bring me a good grade in my English class. With my sails filled, I might be able to overcome my procrastination in starting the assignment. It never occurred to me, as I nestled on my couch, that such a wind might also be destructive. When I finally fell asleep that night, I did so wrapped comfortably in the belief that my meeting with Carl Iverson would have no down side, that our encounter would somehow make my life better—easier. In hindsight, I was at best na?ve. Carl Iverson wasn't wearing shoes when they arrested him. I know this because I found a picture of him, barefoot, being led past the remains of a burned-down shed toward a waiting squad car. His hands were cuffed behind his back, his shoulders slumped forward, a plain-clothed detective holding one of his biceps and a uniformed officer holding the other. Iverson wore a simple white t-shirt and blue jeans. His dark, wavy hair was pressed into the side of his head as if the cops had just pulled him out of bed. I found this picture in the bowels of the University of Minnesota's Wilson library, in a glass-walled archive where thousands of newspapers are stored on microfilm, some dating back to the days of the American Revolution. Unlike the rest of the library, where shelves were filled with stories of the heroic and the famous, the archive room held newspaper articles written by guys with pencils behind their ears and ulcers in their stomachs, articles written about everyday folk—the quiet people. They could never have dreamt that their stories would survive for decades, even centuries, to be read by a guy like me. The archive room had the feel of a tabernacle, with millions of souls packed away on microfilm like incense in tiny jars, waiting for someone to free their essence to be felt, tasted, inhaled again, if only for a moment. I began with a search for Carl Iverson's name on the Internet. I came up with thousands of hits, but one site had an excerpt from some legal document that referred to an appellate court decision regarding his case. I didn't understand all of the legal jargon, but it gave me a date when the murder took place: October 29, 1980, and it gave me the initials of the murdered girl: C.M.H. That would be enough information to find the story in the newspaper. I moved from task to task quickly, pressed into efficiency by my brother's unexpected presence in my life, and more than a little flustered at having one more ball to juggle. I found myself thinking about Jeremy and wondering how he was managing back at my apartment. I wondered if my mom's bail hearing would happen by Friday. I had to work at Molly's on Friday and didn't want to go to work and leave Jeremy alone. I needed to get him back to Austin before the weekend. Molly would almost surely fire me if I had to miss work again. I'd woken Jeremy that morning before I left for school, poured him some cereal, pulled the TV back into the living room, and showed him again how to use the remote. Jeremy was eighteen years old, so it's not that he couldn't pour his own cereal. Yet the unfamiliarity of my apartment would likely have befuddled him. He would go hungry rather than open a strange cupboard door to look for food. I considered skipping my classes that day, but I had already lost too much time procrastinating. I laid out some of Jeremy's favorite DVDs and told him that I would be back in a couple hours. I hoped that he would be okay being alone for that short time, but my concern was growing with every passing minute. I went into the microfilm stacks, found the reel for the Minneapolis Tribune for October 29, 1980, slid it into the reader, and scanned the front page for the story. It was not there. I moved to the following pages and still found no mention of a murder, at least not one that involved a fourteen-year-old girl or the initials C.M.H. I read the entire newspaper and came up blank. I leaned back in my chair, ran a hand through my hair. I was starting to think that the date in the court opinion was wrong. Then it dawned on me. The story would not have made the paper until the next day. I rolled the spool forward to the next day's edition. The top story for October 30, 1980, was a half-page article about a peace treaty between Honduras and El Salvador. Beneath that I found the story I was looking for, a story about a girl murdered and burned in Northeast Minneapolis. The article ran down a sidebar beside a picture of a fire. The picture showed firefighters shooting water on what appeared to be a shed about the size of a single-car garage. The flames shot skyward a good fifteen feet above the roof, suggesting the photographer had snapped the picture as firefighters were just beginning their efforts to extinguish the flames. The article read: Human remains found in Pierce Street blaze Minneapolis police are investigating after charred human remains were discovered yesterday in the debris of a burned tool shed in the Windom Park neighborhood of northeast Minneapolis. Firefighters responding at 4:18 p.m. to reports of a fire in the 1900 block of Pierce Street N.E., arrived to find the tool shed engulfed in flames. Police evacuated neighboring houses while firefighters battled the blaze. Fire Marshal John Vries reports that investigators combing through the debris discovered a charred body amid the rubble. The body has not yet been identified. Police have not ruled out foul play. The article went on for a few more paragraphs with unimportant details about the estimated damage and the reaction of neighbors. I printed a copy of the page and then spooled through the microfilm to the next day's edition. In a follow-up article the police confirmed that the body found the day before had been identified as fourteen-year-old Crystal Marie Hagen. The body had been badly burned, and authorities suspected that she had already been dead when the fire was set. The burned-out shed was located next door to the house where Crystal had lived with her mother, Danielle Hagen; her stepfather, Douglas Lockwood; and her stepbrother, Dan Lockwood. Crystal's mother, Danielle, told reporters that they had noticed that Crystal was missing shortly after word spread that a body had been discovered in the debris of the shed. Crystal was positively identified as the deceased using dental records. The article ended with the note that thirty-two-year-old Carl Iverson had been taken into custody for questioning. Iverson lived next door to Crystal Hagen and owned the shed where Hagen's body was found. Next to this article I found the photograph of the two officers arresting a barefooted Carl Iverson. Using the knobs on the microfilm reader, I enlarged the picture. The two cops wore coats and gloves, in contrast to Iverson's t-shirt and jeans. The uniformed officer had his gaze set on something behind the photographer. From the hint of sadness in his eyes, I speculated that he might have been looking at Crystal Hagen's family, as they watched the arrest of the monster that killed and burned their daughter. The plain-clothed cop had his mouth open, his jaw slightly crooked, as if he were saying something, maybe even yelling something at Carl Iverson. Of the three men in the photo, only Carl Iverson looked at the camera. I didn't know what I was expecting to see in his face. How do you hold yourself after committing murder? Do you strut as you walk past the charcoal-black aftermath of the shed where you burned her body? Do you wear a mask of nonchalance and pass by the ruins with no more interest than if you were walking to the corner store for some milk? Or do you flip out with fear, knowing you've been caught, knowing that you've breathed your last measure of freedom and will spend the rest of your life in a cage. When I zoomed in on Carl Iverson's face, on his eyes as he looked at the photographer, I saw no pride, no false calm, and no fear. What I saw was confusion. There is an odor that permeates old apartment buildings. When I was a kid, I noticed its effect on the people who came by to visit my mother's apartment, that split second of corruption as the taint of decay hits them square in the face, the twitch of the nose, the flutter of blinking, the reining in of the chin. When I was little, that mustiness was what I thought all homes smelled like. Not scented candles or fresh-baked bread, but dirty sneakers and unwashed dishes. By the time I was in junior high, I found myself looking away in embarrassment any time someone came to the door. I swore that when I grew up and got my own apartment, I would get one that smelled of old wood, not old cats. As it turned out, that was not easy to do on my budget. The triplex apartment building I lived in had an ancient cellar that breathed dankness up through the floorboards, filling the structure with a pungency born of wet dirt mixed with the tang of rotting timber. The odor was strongest immediately inside the common front door where our letter boxes were bolted to the wall. Within that foyer, the steps to my apartment rose to the right, and to the left a door led to the main-floor apartment where a Greek family, the Kostas, lived. Sometimes the aroma of rich cooking spices seeped through that door, mixing with the cellar funk to overwhelm the senses. I made a point of keeping my apartment clean, vacuuming weekly, washing dishes after every meal; I'd even dusted once in the short time that I had lived there. I wasn't a clean freak by any stretch. I simply refused to let my apartment succumb to its natural state of entropy. I went so far as to plug an air freshener into an electric socket that pumped out spurts of apple and cinnamon to welcome me home every day. But what caught my attention that day, as I walked through my door, wasn't the pleasantry of the artificial air freshener; it was Jeremy sitting on my couch beside the girl I knew only as L. Nash, and they were giggling. “Now that's what you call ironic,” L. Nash said. “Now that's what you call ironic,” Jeremy repeated. Then he and L. Nash broke into another laugh. I recognized the line from Jeremy's Pirates of the Caribbean movie. It was another one of Jeremy's favorite lines. They were watching the movie together. Jeremy was sitting, as he usually does, in the center of the couch directly in front of the TV, his feet flat on the floor, his back straight against the curve of the couch back, his hands balled up on his lap where he could fidget with them if needed. L. Nash sat in the corner of the sofa, her legs crossed over one another, wearing jeans and a blue sweater. Her dark eyes flitted weightlessly as she laughed with Jeremy. I had never seen her smile before, at least not beyond the cursory upturn at the edges of her lips as we passed each other in the hallway. But now her smile transformed her, as if she had grown taller or changed her hair color or something. Her cheeks popped with dimples; her lips seemed redder and softer against the backdrop of her white teeth. Damn, she was cute. Jeremy and L. Nash looked up at me as if I were a parent intruding upon a slumber party. “Hello?” I said, my tone betraying my confusion. What I wanted to say was “Jeremy, how the hell did you get L. Nash into my apartment and sitting on my couch?” L. Nash must have seen the confusion on my face because she offered an explanation. “Jeremy was having a little problem with the TV,” she said. “So I came over to help.” “Problem with the TV?” I said. “Maybe the TV did not work right,” Jeremy said, his face shifting back to his normal flat affect. “Jeremy hit the wrong button,” L. Nash said. “He pushed the input button by mistake.” “Maybe I just pushed the wrong button,” Jeremy said. “I'm sorry, Buddy,” I said. I had made that mistake a few times myself, accidentally switching the internal input from DVD to VCR, causing the TV to explode with a noisy white static, which had to be a personal hell for Jeremy. “So how did he…I mean who…” “Maybe Lila fixed it,” Jeremy said. “Lila.” I said, letting the name rest on the tip of my tongue for a bit. So that's what the L stood for. “I'm Joe, and you've obviously met my brother Jeremy.” “Yeah,” Lila said. “Jeremy and I are good friends already.” Jeremy had turned his attention back to his movie, paying no more mind to Lila than he did the wall behind him. Like the idiot I was—a condition often exacerbated by the presence of a female—I decided that my next move would be to rescue Lila from Jeremy, to show her a seat at the adult table, impress her with my wit and charm, and sweep her off her feet. At least, that was my plan. “Are you surprised that I'm not a serial killer,” I said. “Serial killer?” Lila looked up at me, confused. “Last night…you…um…called me Jeffrey Dahmer.” “Oh…I forgot.” She smiled a half smile, and I scrambled to find a new topic of conversation, having missed the mark with my attempt at humor. “So what do you do when you're not fixing televisions?” “I'm a student at the U.” Her words slid slowly from her mouth to punctuate that she knew damn well that I knew she was a student. We had passed each other on the stairs many times with textbooks in our hands. Yet, as lame as my overture had been, I had to view it as progress because we were having our first real conversation. I often timed my entrances and exits from the building to coincide with hers—at least to the point where it didn't come across as creepy—and I could no more get her to talk to me than I could mix sunlight with shade. But there we were having a conversation, all because Jeremy hit the wrong button. “Thanks for helping him out,” I said. “I really appreciate it.” “Just being neighborly,” she said and started to stand up. She was going to leave; I didn't want her to leave. “Let me show you my appreciation,” I said. “Maybe I could take you out to dinner or something.” My words fell heavy to the ground as soon as they left my mouth. Lila curled one of her hands into the other, shrugged her shoulders, and said, “That's okay.” Her geniality faded like a toy succumbing to a dead battery, her eyes no longer weightless, her dimples gone. It was as though my words cast a pall over her. “I should get going,” she said. “You can't leave.” She started for the door. “I mean you shouldn't leave,” I said, sounding needier than I intended. “Duty requires that I return the good deed.” I moved toward the door, half blocking her path. “You should at least stay for lunch.” “I have to get to class,” she said, skirting past me, her shoulder brushing lightly against my arm as she went by. Then she paused at the door, or at least I think she paused. Maybe she was reconsidering my invitation. Maybe she was toying with me. Or, maybe—probably—my imagination was playing a trick on me and she didn't pause at all. I, of course, chose to err on the side of recklessness and press on. “Let me at least walk you home,” I said. “It's eight feet away.” “More like ten feet,” I said, following her into the hallway and closing my door behind me. I wasn't getting anywhere with my feeble banter, so I changed tactics and tried sincerity. “I really appreciate what you did for Jeremy,” I said. “He can be a bit…I don't know, childlike. You see he's…” “Autistic?” she said. “Yeah, I know. I have a cousin on the spectrum. He's a lot like Jeremy.” Lila leaned against her door, her hand turning the knob. “Why don't you join us both for dinner tonight,” I said, shredding any semblance of subtlety. “Just my way of saying thanks. I'm making spaghetti.” She stepped inside her apartment and turned to meet my eyes, her face suddenly serious. “Listen Joe,” she said. “You seem like a nice guy and all, but I'm not looking for a dinner. Not right now. I'm not looking for anything right now. I just want to—” “No. No, I understand.” I interrupted her. “I thought I'd ask. It's not for me. It's for Jeremy,” I lied. “He's not good at being away from home, and he seemed to like you.” “Really?” Lila smiled. “You're gonna pimp your brother out like that just so you can cook me a meal?” “Just being neighborly.” I smiled back. She started to close the door but hesitated as she turned the idea over in her head a couple times. “Okay,” she said, “one dinner, that's all—for Jeremy.” Janet, the receptionist at Hillview Manor, smiled at me this time when I walked through the front door. It helped that I had called ahead to get Mr. Iverson's eating and napping schedule. She told me to show up around two o'clock, which I did on the dot, anticipating the wall of Mentholatum odor that hit me as I stepped through the door. The old woman with the crooked wig still kept her vigil at the entrance, paying no attention to me as I walked by her. Before I left my apartment, I settled Jeremy on the couch, started his movie, and showed him again which buttons to push on the remote and which ones to avoid. If all went well—and Iverson agreed to be my subject—I might have just enough time to get some background for my assignment. “Hi, Joe.” Janet stood up and walked out from behind her reception desk. “Is my timing good?” I asked. “As good as it's going to be. Mr. Iverson had a rough night last night. Pancreatic cancer is a terrible thing.” “Is he okay to…” “He's fine now. Probably a little tired. The pain in his belly flairs up sometimes and we have to sedate him just to give him a few hours rest.” “Isn't he getting radiation, or chemo, or something?” “He could, I guess, but it won't do any good at this point. The most that chemo might do is prolong the inevitable. He said he doesn't want that. I don't blame him.” Janet walked with me to the lounge area, pointing to a man in a wheelchair sitting alone in front of one of the large windows that lined the back of the building. “He sits there every day staring out that window, looking at God knows what, since there ain't nothin’ to see. He just sits there. Mrs. Lorngren thinks he's mesmerized by a view with no metal bars blocking the way.” I half expected Carl Iverson to be a monster strapped to his wheelchair with leather belts for the protection of the residents around him, or to have the cold piercing eyes of a madman capable of doing great evil, or to have the demanding presence of an infamous villain; but I found none of that. Carl Iverson should have been in his mid-sixties, if I did the math right. But as I looked at this man, I thought that Janet made a mistake and brought me to the wrong person. A few thin wisps of long, gray hair dangled from the crown of his head; sharp bones poked against gaunt cheeks; thin skin, tinted yellow with jaundice, covered a neck so skinny and shriveled that I was sure I could have closed a single hand completely around it. He had a serious scar crossing the carotid artery on his neck and cadaverous forearms, their tendons prominent against the bone in the absence of any muscle or fat. I half believed that I could hold his arm up, like a child might hold a leaf up to the sunlight, and see every vein and capillary that ran through it. If I had not known better, I would have put his age closer to eighty. “Stage four,” Janet said. “It's about as bad as it gets. We'll try to make him comfortable, but there's only so much we can do. He can have morphine, but he fights it. Says he'd rather have the pain and be able to think clearly.” “How long's he got?” “If he makes it to Christmas, I'll lose a bet,” she said. “I sometimes feel sorry for him, but then I remember who he is—what he did. And I think about that girl he killed and everything she missed out on: boyfriends, love, getting married and having a family of her own. Her kids would've been about your age if he hadn't killed her. I think about those things whenever I start feeling sorry for him.” The phone rang, pulling Janet back to the reception desk. I waited for a minute or two, hoping she would come back and provide the introduction. When she didn't return, I cautiously approached what little remained of the murderer Carl Iverson. “Mr. Iverson?” I said. “Yes?” He turned his attention away from a nuthatch he'd been watching scamper down the trunk of a dead jack pine outside the window. “I'm Joe Talbert,” I said. “I think Mrs. Lorngren told you I was coming?” “Ah, my visitor…has arrived,” Carl said, speaking in a half whisper, breaking his sentence in half with a wheezing inhale. He nodded his head toward an armchair nearby. I sat. “So you're the scholar.” “Nah,” I said, “not a scholar, just a student.” “Lorngren tells me…” He shut his eyes tightly to let a wave of pain pass. “She tells me…you want to write my story.” “I have to write a biography for my English class.” “So,” he said, raising an eyebrow, leaning toward me, his face dead serious, “the most obvious question is…why me? How do I come to receive…such an honor?” “I find your story compelling.” I said the first thing that came to my mind, the words echoing with insincerity. “Compelling? In what way?” “It's not every day you meet a…” I stopped myself, looking for a polite way to end the sentence: a murderer, a rapist of children? That was way too harsh. “…a person who's been to prison,” I said. “You're pulling your punches, Joe,” he said, sowing his words in a careful steady pace so as to avoid having to stop to catch his breath. “Sir?” “You're not interested in me because I spent time in prison. You're interested because of the Hagen murder. That's why you're talking to me. You can say it. It's gonna help with the grade, right?” “The thought did cross my mind,” I said. “That kind of thing…killing someone, I mean, well, you don't come across that every day.” “Probably more often than you think,” he said. “There're probably ten or fifteen people in this very building who have killed.” “You think that there're ten other murderers in this building besides you?” I said. “Are you talking about killing or murdering?” “Is there a difference?” Mr. Iverson looked out the window as he pondered the question, not so much looking for the answer as contemplating whether to tell it to me. I watched the tiny muscles in his jaw tighten a couple times before he answered. “Yes,” he said. “There is a difference. I've done both. I've killed…and I've murdered.” “What's the difference?” “It's the difference between hoping that the sun rises and hoping that it doesn't.” “I don't understand,” I said. “What's that mean?” “Of course you don't understand,” he said. “How could you? You're just a kid, a college pup blowing his daddy's money on beer and girls, trying to keep a passing grade so you can avoid getting a job for another few years. You probably have no greater care in the world than whether you'll have a date by Saturday.” The vigor of this emaciated old man caught me off guard; and frankly, it pissed me off. I thought about Jeremy back at my apartment, a TV remote click away from crisis. I thought about my mother, in jail, begging for my help on the inhale and cursing my birth on the exhale. I thought about the thin edge that I walked between being able to afford college and not, and I wanted to dump that dusty, judgmental prick out of his wheelchair. I felt anger rising in my chest, but I took a deep breath, as I had learned to do whenever I became frustrated with Jeremy, and I let it pass. “You know nothing about me,” I said. “You don't know where I've been, or what I have to deal with. You don't know the shit I've had to wade through to get here. Whether or not you tell me your story is up to you. That's your prerogative. But don't presume to judge me.” I fought against the urge to stand up and walk out, holding on to the arm of the chair to keep me in my seat. Iverson glanced down at my white-knuckled grip, then at my eyes. A hint of a smile, more subtle than a single flake of snow, crossed his face, and his eyes nodded approval. “That's good,” he said. “What's good?” “That you understand how wrong it is to judge someone before you know their whole story.” I saw the lesson he wanted me to learn, but I was far too angry to respond. He continued. “I could have told my story to any number of people. I used to get letters in prison from people wanting to turn my life into something they could make money from. I never responded because I knew that I could give a hundred authors the same information and they would write a hundred different stories. So if I'm going to tell you my story, if I tell you the truth about everything, then I need to know who you are, that you're not just some punk in this for an easy grade, that you will be honest with me and be fair about how you tell my story.” “You understand,” I said, “this is just a homework assignment. No one's gonna read it except my teacher.” “Do you know how many hours are in a month?” Carl asked, apropos of nothing. “I'm sure I could figure it out.” “There's 720 hours in the month of November. October and December each have 744.” “Okay,” I said, hoping he would explain his tangent. “You see, Joe, I can count my life in hours. If I'm going to spend some of those hours on you, I need to know that you're worth my time.” I hadn't considered that point. Janet thought Carl would be dead by Christmas. With just a week remaining in September, that would give Carl three months to live. I did the rough math in my head and understood. If Janet was right, then Carl Iverson had less than three thousand hours of life left to live. “I guess that makes sense,” I said. “So what I'm saying is this: I'll be truthful with you. I'll answer any question you put to me. I'll be that proverbial open book, but I need to know that you are not wasting my limited time. You have to be honest with me as well. That's all that I ask. Can you do that?” I thought about it for a moment. “You'll be absolutely honest? About everything?” “Absolutely honest.” Carl held out his hand to shake mine, to seal the agreement, and I took it. I could feel the bones of Carl's hand knocking around under his thin skin as if I were gripping a bag of marbles. “So,” Carl asked, “why aren't you doing a story on your mom or dad?” “Let's just say my mom is less than reliable.” Carl stared, waiting for me to continue. “Honesty, remember?” he said. “Okay. Honestly? Right now my mother is in a detox center in Austin. She should be getting out tomorrow, and then she'll sit in jail until her first appearance in court on DUI charges.” “Well she sounds like she has a story to tell.” “I won't be telling it,” I said. Mr. Iverson nodded his understanding. “What about your dad?” “Never met him.” “Grandparents?” “My grandma on my mom's side died when Mom was a teenager; my grandpa died when I was eleven.” “How'd he die?” Carl asked the question with no more forethought than you give to a yawn; but he had stumbled onto my deepest wound. He had opened the door to a conversation that I refused to have, even with myself. “This isn't about me,” I said, the sharp tone in my voice cutting a swath between Mr. Iverson and me. “And this isn't about my grandpa. This is about you. I'm here to get your story. Remember?” Carl leaned back in his chair and considered me while I tried to wash my face of all expression. I didn't want him to see the guilt in my eyes or the anger in my clenched jaw. “Okay,” he said. “I didn't mean to touch a nerve.” “No nerve,” I said. “You didn't touch any nerve.” I tried to act as if my reaction had been nothing more than mild impatience. Then I lobbed a question at him to change the subject. “So, Mr. Iverson, let me ask you a question.” “Go ahead.” “Because you only have a few months to live, why would you agree to spend it talking to me?” Carl adjusted himself in his chair, gazing out the window at the drying towels and the barbeque grills littering the apartment balconies across the way. I could see his index finger stroking the arm of his wheelchair. It reminded me of how Jeremy strokes his knuckles when he is anxious. “Joe,” he said finally, “do you know what a dying declaration is?” I didn't, although I gave it a shot. “It's a declaration made by someone who is dying?” “It is a term of law,” he said. “If a man whispers the name of his killer and then dies, it's considered good evidence because there's a belief—an understanding—that a person who is dying would not want to die with a lie upon his lips. No sin could be greater than a sin that cannot be rectified, the sin you never get to confess. So this…this conversation with you…this is my dying declaration. I don't care if anybody reads what you write. I don't even care if you write it down at all.” Carl pursed his lips, his stare searching for something far beyond the immediate scenery, a slight quiver in his words. “I have to say the words out loud. I have to tell someone the truth about what happened all those years ago. I have to tell someone the truth about what I did.” That evening, my head pulsed with waves of excitement. I had secured a tragic subject for my biography assignment, and, to top the evening off, I had a dinner date with Lila Nash. Okay, not a date. But I had a girl coming over to my home to share a meal with me. This had never happened before. When it came to dating, I always stuck to restaurants. I had never cooked for a girl or served a girl a meal in my home. I had come close once, but, like many of my plans back in my high-school days, it came to ruin. Somewhere in my adolescence, I discovered that I was neither handsome nor ugly. I fell in that vast ocean of so-so guys that made up the background of the picture. I was the guy that you agree to go to homecoming with after you found out that the guy you really wanted had already asked another girl. I was okay with that. In fact, I think that good looks would have been wasted on me. Don't get me wrong, I had my share of dates in high school, but, by design, I never dated anyone for more than a couple months—except Phyllis. Phyllis was my first girlfriend. She had curly brown hair that sprayed out from her head like the tentacles of a sea anemone. I thought she looked peculiar until the day we shared our first kiss. After that her hair struck me as daring and avant-garde. We were high-school freshmen, following the well-worn path of juvenile courtship, testing boundaries, hiding behind corners to steal a kiss, holding hands under the table in the cafeteria, all the things that seemed so wonderfully exciting to me. Then one day, she insisted that I introduce her to my mother. “Are you ashamed of me?” Phyllis asked. “Am I just someone you mess around with when it's convenient?” Try as I might, I could not convince her that my intentions were honorable unless I brought her to my house for a formal introduction. Looking back now, I should have simply broken up with her and let her think I was a jerk. I told my mother that I would be bringing Phyllis by after school that day. I talked about the visit as often as I could that morning, hoping to get across to my mother that she needed to be on her best behavior for that one hour of that one day. All she had to do was be cordial, sober, and normal for one hour. Sometimes I ask too much. As we strolled up the front walk, I could smell food, or the remains of food, burning in the kitchen. Phyllis had been smiling for the entire walk from school to my house, nervously folding her fingers together as we got closer. I stopped at the front door, hearing my mother scream at some guy named Kevin. I didn't know any Kevin. “God dammit, Kevin, I can't pay you right now.” I could hear the slur in her words. “That's just great,” a male voice hollered back. “I bend over backward to help you out and when I need the money you fuck me over.” “It's not my fault you can't keep a job,” Mom yelled. “Don't be blamin’ me.” “No, but it's your fault I got no money,” he said. “I ain't got no retard kid to pay my bills like you do. You owe me a hunnerd dollars. I know you get welfare or some shit for that kid. Just pay me outta that.” “Fuck you! You piece of shit. Get outta my house.” “Where's my money?” “You'll get your fuckin’ money. Now get out.” “When? When do I get the money?” “Get out. My kid's coming home with some little skank, and I need to get ready.” “When do I get my money?” “Get out before I call the cops and tell ’em you're driving without a license again.” “You fucking bitch.” Kevin slammed his way out the back door about the same time that the smoke detector shrieked to life, fed by the burning food in the kitchen. I looked at Phyllis and saw that she had folded close the shutters of her brain, albeit too late to block out the experience that would surely be the focus of some future therapy sessions. I wanted to apologize, to explain, or better yet, to disappear, slip through the cracks between the porch planks. Instead, I turned Phyllis around by her shoulders, walked her to the corner, and said my last goodbye to her. The following day at school, she made a point of avoiding me in the halls, which was fine by me because I would have avoided her anyway. After that, I never dated any girl for more than two months. I couldn't endure the humiliation of bringing another girl home to my mother. I thought of Phyllis as I cooked the noodles for my dinner with Lila. For the first time in my life, I would bring a girl home and not worry about what would meet me at the door. But then again, I wasn't bringing a girl home. This wasn't a date, despite the amount of time I spent getting ready, combing my hair just so, applying a little extra deodorant and a tiny hint of cologne, picking out clothes that said both “look at me” and “I don't care.” I even made Jeremy take a shower in my bathroom across the hall. All this effort for a girl who threw a cold shoulder at me with the force of a middle linebacker. But damn, she was cute. Lila arrived at seven, wearing the same jeans and sweater that she'd worn that morning when she left for class. She said hello, glanced around the kitchen to see that I had started the water boiling, and then went to Jeremy, who was sitting on the couch. “What's the movie tonight, handsome?” she said. Jeremy blushed slightly. “Maybe Pirates of the Caribbean,” he said. “Perfect.” She smiled. “I love that movie.” Jeremy smiled his best goofy smile as he pointed the remote at the television, and Lila pushed the button to start the movie. I felt a strange jealousy watching Jeremy and Lila on my couch, but that was exactly what I had asked for. I used Jeremy to coax Lila to my home, and she came to see him, not me. I turned back to my spaghetti noodles, glancing over at Lila every now and again to see her attention split between the television and a stack of my homework papers on the coffee table. “Are you researching the war in El Salvador?” she asked. “The war in El Salvador?” I said, looking over my shoulder. She was reading the newspaper article I'd copied at the library. “You have an article about the signing of a peace treaty between El Salvador and Honduras.” “Oh, that,” I said. “No. Look at the column below that.” “The one about the girl?” she said. “Yeah, I'm interviewing the guy who killed her.” She went silent for a moment as she read each of the articles I had copied at the library. I watched her face wince as she covered those parts of the story that expounded upon the more gruesome details of Crystal Hagen's death. I stirred the pasta and waited patiently for her response. Then she said, “You're kidding, right?” “What?” She flipped through the articles again. “You're interviewing this psychopath?” “What's wrong with that?” I asked. “Everything,” Lila said. “It amazes me how prison scumbags can sucker people into paying them attention. I knew this girl who got engaged to some creep in prison. She swore he was innocent—wrongfully convicted, waited for him for two years until he got released. Six months later he was back in prison after he beat the crap out of her.” “Carl's not in prison,” I said with a sheepish shrug. “He's not in prison? How could he not be in prison after what he did to that girl?” “He's dying of cancer at a nursing home. He only has a few months,” I said. “And you're interviewing him because…” “I'm writing his biography.” “You're writing his story?” she said, with more than a hint of condemnation. “It's for my English class,” I said, almost as an apology. “You're giving him notoriety.” “It's an English class,” I said. “One teacher and maybe twenty-five students. I'd hardly call that notoriety.” Lila put the papers back down on my table. She looked at Jeremy and lowered her voice. “It doesn't matter that it's only a college class. You should do a story on the girl he killed, or the girls he would have killed if he hadn't gone to prison. They deserve the attention, not him. He should be disposed of quietly, no grave marker, no eulogy, no memory of the man. When you write down his life's story, you're creating a marker that shouldn't exist.” “Don't hold back,” I said. “Tell me what you really think.” I pulled a thread of spaghetti from the boiling water and threw it at the refrigerator. It bounced off the fridge door and fell to the floor. “What the hell are you doing?” she asked, looking at the noodle on the floor. “Testing the spaghetti,” I said, glad to be on a different topic. “By flinging it around the kitchen?” “If it sticks to the refrigerator, it's done.” I bent down and picked the spaghetti strand off the floor and tossed it into the garbage. “And this spaghetti isn't quite done yet.” When I left Hillview earlier that day, I felt good about my project. Iverson had promised to tell me the truth about the death of Crystal Hagen. I would be his confessor. I couldn't wait for my dinner with Lila, to tell her about Carl. In my imagination at least, Lila would be riveted by what I was doing, sharing my excitement, wanting to know all about Carl. After seeing her reaction now, all I wanted to do was avoid that subject for the rest of the evening. “Did he tell you what he did, or is he telling you he was framed?” she asked. “He hasn't said a thing about it yet.” I pulled three plates from the cupboard and walked them to the coffee table in the living room where we would be eating. Lila got up and grabbed some glasses from the same cupboard and followed me. I cleaned my backpack, my notes, and the newspaper articles off the coffee table. “We haven't gotten to that point yet,” I said. “So far, he's told me about growing up in South St. Paul, an only child. Um…let's see…his father managed a hardware store and his mom…” I paged through my memory, “worked at a deli in downtown St. Paul.” “So when you write this guy's story, you're simply gonna write down whatever he tells you to?” Lila placed the glasses on the table by the plates. “I also have to get a couple of secondary sources,” I said, walking back to the kitchen. “But, when it comes to what he did—” “And by ‘what he did’ you mean raping and killing a fourteen-year-old girl and burning her dead body,” Lila added. “Yeah…that. When it comes to that, there are no other sources. I have to write what he tells me.” “So he can feed you a line of bull, and you'd tell that story?” “He's already done his time. Why would he lie?” “Why wouldn't he lie?” Lila said with an edge of incredulity. She stood at the end of the kitchen counter, her hands flat on the Formica, her arms stiff, her fingers spread. “Put yourself in his shoes. He rapes some poor girl, murders her, spends his time in prison telling every cellmate, guard, and lawyer who cares to listen to him that he's innocent. He's not gonna quit now. Do you really think that he's gonna admit that he killed that girl?” “But he's dying,” I said, flinging another spaghetti strand at the refrigerator—it stuck. “That proves my point, not yours,” Lila said, with the air of a practiced debater. “He gets you to write your little article—” “Biography—” “Whatever. And now he has a written account out there in academia, painting him as the victim.” “He wants to give me his dying declaration,” I said, pouring the spaghetti into the strainer to rinse it. “He wants to give you his what?” “His dying declaration…that's what he called it. It's a statement that's true because you don't want to die with a lie on your lips.” “As opposed to dying with a murder under your belt?” she said. “You see the irony, don't you?” “It's not the same thing,” I said. I had no argument as to why it wasn't the same thing. I couldn't hack my way past her logic. Every turn presented another blocked path, so I signaled my defeat by carrying the noodles to the coffee table and dishing them onto the plates. Lila picked up the pan of marinara sauce and followed me. As she started to pour the sauce, she stood up and grinned like the Grinch on Christmas Eve. “Oh, do I have an idea,” she said. “I'm almost afraid to ask.” “A jury convicted him, right?” “Yeah.” “Which means he had a trial.” “I assume so,” I said. “You can look at his file from the trial. That'll tell you exactly what happened. It'll have all the evidence, not just his version.” “His file? Can I do that?” “My aunt's a paralegal at a law firm in St. Cloud. She'll know.” Lila pulled her cell phone from her pocket and scrolled through her contacts until she found her aunt's number. I handed Jeremy a paper towel to use as a napkin so that he could start eating, and then I listened to Lila's end of the conversation. “So the file belongs to the client not the lawyer?” she said. “How do I find that out?—Will they still have it?—Can you e-mail that to me?—Perfect. Thanks a bunch. I gotta run.—I will. Bye-bye.” Lila hung up her phone. “It's easy,” Lila said, turning to me. “His old attorney will have the file.” “It's been thirty years,” I said. “But it's a murder case, so my aunt said they should still have it.” I picked up the newspaper articles, paging through them until I came across the name of the attorney. “His name was John Peterson,” I said. “He was a public defender out of Minneapolis.” “There you go,” she said. “But how do we get it from the lawyer?” “That's the beauty,” she said. “The file doesn't belong to the lawyer. It belongs to Carl Iverson. It's Carl's file and the lawyer has to let him have it. My aunt's gonna e-mail me a form that he can sign requesting the file, and they have to give it to him or whoever he sends over to get it.” “So all I have to do is get Carl to sign this form?” “He'll have to sign it,” she said. “If he doesn't sign, then you know that he's full of crap. Either he signs it or he's nothing more than a lying, murdering bastard who wants to keep you in the dark about what he really did.” I'd seen my mom wake up in the morning with the remnants of her previous night's binge still smeared in her hair; I'd seen her stumble into the apartment cross-eyed drunk with her shoes in one hand and wadded-up undergarments in the other; but I'd never seen her look as pathetic as she did when she came shuffling into the Mower County Courthouse wearing her jail-orange jumpsuit with her wrists in handcuffs and shackles on her ankles. Three days of no makeup and no showering brought out the burlap in her skin. Her blonde hair with its dark-brown roots hung heavy with dandruff and greasy build-up. Her shoulders slumped forward as though the cuffs on her wrists weighed her down. I had dropped Jeremy off at Mom's apartment before heading to the courthouse to wait for her first appearance. She entered with three other people also dressed in orange. When she saw me she waved for me to come up to the wooden railing, her on one side, standing beside the attorney's table with its comfy chairs, and me in the gallery with its wooden church pews for seating. A bailiff held out a hand as I approached her, a signal to not get close enough to pass weapons or other such contraband to the people in orange. “You need to bail me out,” Mom said in a frantic whisper. Up close I could see that the stress of her incarceration had hung deep crescent bags of exhaustion under her bloodshot eyes. She looked as if she hadn't slept in days. “How much are you talking about,” I said. “The jailer said I'll probably need three thousand to bail out. Else I gotta stay in jail.” “Three thousand!” I said. “I need that money for school.” “I can't take jail, Joey.” My mother started to cry. “It's full of crazy people. They stay up all night yelling. I can't sleep. I'm going crazy, too. Don't make me go back there. Please, Joey.” I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. I felt sorry for her—I mean this was my mother, the woman who gave me life. But if I gave her three thousand dollars, I would run out of money midway through my next semester. My thoughts of staying in school were colliding with the vision of my mother in her most desperate hour. I was unable to speak. No matter what I said, it would be wrong. I was rescued from my dilemma when a couple of women entered the court through a door behind the judge's bench, and the bailiff called for everyone to rise. I took a deep breath, thankful for the interruption. The judge entered and instructed everyone to sit down, and the bailiff escorted my mother to a seat in the jury box to sit with the other folks in orange. As the clerk called what she referred to as the “in-custodies” up to the bench, I listened to the dialogue that went back and forth between the judge and the attorney, a female public defender handling all four defendants. It reminded me of a Catholic funeral mass I had attended when one of my high-school coaches died. The litany had been spoken by the priest and the parishioners so many times that the rote presentation seemed toneless to us outsiders. The judge said: “Is your name…? Do you live at…? Do you understand your rights? Counsel, does your client understand the charges?” “Yes, your honor, and we waive any further reading of the complaint.” “How do you wish to proceed?” “Your Honor, we waive the rule-eight hearing, ask that my client be released on his personal recognizance.” The judge would then set bail, giving each inmate the choice between paying a higher bail amount with no conditions or paying lower bail—or no bail at all—provided that they agree to abide by certain conditions set by the judge. When Mom took her turn before the judge, they went through the same back-and-forth, with the judge setting bail at $3,000, but then he continued with the second option. “Ms. Nelson you can pay the three thousand dollars, or you can be released on your personal promise to appear at all future hearings as well as the following conditions: keep in contact with your attorney, remain law abiding, no possession or consumption of alcohol, and be hooked up to an alcohol monitoring bracelet. Any use of alcohol will bring you right back to jail. Do you understand those conditions?” “Yes, your honor,” my mother said, looking absolutely Dickensian in her role as the pitiful soul. “That's all,” the judge said. Mom shuffled back to the line of people in orange, all of whom now stood up and started moving in chain-gang fashion toward the door that would lead them back to the jail. As she passed, Mom looked at me with a glare that would have been the envy of Medusa. “Come down to the jail and bail me out,” she whispered. “But mom, the judge just said—” “Don't argue with me,” she hissed as she left the court room. “And…she's back,” I muttered under my breath. I walked out of court, pausing on the sidewalk to ponder which way to turn, left to the jail and my mother or right to my car. The judge said she could leave; I heard him. All she had to do was not drink. A bad feeling crept through my veins, like poison from a snake bite. I wrestled with my decision, eventually turning left, overruling my urge to run. Entering the jail, I gave my driver's license to a lady behind bulletproof glass who directed me to a small room where another glass window separated me from the cubicle where they would bring my mother. A couple minutes later they brought my mother to the cubicle, now free of her handcuffs and shackles. She sat in a chair on the other side of the glass, picking up a black phone on the wall. I did the same thing, grimacing as I drew the phone up to my face, imagining the multitudes of unfortunates who had breathed into that receiver before me. It felt sticky. “Did you pay the bail?” “You don't need me to pay bail; you can get out on your own. The judge said so.” “He said I could get out if I did that monitor thing. I'm not doing no damn monitor.” “But you can get out for free; you just can't drink.” “I ain't doin’ no damn monitor!” she said. “You have enough money. You can help me out for once in your life. I can't take another minute in here.” “Mom, I barely have enough to make it through the semester. I can't—” “I'll pay you back for Christ sake.” Now we were getting into our own litany. When I turned sixteen, I got my first job changing oil at a garage in town. When I spent my first paycheck on clothes and a skateboard, Mom threw a fit so fierce that the upstairs neighbors called the landlord and the cops. After she settled down, she forced me to open a savings account; and, because a sixteen-year-old can't open an account without a parent, they put her name on it as well. For the next two years she borrowed money from that account whenever she ran light on the rent or her car needed fixing—always with the empty promise that she'd pay me back but never doing so. The day I turned eighteen, I opened my own account in my name alone. Without direct access to my money, she had to switch her tactic, moving from theft to blackmail because, after all, living in her house and eating her food entitled her to bleed my account of hundreds of dollars. So I started skimming a little off the top each week, hiding the money in a can under the insulation in the attic—my coffee-can college fund. Mom always suspected that I hid money, but she could never prove it, and she never found it. In her mind the few grand that I secreted away had grown to ten times what actually lay beneath the insulation. Add to that my student loans and the pittance I got in grant money, and in my mother's mind my cache had grown to a small fortune. “Can't we get a bail bondsman?” I asked. “Then you don't have to pay the full three thousand.” “Don't you think I thought of that? You think I'm stupid? I got no collateral. They won't talk to me without collateral.” Her words cut with an edge I knew well, her mean streak showing through as clear as the dark roots that lined the part in her hair. I decided to come back hard myself. “I can't bail you out, Mom. I can't. If I give you three thousand, I can't afford to go to college next semester. There's just no way to do it.” “Well then…” She leaned back in the plastic chair. “…you'll have to take care of Jeremy while I'm in here, cuz I'm not goin’ on no damned monitor.” And there it was: the final card in her hand, proving that she had the royal flush; she had beaten me. I could try bluffing and say that I would leave Jeremy in Austin, but that bluff was naked and my mother knew it. She stared at me with the conviction of a falling boulder, her eyes calm, level, my eyes twitching with anger. How could I take care of Jeremy? When I left him alone for a couple hours, he needed to be rescued by Lila. I had gone to college to get away from all this crap. Now here she was pulling me back, forcing me to choose between my college education and my brother. I wanted to reach through that reinforced glass and choke her. “I can't believe how selfish you are,” she said. “I told you I'd pay you back.” I pulled my checkbook out of my back pocket and started writing the check as a current of rage passed through me. I smiled slightly as I imagined filling out the entire check then holding it up to the thick glass that separated us and tearing it to shreds. But deep down, I knew the truth: I needed her—not as a son needs a mother, but as a sinner needs the devil. I needed a scapegoat, someone I could point at and say, “You're responsible for this, not me.” I needed to feed my delusion that I was not my brother's keeper, that such a duty fell to our mother. I needed a place where I could store Jeremy's life, his care, a box that I could shut tight and tell myself it was where Jeremy belonged—even if I knew, deep down, that it was all a lie. I needed that thin plausibility to ease my conscience. That would be the only way I could leave Austin. I tore the check out and showed it to my mother. She smiled an empty smile and said, “Thank you, sweetie. You're an angel.” I stopped at Hillview on my drive back from Austin, hoping to make some progress on my paper and have Carl sign the release that would allow me to get his file from the public defender's office. I had hoped that a visit with him might distract me from the burn in my chest left there by my mother. I trudged into Hillview, my guilty conscience weighing me down. I felt as if some vacuous force, some inexplicable gravity was sucking me backward, pulling me to the south, to Austin. I thought that running away to college would get me out of my mother's reach, but I was still too close, too easily plucked from the low branch I had chosen. What would it take to wash my hands of my mother—my brother? What price would I need to pay to leave them behind? At least for today, I thought to myself, the price was three thousand dollars in bail money. Janet smiled at me from her station behind the reception desk as I passed. I walked to the lounge where residents, most of whom were in wheelchairs, gathered in small clusters like chess pieces in a half-finished game. Carl sat in his usual place, his wheelchair facing the picture window, looking out at the laundry hanging from the balcony rails of the apartment building outside. I stopped short of Carl when I noticed that he had a visitor, a man who looked to be in his mid-sixties, with short, peppery hair that spiked and leaned toward the back of his head like pond reeds tipping in a breeze. The man's hand rested on Carl's forearm, and he, too, faced toward the window as they talked. I walked back to the reception desk, found Janet hovering over some paperwork, and asked her about the visitor. “Oh, that's Virgil,” she said. “I can't remember his last name. He's the only visitor Carl's ever had…except for you.” “Are they related?” “I don't think so. I think they're just friends. Maybe they met in prison. Maybe they were…you know…special friends.” “I didn't get the impression Carl swung that way,” I said. “He was in prison for thirty years. That might've been the only swinging he could get.” Janet put her hand to her lips and giggled at the guilty pleasure that had escaped them. I smiled back at her, more in an attempt to stay on her good side than to join in her joke. “Do you think I should go back? I don't want to disturb them if they're…” I trailed off, not sure how to finish the sentence. “I say go for it,” she said. “If you're interrupting, he'll let you know. Carl may be dropping weight like a snowman in a skillet, but don't underestimate him.” I made my way back to Carl, who was now chuckling over something the other man had said. Carl had never smiled in my presence, and the lift it brought to his face shed years. He saw me coming and his smile withered as if he were a child being brought in from play. “There's the pup now,” he sighed. The man with Carl looked up at me with an odd indifference, holding out his hand for me to shake. “Hey, Pup,” he said. “Some folks call me Joe,” I said. “That's right,” Carl said, “Joe the writer.” “Actually, it's Joe the college student,” I said. “I'm not a writer, it's just an assignment.” “I'm Virgil…the painter,” the man said. “Painter, as in Dutch master or Dutch Boy,” I asked. “Mostly Dutch Boy,” he said. “I paint houses and such. But I do a little canvas work for my own enjoyment.” “Don't let him buffalo you, Joe,” Carl said. “Virgil here's a regular Jackson Pollock. Too bad that's when he's trying to paint houses.” Carl and Virgil laughed at that, but I didn't understand the reference. Later I would look up Jackson Pollock on the Internet to see his paintings, which resembled something a toddler could have concocted with a plate full of spaghetti and a temper tantrum; I got the joke. “Mr. Iverson—” I started. “Call me Carl,” he said. “Carl, I was hoping I could get you to sign this for me.” “What's that?” “It's a release. It'll let me see your trial file,” I said hesitantly. “I need two collateral sources for the biography.” “Ah, young pup here doesn't believe I'll be truthful with him,” Carl said to Virgil. “He thinks I'll hide the monster that lurks inside of me.” Virgil shook his head and looked away. “I don't mean any disrespect,” I said. “It's just that a friend of mine…well, not so much a friend as a neighbor, thought I could get a better understanding of you if I took a look at the trial stuff.” “Your friend couldn't be more wrong,” Virgil said. “If you really want to know the truth about Carl here, the trial's the last place you'd look.” “It's okay, Virg,” Carl said. “I don't mind. Hell, that old file's been collecting dust for thirty years now. Probably doesn't exist anymore.” Virgil leaned forward over his knees then stood up slowly, using his arms to raise himself off the chair, like a man far older than he appeared to be. Brushing the wrinkles out of his slacks, he grabbed the worn handle of a hickory cane that leaned against the wall near him. “I'm gonna grab some coffee. Want some?” I didn't answer, as I figured he wasn't talking to me. Carl pursed his lips, shook his head no, and Virgil walked away with a practiced but unnatural gait, his right leg bending and snapping straight with mechanical rigidity. I looked closer at the rustle of his pant leg just above his shoe and saw the unmistakable glint of metal where his ankle should have been. I turned back to Carl, feeling as if I owed him an apology, as if I had called him a liar by wanting to check his story against the file—which is exactly what I planned to do. “I'm sorry, Mr. Iver—I mean, Carl. I wasn't trying to insult you.” “That's alright, Joe,” Carl said. “Virgil can be a bit overprotective of me. We've known each other a long time.” “Are you related?” I asked. Carl thought for a moment and then said, “We're brothers…by fire, not by blood.” His eyes turned back to the window, his gaze lost in a memory that robbed his cheeks of their color. After a moment he said, “Got a pen?” “A pen?” “To sign that paper you brought.” I handed Carl the form and a pen and watched him sign the release, his knuckles poking through his skin, his forearms so slight that I could see the pop and contraction in each muscle as he signed. He handed me back the paper, and I folded it, sliding it into my pocket. “One thing though,” he said, looking down at his fingers, which now rested on his lap. He spoke to me without raising his eyes. “When you read that file, you're gonna see a lot of things in there, terrible things that'll make you want to hate me. It sure made the jury hate me. Just keep in mind, that's not my whole story.” “I know,” I said. “No you don't,” he said softly, turning his attention back to the colorful towels flapping on the apartment balcony across the way. “You don't know me. Not yet.” I waited for him to finish his thought, but he just stared out the window. I left Carl to his memory, heading to the front door, where Virgil stood waiting for me. He held out his hand, a business card pressed between two of his fingers. I took the card. Virgil Gray Painting—Commercial and Residential. “If you want to know about Carl Iverson,” he said, “you need to talk to me.” “Were you in prison with him?” Virgil seemed to be on the cusp of aggravation, speaking in a tone that I had heard often in the bars when guys talked about their bad jobs or nagging wives—irritated yet resigned to the circumstances. “He didn't kill that girl. And what you're doing is bullshit.” “What?” I said. “I know what you're doing,” he said. “What am I doing?” “I'm telling you: he didn't kill that girl.” “You were there?” “No. I wasn't there. Don't be a smartass.” It was my turn to be irritated. I had just met this man, and he felt that he knew me well enough to insult me. “The way I see it,” I said, “only two people know what happened: Crystal Hagen and the person who killed her. Anybody else is just saying what they want to believe.” “I didn't have to be there to know he didn't kill that girl.” “Ted Bundy had people who believed in him, too.” I didn't know if that was true, but I thought it sounded good. “He didn't do it,” Vigil snapped. He pointed to the phone number on his card. “You call me. We'll talk.” I wasted the better part of a week and eight phone calls trying to pry Carl Iverson's criminal file from the public defender's office. Initially, the receptionist struggled to understand my request, and when she finally did understand, she gave me her opinion that the file had probably been destroyed years ago. “Regardless,” she said, “I have no authority to hand over a murder file to any Tom, Dick, or Harry who asks for it.” After that she simply passed my calls on to the voice mail of Berthel Collins, chief public defender, where my messages seemed to fall into an abyss. On the fifth day of no return call from Collins, I skipped my afternoon classes and caught a bus to downtown Minneapolis. When the receptionist told me that the chief was busy, I told her I would wait and took a seat close enough to her desk that I could hear her as she whispered into her telephone. I read magazines to kill time until she finally whispered to someone, telling them that I was lingering. Fifteen minutes later she broke down and ushered me into the office of Berthel Collins, a pale-skinned man with a mop of uncombed hair crisscrossing his head and a nose as big around as a ripe persimmon. Berthel smiled at me and shook my hand as if he wanted to sell me a car. “So you're the kid that's stalking me,” he said. “I take it you got my phone messages,” I said. He looked flustered for a second then motioned me to a chair. “You gotta understand,” he said, “we don't get calls all that often asking us to dig up a thirty-year-old file. We store all that stuff off-site.” “But you do still have the file?” “Oh, yeah,” he said, “We have it. We're mandated to keep murder files indefinitely. I had a runner bring it in yesterday. That's it right there.” He pointed to a banker's box sitting against the wall behind me. I hadn't expected that much stuff. I thought I'd have maybe a binder full of paper, not a box. I calculated the number of hours it would take to read the file and watched as those numbers filled a bucket in my head. I then factored in the homework from my other classes and the tests and the lab projects. I suddenly felt dizzy. How would I ever get this all done. I began to regret my decision to get the file; this was supposed to be a simple English assignment. I reached into my pocket, pulled out the release, and handed it to Mr. Collins. “So, I can take that with me then?” I asked. “Not all of it,” he said. “Not yet. We have some files ready to go. We have to cull out the notes and work product before we let it go out of this office.” “How long's that gonna take?” I shifted in my chair, trying to find a position where the cushion springs didn't grind into my butt cheeks. “Like I said, we have a couple files ready today.” He smiled. “We have an intern working on it. The rest of the file should be ready fairly soon, maybe a week or two.” Collins leaned back in his cushy Georgian wingback chair, which I noticed sat a good four inches higher than any other chair in the room and seemed far more comfortable. I shifted again in my seat, trying to keep blood flowing to my legs. “What's your interest in this case anyway?” he asked, crossing one leg over the other. “Let's just say I have an interest in the life and times of Carl Iverson.” “But why?” Collins asked with genuine sincerity. “There wasn't much to this case.” “You know the case?” “Yeah, I know it,” he said. “I clerked here that year; it was my third year of law school. Carl's lead attorney, John Peterson, brought me on to do his legal research.” Collins paused, looking past me to a blank spot on his wall, recollecting the details of Carl's case. “I met Carl in jail a few times and sat in the gallery during his trial. It was my first murder case. Yeah, I remember him. I remember the girl, too, Crystal something or other.” “Hagen.” “That's right, Crystal Hagen.” Collins's face grew cold. “I still see the pictures—the ones we had in the trial. I'd never seen crime-scene photos before. That was my first time. It's not peaceful like you see on TV with their eyes closed, looking like they simply fell asleep. No, it's not like that at all. Her photos were violent and gut-wrenching. To this day, I can still see her.” He shuddered slightly, then continued. “He could've gotten a deal you know.” “A deal?” “A plea bargain. They offered him second-degree murder. He could have been eligible for parole in eight years. He turned it down. The man's facing a mandatory life sentence if he's convicted of first-degree, and he turns down a second-degree plea offer.” “That brings up a question that's been bugging me,” I said. “If he gets sentenced to life in prison, how can he ever get paroled?” Collins leaned forward and rubbed the underside of his chin, scratching a day's worth of scruff. “Life doesn't necessarily mean until you die,” he said. “Back in 1980 life in prison meant that you had to do seventeen years before being eligible for parole. Later, they changed that to thirty years. They changed it again so that a murder committed during a kidnapping or a rape gets life without possibility of parole. Technically, they convicted Iverson under the old statute, so he was eligible for parole after seventeen years, but forget that. Once the legislature made it clear that they want murdering rapists locked up for good, Iverson's prospects for parole pretty much evaporated. To tell you the truth, when I got your call, I looked up Iverson's record on the Department of Corrections website and about fell on the floor when I saw that he was out.” “He's dying of cancer,” I said. “Well that explains it,” he said. “Prison hospice can be problematic.” The corners of his mouth tipped downward, his head nodding in understanding. “What did Carl say happened on the night Crystal Hagen died?” “Nothing,” he said. “He said he didn't do it—said he drank that afternoon until he passed out and couldn't remember a thing. Honestly, he didn't do much to help with his defense, just kind of sat there and watched the trial like he was watching television.” “Did you believe him when he said he was innocent?” “It didn't matter what I believed. I was just a law clerk. We put up a good fight. We said that Crystal's boyfriend did it. That was our theory. He was the last to see her alive. He had all the opportunity in the world, and it was a crime of passion. He wanted to screw her—she said no—things got out of hand. It was a decent theory: a silk purse from a sow's ear so to speak. But in the end, the jury didn't believe it, and that's all that matters.” “There are some people who think he's innocent,” I said, thinking of Virgil. Collins lowered his eyes and shook his head, dismissing my comment as if I were some gullible child. “If he didn't do it, then he's one sorry bastard. She was found dead in his shed,” he said. “They found one of her fingernails on the steps to his back porch.” “He tore her fingernail off?” I said, shuddering at the thought. “It was a fake fingernail, one of those acrylic things. She had her nails done up for her first homecoming dance a couple weeks earlier. The prosecutor argued that it broke off when he was dragging her dead body to his shed.” “Do you believe Carl killed her?” “There was no one else around,” Collins said. “Iverson simply said he didn't do it, but at the same time, he said he was too drunk to remember anything from that night. It's Occam's razor.” “Occam's razor?” “It's a principle that says that all things being equal, the simplest conclusion is usually the correct one. Crimes like murder are rarely tricky, and most murderers are far from clever. Have you met him yet?” “Who? Carl? Yeah, he signed the release.” “Oh, yeah,” Collins furrowed his eyebrows, displeased at missing that obvious conclusion. “What did he tell you? Did he tell you he's innocent?” “We haven't talked about the case yet. I'm easing up to that.” “I expect he will.” Collins ran his thick hands through his hair, scratching loose some dandruff that fell to his shoulders. “And when he does, you'll want to believe him.” “But you don't believe him.” “Maybe I did—back then. I'm not sure. It's hard to tell with guys like Carl.” “Guys like Carl?” “He's a pedophile, and nobody can tell a lie like a pedophile. They're the best. There's no con artist alive who can lie like a pedophile.” I looked at Collins with a blank expression that urged him to explain. “Pedophiles are the monsters walking among us. Murderers, burglars, thieves, drug dealers, they can always justify what they've done. Most crimes occur because of simple emotions like greed or rage or jealousy. People can understand those emotions. We don't condone it, but we understand it. Everybody's felt those feelings at one time or another. Hell, most people, if they're honest, would admit to planning a crime in their head, committing the perfect murder, getting away with it. Every person on a jury has felt angry or jealous. They understand the base emotion behind a crime like murder, and they'll punish a guy for not controlling that emotion.” “I suppose so,” I said. “Now think of a pedophile. He has a passion to have sex with children. Who's gonna understand that? You can't justify what you've done. There's no explanation for them; they're monsters, and they know it. Yet they can't admit it, not even to themselves. So they hide the truth, burying it so deep inside that they begin to believe their own lies.” “But some can be innocent, right?” I asked. “I had a guy once…” Collins leaned forward, plopping his elbows on his desk. “He was accused of perping on his ten-year-old kid. This guy had me convinced that his ex-wife planted the story in the kid's head. I mean I believed him completely. I'd prepared a scathing cross-examination to tear that kid up. Then, about a month before trial, the computer forensics came back. The prosecutor called me to his office to show me a video that this dumbass made of the whole thing, exactly what his kid said happened. When I showed the video to my client he cried his eyes out, bawled like a frigging baby, not because he raped his kid and got caught, but because he swore it wasn't him. The prosecutor had the son-of-a-bitch on tape, his face, his voice, his tattoos, and he wanted me to believe it was some lookalike.” “So you assume all your clients charged with pedophilia are lying?” “No, not all.” “Did you assume Carl was lying?” Collins paused to give my question some thought. “I wanted to believe Iverson at first. I suppose I wasn't as jaded back then as I am now. But the evidence said he killed that girl. The jury saw it, and that's why Iverson went to prison.” “Is it true what they say about pedophiles in prison?” I asked. “That they get beat up and stuff?” Collins pursed his lips and nodded. “Yeah, it's true. Prison has its own food chain. My drunk-driver clients will ask ‘why are they picking on me? It's not like I robbed somebody.’ The thieves and the burglars say ‘it's not like I killed somebody.’ The murderers will say ‘at least I'm not a pedophile; it's not like I raped a child.’ Guys like Iverson have nowhere to go. There's no one worse than them, and that puts ’em on the bottom of that food chain. To make things worse, he did his time at Stillwater Prison. That's about as bad as it gets.” I had given up trying to get comfortable in the piece-of-crap chair, realizing that the chair was probably uncomfortable by design—a way to encourage short office visits. I stood up and rubbed the back of my thighs. Collins also stood and walked around the desk. He picked two files out of the box and handed them to me. One was tagged jury selection and the other was labeled sentencing. “These are ready to go,” he said. “I guess I can let you have the trial transcripts, too.” “Trial transcripts?” “Yeah, first-degree-murder cases get an automatic appeal. The court reporter prepares a transcript of the trial, everything that was said, word for word. They'll have copies of that at the Supreme Court, so you can have our copy today.” Collins walked to the box and pulled out six softbound volumes, stacking them one-by-one in my arms, creating a pile of paper well over a foot thick. “That'll keep you busy for a while.” I looked at the books and files in my arms, feeling their weight, as Mr. Collins ushered me out. I turned at the door. “What am I going to find in these books?” I asked. Collins sighed, rubbed his chin again, and shrugged. “Probably nothing you don't already know.” On my bus ride home, I thumbed through the six volumes of transcripts and cursed under my breath. I had managed to create more reading for this one assignment than I had in all my other classes combined. It was too late to drop the class without screwing my GPA. My interview notes and opening chapter for Iverson's biography were due soon—this on top of all the other homework I had to do—and I could see no way to get through all this material in time. After the long trek from the bus stop to my apartment, the transcripts in my backpack seemed as heavy as stone tablets. I pulled out my keys and started to unlock my door, but paused when I heard the silk of Spanish guitar music coming from Lila's apartment. The transcripts gave me an excuse to stop in and say hi. They were, after all, her contribution to this quixotic project. Besides, I really wanted to see her again. There was something about her leave-me-the-fuck-alone attitude that hooked me. Lila answered her door, barefoot, wearing an oversized Twins jersey and shorts that barely showed below the tails of the shirt. I couldn't stop my eyes from going straight to her legs, just a quick glance, but enough that she noticed. She looked at me and raised an eyebrow. No “hello.” No “what's up.” Just a single raised eyebrow. That flustered the hell out of me. “I…uh…went to the attorney's office today,” I stammered. “I have the transcripts from the trial.” I reached into the backpack and showed her proof of my deed. She remained planted in her doorway, looking up at me, not inviting me in or responding beyond the raised eyebrow. Instead, she studied me as if to size up my intrusion, shrugged, and walked into her apartment, letting the door creak open behind her. I followed her into her apartment, which smelled faintly of baby powder and vanilla. “Have you read them yet?” she asked. “I just got ’em.” I dropped the first volume onto her table, letting it slam down to show its heft. “I have no idea where to begin reading these things.” “Start with the opening statement,” she said. “The what?” “The opening statement.” “That should probably be near the beginning, right?” I asked, grinning. She picked up one of the transcripts and began flipping pages. “How do you know about opening statements and stuff? Are you pre-law?” “Maybe,” she said, in a matter-of-fact tone. “I was in mock trial in high school. The attorney who coached us said that the opening statement should tell the story of the case—tell it like you're sitting around the living room with friends.” “You were in mock trial?” “Yeah,” she muttered, licking her fingers and flipping more pages. “If all goes well, I wouldn't mind going to law school someday.” “I haven't locked into a major yet, but I'm thinking journalism. It's just that—” “Here it is.” She stood up, creasing the pages back so she could hold the transcript in one hand. “You be the jury. Sit on the couch, and I'll be the prosecutor.” I sat in the middle of her couch, spreading my arms out to each side, placing them on the backrest. She stood in front of me and read a few lines to herself to get into character. Then she drew her chest up, pulled her shoulders back, and started to speak. And as she spoke, I watched the pixie in her disappear, and from its shadow stepped a woman with the confidence and poise to command a jury's attention. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the evidence in this case will show that on October 29, 1980, the defendant,” Lila waved her arm with the grace of a game-show model, pointing toward an empty chair in the corner, “Carl Iverson, raped and murdered a fourteen-year-old girl by the name of Crystal Marie Hagen.” Lila paced slowly in front of me as she read, looking up from her script as often as she could, making eye contact with me as if I were an actual juror. “Last year, Crystal Hagen was a happy, vivacious, fourteen-year-old girl, a beautiful child, loved by her family and excited to be on the cheerleading squad at Edison High School.” Lila paused and lowered her voice for effect. “But, ladies and gentlemen, you will learn that not everything was wonderful in Crystal Hagen's life. You will see excerpts from her diary where she writes about a man named Carl Iverson, a man who lived in the house next door to Crystal Hagen. You will see, in her diary, where she calls him ‘the pervert next door.’ She wrote that Carl Iverson would stare at her from his window and watch her as she practiced her cheerleading routines in her back yard. “From that diary, she will tell you about an incident when she was with her boyfriend, a young man she met in her high-school typing class, a boy named Andy Fisher. One night she and Andy were parked in the alley that passed behind both Crystal's house and Carl Iverson's house. They were parked at the end of the alley, away from prying eyes, making out, as kids will do. That's when the defendant, Carl Iverson, walked up to the car like a monster in a slasher movie and glared into the window at them. He saw Crystal and Andy…well let's just say that they were experimenting…sexually. Just a couple of kids goofing around. And Carl Iverson saw them; he watched them. “Now that may not seem all that bad, but for Crystal Hagen, it was like the end of the world. You see, Crystal had a stepfather, a devoutly religious man named Douglas Lockwood. He'll be testifying in this trial. Mr. Lockwood didn't approve of Crystal being a cheerleader. He didn't like the idea of her dating at the age of fourteen. So he set out some rules for Crystal—rules to protect the family's reputation and Crystal's modesty. He told her that if she did not live up to those rules, she would not be allowed to continue as a cheerleader. And if the infraction were serious enough, he would send her to a private, religious school. “Ladies and Gentlemen, what she did in that car that night with Andy Fisher broke those rules. “The evidence will show that Carl Iverson used what he saw in the alley that night to blackmail Crystal, to get her to…well…do his bidding. You see, shortly after that night in the alley, Crystal wrote in her diary that a man was forcing her to do stuff she didn't want to do—sexual stuff. He told her that if she did not do what he wanted, he was going to expose her secret. Now, Crystal doesn't expressly say that Carl Iverson was the man threatening her, but when you see her words in that diary, it'll leave no doubt in your mind who she's writing about.” Lila slowed the cadence of her speech, lowering her voice to little more than a whisper, giving it a dramatic effect. My arms moved from the back of the couch to my knees as I leaned in to hear her. “The afternoon of her murder, Andy Fisher drove her home after school. They kissed goodbye, and Andy left. Crystal was all alone in an empty house next door to Carl Iverson. After Andrew drove away, we know that Crystal ended up in Carl Iverson's house. Maybe she went there to confront him. You see, Crystal Hagen met with her school counselor that afternoon and learned that what Carl Iverson was doing to her would send him to prison. Or maybe she went there at the point of a gun because on the morning of Crystal's death, we know that Carl Iverson bought an army-surplus handgun. We're not sure of exactly how she came to be in Iverson's house, but we know that she was there because of evidence that I'll get to in a minute. And once she was there, we know that things went terribly wrong for Crystal Hagen. She had a plan to turn the tables on Iverson—send him to prison if he didn't stop the threats and the abuse. Carl Iverson, of course, had other plans.” Lila stopped pacing, no longer pretending to be the prosecutor. She sat down on the couch beside me, her eyes fixed on the transcript. When she continued, she spoke as if she were struck by some profound sadness. “Carl Iverson raped Crystal Hagen. And when he was finished with her—after he took everything else he could take from her—he took her life. He strangled her using an electrical cord. Ladies and gentlemen, it takes a long time to strangle a person to death. It is a slow, horrible way to die. Carl Iverson had to wrap that cord around Crystal Hagen's throat and pull it tight and hold it there for at least two minutes. And as every second passed, he had the ability to change his mind. Instead he continued to pull on that cord, keeping it tight around her throat until he was sure that she was not just unconscious, but dead.” Lila stopped reading and looked at me with a pained expression, as though I were somehow an extension of Carl, as though some seed of his monstrous deed lived in me. I shook my head. She went back to reading. “Crystal fought for her life. We know this because one of her false fingernails broke off during the struggle. That fingernail was found on the steps leading out of Carl Iverson's house. It fell there as Carl Iverson dragged her body to his tool shed. He dumped her body onto the floor of that shed as if she were just a piece of garbage. Then, to try and hide his crime from the world, he set his shed on fire, believing that the heat and the flames would destroy the evidence of what he had done. After he touched a match to that old shed, he went back in his house and drank from a bottle of whiskey until he passed out. “By the time the fire trucks got there, the shed was completely engulfed in flames. After police found Crystal's body in that smoldering rubble, they knocked on Mr. Iverson's door, but he didn't answer. They assumed nobody was home. Detective Tracer returned in the morning with a search warrant and found Iverson still passed out on the couch, an empty whiskey bottle in one hand and the 45-caliber pistol near the other. “Ladies and gentlemen, you're going to see pictures that will turn your stomach. I apologize in advance for what you're going to see, but it's necessary so that you understand what happened to Crystal Hagen. The fire burned the bottom half of her body so badly that some parts of her were barely recognizable. The tin from the roof of the shed fell on her, covering her upper torso, protecting that part of her from the worst of the fire. And there, tucked under her chest, you'll see her left hand—unburned. And on the left-hand you'll see the acrylic fingernails that she was so proud of, the nails she had done up for her first homecoming dance with Andy Fisher. You'll see that one of the nails is missing, the nail that broke off during her fight with Carl Iverson. “Ladies and gentlemen, once you've seen all the evidence in this case, I'll be coming back here to speak with you again, and I'll be asking you to return a verdict of guilty for murder in the first degree against Carl Albert Iverson.” Lila put the transcript on her lap, letting the echo of her words fall silent. “What a sick bastard,” she said. “I can't believe you can sit with this guy and not want to kill him. They should've never let him out of prison. He should've rotted away in the darkest, dankest cell they have.” I leaned slightly toward her, imitating her posture and resting one of my hands on the cushion next to her leg. If I had spread my fingers I could have touched her. That thought erased all others in my head, but she took no notice. “What's it like…talking to him?” she asked. “He's an old man,” I said. “He's sick and weak and thin as a whip. It's hard to see him in that stuff you read.” “When you write about him, make sure you tell the whole story. Don't just write about the weak old man dying of cancer. Tell them about the drunken degenerate who burned a fourteen-year-old girl.” “I made a promise to write the truth,” I said. “And I will.” The month of October flew by with the speed and tumult of a falling, mountain river. One of Molly's bartenders had to quit because the woman's husband caught her flirting for better tips. Molly had asked me to fill in until she found a replacement. I couldn't refuse because I needed to make up for the three thousand dollars I wasted on my mom's bail. So, for most of the month I worked Tuesday through Thursday nights behind the bar and weekend nights at the door. On top of that I had midterms in my economics and my sociology classes. I fell into the habit of reading only the highlighted lines of my textbooks—used books whose previous owners hopefully had an eye for what was test-worthy. I found a document in Carl's sentencing file that turned out to be a godsend. It was a report that gave a thorough synopsis of Carl Iverson's life growing up in South St. Paul: his family, his petty delinquencies, his hobbies, his education. It touched briefly upon his military service, mentioning that Carl had been honorably discharged from the army after serving in Vietnam, having been awarded two Purple Hearts and a Silver Star. I made a note to myself to explore Carl's military service in more depth. I visited Carl twice in October, just before my notes and opening chapter were due. I managed to finish the first chapter by blending information from the report with the details from my notes—sprinkled liberally with my own creative license. After I turned the assignment in to my instructor, I did not go back to Hillview until after Halloween, a holiday I had grown to despise. I dressed up as a bouncer for Halloween, just as I had for every Halloween since I turned eighteen, and worked the door at Molly's. I broke up only one fight that night, when Superman grabbed the ass of Raggedy Ann—if Raggedy Ann had been a stripper, that is—causing her boyfriend, Raggedy Andy, to beat the man of steel to the floor. I rushed Raggedy Andy out the door. Raggedy Ann followed us out, flashing me a coy smile when she passed, as though the fight had been her plan all along, the kind of validation she had hoped for when she tucked her ample, fleshy parts into that tiny costume. I hated Halloween. Cold weather arrived in earnest on the first day of November, the day I went back to Hillview. The temperature barely crested thirty degrees; dead leaves gathered in the crooks of buildings and around dumpsters where breezes curled. I called that morning to make sure that Carl would be up for a visit, not knowing exactly how pancreatic cancer progresses. I found Carl in his usual spot, staring out the window. He had an afghan covering his lap, thick wool socks under his cotton slippers, and long johns under his blue robe. He was expecting me and had asked one of the nurses to move a comfortable chair next to his wheelchair. Out of reflex, or habit, I shook his hand as I sat down, his thin fingers sliding from my palm, cold, limp, like dead seaweed. “Thought you forgot about me,” he said. “It's been a busy semester,” I answered, pulling out my small digital recorder. “You don't mind do you? It's easier than taking notes.” “This is your show. I'm just killing time.” He chuckled at his own gallows humor. I turned the recorder on and asked Carl to pick up where he'd left off in our last meeting. As Carl told his stories, I found myself breaking them apart into bits of information, spreading them around like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle on the table. Then I tried to reassemble the pieces in a way that would explain the birth and life of a monster. What was it in his childhood, in his adolescence, that planted the seed that would one day come to define him as Carl the murderer? There had to be a secret. Something had to have happened to Carl Iverson to make him different from the rest of the human race, different from me. He had given me that sermon about honesty the day we first met, and now he was telling me his Leave-It-To-Beaver upbringing, all the while hiding that dark tangent that shifted his world onto an axis the rest of us could never understand. I wanted to cry bullshit. Instead, I nodded and prodded and listened as he painted his world egg-shell white. It was during the second hour of our interview when he said, “And that's when the US government invited me to go to Vietnam.” Finally, I thought, an event that might explain the monster. Carl had grown weak from all the talking he was doing, so he put his hands on his lap, leaned back in his wheelchair, and closed his eyes. I watched the scar on his neck pulse as blood passed through his carotid artery. “Is Vietnam where you got that scar?” I asked. He touched the line on his neck. “No, I got that in prison. This psychopathic Aryan Brother tried to cut my head off.” “Aryan Brother? Aren't those the white guys?” “They are,” he said. “I thought the different races stuck up for each other in prison.” “Not when you're a convicted child molester—which I was. The different gangs have dibs on the sex offenders of their own race.” “Dibs?” “Sex offenders are the runts of the prison litter. If you get shit on, you take it out on the runt; if you need to earn a tear tattoo, to show you're a tough guy, why not kill the runt; if you need a bitch…well, you get the picture.” I cringed inside but kept my composure so that he wouldn't see my revulsion. “One day, about three months after I got to Stillwater, I was on my way to dinner. That's the most dangerous time of the day. They send two hundred guys at a time to the mess hall. In that crowd, the shivs come out. There's no keeping track of who did what to whom.” “Isn't there a place where you can get out of the general population? Oh…what's it called…protective custody or something like that?” “Segregation,” he said. “Seg for short. Yeah, I could have asked for seg, but I didn't.” “Why not?” “Because at that point in my life, living didn't matter all that much to me.” “So how'd you get the scar?” “There was this big gorilla named Slattery who tried to get me to…well, let's just say he was lonely for some companionship. Said he'd cut my throat if I didn't give him what he wanted. I told him he'd be doing me a favor.” “So he cut your throat?” “No. That's not how it works. He was a boss, not a worker. He had some punk do it, some kid looking to make a name for himself. I didn't even see it happen. I felt a warm liquid running down my shoulder. I put my hand up to my throat and felt the blood spurting out of my neck. Nearly died. After they patched me up, they forced me into seg. Stayed there most of the rest of my thirty years: noisy, surrounded by concrete almost every hour of the day. It could drive a man crazy.” “Is prison where you met your ‘brother’?” I asked. “My brother?” “Virgil—wasn't that his name?” “Ah, Virgil.” He took in a deep breath, as if to sigh, and a wave of pain jolted him upright in his chair. The blood drained from his fingers as he gripped the sides of his wheelchair. “I think…” he said, tapping out a series of short breaths, as if he were giving birth, waiting for the pain to pass. “That story's…gonna have to wait…for another day.” He waved a nurse over, asking her for his medication. “I'm afraid…I'm going to be asleep…in a very short while.” I thanked him for his time, picked up my backpack and recorder, and headed out. I stopped briefly at the front desk to fish my wallet out of my pocket and find the business card Virgil Gray had given to me. The time had come for me to hear from the one person in the world who believed Carl to be innocent, the sole voice arguing against my conclusion that Carl Iverson had been justly punished. As I dug out the card, Janet leaned across the reception desk and whispered, “He didn't take his pain medication today. He wanted to be clear headed when you came. He'll probably be out of it all day tomorrow.” I didn't respond to Janet. I didn't know what to say. It had been a couple weeks since I got the call from the public defender's office telling me that the rest of Carl's file had been readied. I felt bad about that. I felt bad because I still hadn't picked it up. Had Virgil Gray not suggested that we meet downtown, that box would likely have stayed at the public defender's office. My assignment was time consuming enough without having to read a stack of files up to my knee. But when I called Virgil, he suggested that we meet in a small courtyard outside the government center in downtown Minneapolis. And that is where I found him, sitting on a granite bench at the edge of the courtyard, his cane resting against his good leg. He watched me as I crossed the length of the square, not waving or otherwise acknowledging me. “Mr. Gray.” I held out my hand; he shook it with the enthusiasm you might show for leftover broccoli. “I appreciate you meeting with me.” “Why are you writing his story?” Virgil asked bluntly. He didn't look at me when he spoke, his eyes focused on the fountain in the center of the courtyard. “Excuse me?” I said. “Why are you writing his story? What's in it for you?” I sat on the bench beside Mr. Gray. “I told you. It's an English assignment.” “Yes, but why him? Why Carl? You could write about anyone. Hell, you could make up a story. Your teacher would never know the difference.” “Why not Carl?” I asked. “He has an interesting story to tell.” “You're just using him,” Virgil said. “Carl's been screwed over more than any man deserves. I don't think it's right, what you're doing.” “Well, if he has been screwed, like you say, wouldn't it be good to have someone tell that story?” “So that's what you're doing?” he said, his words dripping with sarcasm. “That's the story you're telling? You're writing about how Carl got screwed, about how he was convicted for a crime he didn't commit?” “I haven't written any story yet. I'm still trying to figure out what the story is about. That's why I came to see you. You said he's innocent.” “He is innocent.” “Well, so far you're the only one saying that. The jury, the prosecutor, hell, I think his own attorney, believed he was guilty.” “That don't make it true.” “You didn't stand up for Carl at his trial. You didn't testify.” “They wouldn't let me testify. I wanted to testify, but they wouldn't let me.” “Who wouldn't they let you testify?” Virgil looked up at a sky the color of fireplace ash. The trees around the courtyard had stripped down to their winter skeletons, and a cold wind swept across the cobblestone and up the back of my neck. “His attorneys,” Virgil said, “they wouldn't let me tell the jury about him. They told me that if I testified, it would be character evidence. I told ’em damn straight it'd be character evidence. They need to know the real Carl, not that pile of lies the prosecutor was shoveling. They said if I talked about Carl's character, the prosecutor could also talk about Carl's character, about how he drank all day, couldn't keep a job, all that bullshit.” “So, what would you have said if you'd testified?” Virgil turned, looking me in the eye, sizing me up one more time, his cold, gray irises reflecting the gathering clouds. “I met Carl Iverson in Vietnam in 1967. We were dumb kids fresh out of boot camp. Did a tour in the jungle with him—doing things, seeing things that you just can't explain to people who weren't there.” “And in that tour you came to know him well enough to say, without a doubt, that he didn't kill Crystal Hagen? Was he some kind of pacifist?” Virgil narrowed his gaze as if he were getting ready to punch me in the face. “No,” he said. “Carl Iverson was no pacifist.” “So he killed people in Vietnam.” “Yeah, he killed people. He killed plenty of people.” “I can see why the defense attorney didn't want you testifying.” “It was a war. You kill people in war.” “I still don't understand how telling the jury about Carl killing people in a war could've helped. I would think that if I had been in a war and had killed—what was it you said…plenty of people—that killing would come easier to me.” “There's a lot you don't understand.” “Then make me understand,” I said, getting frustrated. “That's why I'm here.” Virgil thought for a moment and then reached down, his hands pinching the fabric of his khaki pants near his right knee, slid his trousers up, and exposed the shiny metal prosthesis that I had seen the day we first met. The artificial leg extended all the way up to his mid-thigh, a white plastic kneecap covering a spring-loaded hinge the size of a fist. Virgil tapped on his metal shin. “See this?” he asked. “This is Carl's doing.” “Carl's the reason you lost your leg?” “No,” he smiled. “Carl's the reason I'm here to tell you about my missing leg. Carl's the reason I'm alive today.” Virgil slid his trouser leg back down, leaning forward, resting his elbows on his thighs. “It was May of 1968. We were stationed at a little firebase on a ridge northwest of the Que Son Valley. We received orders to toss a village, some no-name collection of huts. Intel had spotted Viet Cong activity in the area, so they sent our platoon in to check it out. I was walking point along with this kid…” A nostalgic smile crossed Virgil's face. “Tater Davis. Dumb kid used to follow me around like a basset hound.” Virgil took a moment more to remember before he continued. “So me and Tater were walking point—” “Point?” I asked. “Like out in front?” “Yeah. They put a man or two out ahead of the rest of the column. That's the point. It's a hell of a plan. If things go bad, the army would rather lose those two fellas than a whole platoon.” I looked at Virgil's leg. “I take it things went badly?” “Yep,” he said. “We came over a small rise where the trail cut through a rocky knoll. On the downhill side of the knoll the trees thinned out a bit, enough to see the village ahead. Tater picked up the pace once he saw the village, but something wasn't right. I can't say I saw anything in particular, maybe it was a feeling, maybe subconsciously I saw something, but whatever it was, I knew something wasn't right. I signaled for the platoon to hold up. Tater saw me and put his rifle at the ready. I walked ahead on my own, maybe twenty or thirty paces. I was just about to give the ‘all's clear’ when the jungle exploded with gunfire. It was something else, I tell you. Ahead of me, beside me, behind me, hell, that jungle lit up with muzzle flashes from everywhere.” “The first bullet I took busted my shoulder blade. About that same time, two rounds caught my leg. One shattered my knee, the other busted my femur. I dropped without firing a single shot. I heard my prick of a sergeant, this piece of shit named Gibbs, ordering the platoon back over the knoll to take up defensive positions. I opened my eyes to see my buddies scampering away from me, jumping behind rocks and trees. Tater was running with all his might to make it back to the platoon. And that's when I saw Carl, running toward me.” Virgil stopped talking as he watched the past play out through the tears that had welled up in his eyes. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a handkerchief, and dabbed it to his eyes, his hand trembling slightly. I looked away to give Virgil some privacy. People in finely pressed suits crossed the courtyard in front of us, heading to and from the government center, ignoring the one-legged man sitting next to me. I waited patiently for Virgil to compose himself, and when he did, he continued. “Carl came running up the trail, screaming like a mad man, firing at the muzzle flashes in the tree line. I could hear Sergeant Gibbs screaming at Carl, telling him to fall back. When Tater saw Carl, he stopped retreating and jumped behind a tree. Carl got to me and dropped down on one knee, putting himself between me and about forty AK-47s. He stayed there, firing his rifle until he was about out of rounds.” Virgil took in a slow breath, again on the verge of tears. “You should've seen him. He picked my rifle up with his left hand as he squeezed off the final rounds from his rifle, firing both guns at the same. Then he dropped his M-16 across my chest and went on firing mine. I popped a fresh magazine into his rifle and handed it back to him in time to reload my rifle again. “Did Carl get hit?” “He took a bullet through his bicep on his left arm, another one cut a crease in his helmet, and another took the heel off his boot. But he never budged. It was a sight.” “I bet it was,” I said. Virgil looked at me for the first time since he started telling his story. “Have you ever seen those old movies,” he said, “where the sidekick gets shot and he tells the hero to go on without him, to save himself.” “Yeah,” I said. “Well, I was that sidekick. I was as good as dead, and I knew it. I opened my mouth to tell Carl to save himself, but what came out was ‘don't leave me here.’” Virgil looked at his fingertips, which were folded together on his lap. “I was scared,” he said, “more scared than I had ever been in my whole life. Carl had done everything wrong—militarily speaking, that is. He was saving my life. He was willing to die for me, and all I could do was tell him ‘don't leave me here.’ I've never been so ashamed.” I wanted to say something comforting, or to pat him on the shoulder, to let him know that it was okay, but that would have been an insult. I wasn't there. I had no say in what was or wasn't okay. “When the battle was at its worst,” he said, “the entire platoon was firing to beat hell. The VC were dealing it back in spades with Tater and Carl and me right in the middle of it all. I looked up and watched torn-up leaves and the splinters from the trees falling like confetti, the tracer rounds crisscrossing above us—red from our guns, green from theirs—noise and dirt and smoke. It was amazing, like I was outside of what was happening. The pain was gone; the fear was gone. I was ready to die. I looked over and saw Tater crouched behind a tree, laying down fire as best he could. He emptied his magazine and reached for a new one. Right then, he took a bullet in the face and fell dead. That's the last thing I remember before losing consciousness.” “You don't know what happened after that?” I asked. “I was told that we had air support hovering above the mission. They dropped a load of napalm on the VC position. Carl covered me like a blanket. If you look closely, you can still see scars on the back of his arms and neck from the burn he took.” “Was that the end of the war for you two?” I asked. “It was for me,” Virgil said, clearing the choke out of his throat. “We got patched up at the firebase first, and then it was off to Da Nang. They sent me to Seoul, but Carl never made it past Da Nang. He spent some time recovering and then went back to the company.” “The jury never got to hear that story?” I said. “Not a word of it.” “It is an amazing story,” I said. “Carl Iverson is a hero—a true god-damned hero. He was willing to lay down his life for me. He's not a rapist. He didn't kill that girl.” I hesitated before I said my next thought. “But…that story doesn't prove that Carl is innocent.” Virgil shot me a cold stare that bore into my temples, his grip on his cane tightening as if he were preparing to beat me with it for my insolence. I didn't move or say a word as I waited for the anger behind his eyes to thaw. “You sit here all warm and safe,” he sneered. “You have no idea what it's like to face your own death.” He was wrong. I didn't feel warm; and with his knuckles turning white as he gripped the handle of his cane, I didn't feel particularly safe, although he had a point about the facing death part. “People can change,” I said. “A man doesn't jump in front of a hail of bullets one day and murder a little girl the next,” he said. “But you weren't with him for the rest of his tour, were you? You flew home, and he stayed there. Maybe something happened; something that turned a screw in his head—made him the kind of guy that could kill that girl. You said yourself that Carl was a killer in Vietnam.” “Yeah, he was a killer in Vietnam, but that's different than murdering that girl.” Virgil's words brought back the first conversation that I'd had with Carl, how cryptic he'd been about the distinction between killing and murdering. I though Virgil might be able to help me understand, so I asked, “Carl said that there's a difference between killing and murdering. What does he mean by that?” I thought I knew the answer, but I wanted to hear it from Virgil before I talked to Carl about it. “It's like this,” he said. “You kill a soldier in the jungle, and you're just killing. It's not murder. It's like there's an agreement between armies that killing each other is okay. It's allowed. That's what you're supposed to do. Carl killed men in Vietnam, but he didn't murder that girl. See what I'm saying?” “I see that you owe your life to Carl Iverson, and that you have his back no matter what. But Carl told me that he'd done both. He killed and he murdered. He said he was guilty of both.” Virgil looked at the ground, his face softening with some thought that seemed trapped in his head. He rubbed the stubble on his chin with the back of his index finger and then nodded as if he had come to some silent conclusion. “There's another story,” he said. “I'm all ears,” I said. “It's a story I can't tell you,” he said. “I swore to Carl that I would never tell anyone. I never have, and I never will.” “But if it helps to clear—” “It's not my story to tell; it's Carl's. It's his decision. He's never told a soul, not his lawyer, not the jury. I begged him to talk about it at his trial, but he refused.” “It happened in Vietnam?” “It did,” he said. “And it shows what?” I asked. Virgil bristled at my question. “For some reason, Carl seems interested in talking to you. I don't understand it, but he seems willing to let you in. Maybe he'll tell you about what happened to him in Vietnam. If he does talk about it, you'll see. There's no way in hell Carl Iverson could have killed that girl.” After my meeting with Virgil, I stopped by the public defender's office to pick up the rest of the file, carrying it home on my shoulder, my mind juggling the competing sides of Carl Iverson. On the one side, Carl was a man kneeling in a jungle, taking bullets for his friend. On the other side was a sick bastard capable of extinguishing the life of a young girl in order to satiate his deviant sexual desires—two sides, one man. Somewhere in the box on my shoulder, there had to be an explanation of how the first man became the second. The box seemed impossibly heavy as I mounted the staircase to my apartment. As I reached the top step, Lila opened her door, saw me, pointed at the box on my shoulder, and asked, “What's that?” “It's the rest of Carl's file,” I said. “I just picked it up.” Her eyes lit up with excitement. “Can I see it?” she said. Ever since Lila had read the prosecutor's opening statement in the transcript, Carl's case had become my lure, the key to getting Lila into my apartment so I could spend time with her. I would have been lying if I'd said that my interest in digging deeper into Carl Iverson's story didn't have a lot to do with my attraction to Lila. We went to my apartment and started digging through the box, which held a few dozen folders of varying thicknesses, each with the name of a different witness or a label like forensics, or photos, or research. Lila pulled out a file labeled diary; I pulled out another with the words autopsy photos written on the flap. I remembered the prosecutor's warning in his opening statement about the intensity of the photos. I remembered, as well, the words of Carl's public defender, Berthel Collins, and his reaction the first time he saw the photos. I needed to see those photos—not in the sense that I required their viewing for my project; I needed to understand what happened to Crystal Hagen. I needed to put a face to the name, flesh to the bone. I needed to test my mettle, to see if I could handle it. The autopsy-photo folder was one of the thinnest in the box, containing maybe a couple dozen eight-by-ten pictures. I took a breath, closed my eyes, and prepared myself for the worst. I raised the folder cover quickly, like tearing off a bandage, and opened my eyes to see a beautiful young girl smiling back at me. It was Crystal Hagen's freshman picture. Her long, blonde hair parted in the middle, curled back along the frame of her face, emulated Farrah Faucet, as did most of the girls of that time. She smiled a perfect smile, white teeth glistening behind soft lips, her eyes sparkling with a hint of mischief. She was a beautiful girl, the kind of girl that a young man would want to love and an old man should want to protect. This would be the picture that the prosecutor would have propped up in front of the jurors to make them feel for the victim. There would be other pictures he would use to make them despise the accused. I stared at Crystal's picture for several minutes. I tried to imagine her alive, going to school, worrying about grades or boys or the myriad inconsequential anxieties that seem so overwhelming to a teenager and so mundane to an adult. I tried to imagine her as an adult—aging her from the freshman cheerleader with the long, flowing locks to the middle-aged mother with practical hair and a minivan. I felt sorry that she was dead. I turned to the next picture, gasping as my heart seized up inside my chest. I slapped the file folder closed to wait for my breath to return. Lila was reading her file—the diary entries—so intensely that she didn't notice my jolt. I had only seen the image for a second, long enough for it to become seared on the back of my eyelids. I opened the file again. I had expected her hair to be gone; it doesn't take much heat to burn hair. What I didn't expect was for her lips to be burned off. Her teeth, bright white in her class photo, now protruded from her jawbone, stained yellow by the fire. She lay on her right side, exposing the melted tissue of what used to be her left ear and cheek and her nose. Her face was nothing more than a tight black mask of charred skin. As the burning muscles in her neck contracted, her face had twisted around to look over her left shoulder in a grotesque expression that mimicked a scream. Her legs were bent in a fetal position, and the meat of her thighs and calves had fused to the bone, burnt and shriveled like beef jerky. Both her feet had been burned down to stumps. The fingers of her right hand curled into her wrist, which tucked into her biceps and chest. All her joints had knotted up as the heat from the fire shrank the cartilage and tendons. I could see where a sheet of tin had fallen across her body, protecting part of her torso from the worst of the flames. I swallowed back a gag in my esophagus and turned to the next picture, which showed Crystal rolled onto her back, her body frozen in a curl. The medical examiner held Crystal's left wrist in one of his latex-gloved hands. The skin on her left hand had been better protected, having been trapped under her body. In the medical examiner's other hand, between his thumb and forefinger, he held the broken fingernail by its edges, matching it up with the other fingernails on her left hand. It was the fake nail that they found on the steps leading from Carl's house to his shed. I closed the file. Had Crystal's family seen these pictures? They had to have. They attended the trial. These photos were trial exhibits, probably blown up to a size that could be viewed across a large courtroom. What had it been like to sit in that courtroom and see these pictures, the mutilation of their beautiful daughter? How could they not charge over the bar separating the gallery from the defendant and rip out the man's throat? It would have taken more than an old bailiff with a baton to stop me if this had been my sister. I took a deep breath, opening the file once again to Crystal's school picture. I felt my heart rate mellow, my breathing returning to normal. Wow, I thought. I had never had such a visceral reaction to a picture. The juxtaposition of the pretty, vibrant cheerleader with the charred corpse made me happy that Carl had rotted for decades in prison, and it made me regret that Minnesota forbids putting criminals to death. If those pictures had that effect on me, they must have had a similar effect on Carl's jury. There was no way Carl was going to walk out of that courtroom a free man. It was the least the jury could do to avenge Crystal's death. Just then, my cell phone rang, interrupting my thoughts. I recognized the 507 area code from Austin, but not the number. “Hello?” I said. “Joe?” came a man's voice. “This is Joe.” “It's Terry Bremer.” “Hi, Mr. Bremer.” I smiled at hearing the familiar name. Terry Bremer owned the duplex where Mom and Jeremy lived, where I used to live. At that thought, my smile faded. “Is something wrong?” “We had a small incident here,” he said. “Your brother tried to heat up a piece of pizza in the toaster.” “Is he okay?” “He's fine, I think. He set off the smoke detectors. Mrs. Albers from next door came over to check on him because the alarm didn't stop. She found your brother curled up in his room. He's really freaked out here. He's rocking back and forth and rubbing his hands.” “Where's my mother?” “Not here,” Bremer said. “Your brother mentioned something about her going to some meeting yesterday. She hasn't come back yet.” I wanted to hit something. I balled my hand into a fist and drew it back, my eyes focused on a smooth section of wall just itching to be pounded. But I knew that would be nothing but a ticket to bruised knuckles and forfeiture of my damage deposit. It certainly would not make my mother grow up. It wouldn't bring Jeremy back from his panic. I took a deep breath, lowered my head, and unclenched my fist. I turned to Lila, who was looking up at me with a worried expression. She had heard enough of the conversation to figure out what had happened. “Go,” she said. I nodded, grabbed my coat and my keys, and headed out the door. Terry Bremer stood on bowed legs and carried a tin of chew in his back pocket, a good ol’ boy who owned a bowling alley, two bars, and a couple dozen apartment units in Austin. He was one of those guys who could have been at the helm of a multinational corporation had his wall held the sheepskin of Harvard Business School instead of Austin High School. As landlords go, he was a good guy, affable, responsive. He'd given me my first bouncer job at a little hole-in-the-wall he owned called the Piedmont Club. It happened a couple weeks after I turned eighteen. He had come around for the rent—rent that my mother had blown on a trip to an Indian casino the weekend before. Instead of yelling or threatening to kick us out, he hired me to watch the door, clear off tables, and haul kegs up from the cellar. It was a good deal for me because it put money in my pocket and taught me how to deal with angry drunks and idiots. It was a good deal for him because if my mom blew our rent money, he simply withheld it from my check. “Is my mother back yet?” I asked when I walked into the apartment. Mr. Bremer stood just inside the door like a sentinel waiting to be relieved of duty. “No,” he said, “and by the looks of things, she hasn't been around since yesterday.” He took his cap off and brushed his palm across the smooth skin of his bald head. “I gotta tell ya, Joe, Mrs. Albers was on the verge of calling social services. Jeremy could've burned the place down.” “I know, Mr. Bremer, it won't—” “I can't be getting sued Joe—your mom leaving him alone like that. If he burns the place down, I'll get sued. Your mother can't leave a retard home alone like that.” “He's not a retard,” I snapped. “He's autistic.” “I didn't mean nothin’ by it, Joe. But you know what I'm saying. Now that you're off at college there's no one around to keep things in line.” “I'll talk to her,” I said. “I can't have this happen again, Joe. If it does, I gotta kick ’em out.” “I'll talk to her,” I said again, a little more insistent. Mr. Bremer put on his coat, paused as if to continue the conversation, to make sure he'd made his point, then must have thought better of it and headed out the door. I found Jeremy in his room. “Hey, Buddy,” I said. Jeremy looked up at me, started to smile, but then stopped, his eyes falling to the corner of the room and his brow taking on that worried expression he wore when life didn't make sense to him. “I heard you had a little excitement here tonight,” I continued. “Hi, Joe,” he responded. “Did you try and cook your own supper?” “Maybe I tried to make some pizza.” “You know you can't make pizza in the toaster, don't you?” “Maybe I'm not allowed to use the stove when mom is not home.” “Speaking of that, where is mom?” “Maybe she had a meeting.” “Is that what she said? Did she tell you she had a meeting?” “Maybe she said she had to go to a meeting with Larry.” “Larry? Who's Larry?” Jeremy sent his gaze back to the corner of the room. It was his signal that I'd asked a question for which he had no answer. I stopped asking questions. It was getting near ten o'clock. Jeremy liked to be in bed by ten, so I had him brush his teeth and get ready. I waited in the doorway to his bedroom as he changed into his sleeping clothes. When he took off his sweatshirt, I saw the faint shadow of a bruise across his back. “Hold up there, Buddy,” I said, walking over to get a better look at what I thought I'd seen. The bruise, about six inches in length and the width of a broom handle, started just under his shoulder blade and extended to his spinal cord. “What's this?” Jeremy looked into the corner of the room and didn't answer. Feeling the blood in my cheeks heating up, I took a deep breath to calm myself, knowing that Jeremy would shut down if I became angry. I smiled at him, letting him know that he wasn't in trouble. “How'd you get this bruise?” I asked. He continued to look at the corner of the room, saying nothing. I sat down with Jeremy on the edge of the bed, resting my elbows on my knees, pausing for a bit to make sure I was calm. “Jeremy,” I said. “It's very important that you and I don't keep secrets from each other. I'm your brother. I'm here for you. You're not in any trouble. But you can't keep secrets from me. You gotta tell me what happened.” “Maybe…” His eyes darted from one fixed point to another as he struggled to decide what to do. “Maybe Larry hit me.” I clenched my fists, but my face remained calm. “See?” I said, “You didn't do anything wrong. You're not in trouble. How did he hit you?” “Maybe he hit me with the remote control.” “He hit you with the remote? The TV remote? Why?” Again Jeremy averted his gaze. I had asked one question too many. I wanted to put my hands on Jeremy's shoulders and let him know that everything was okay, but you can't do that with Jeremy. I smiled at him and told him to get some sleep and have good dreams. I started his movie up, shut off the light, and closed the door. Whoever this Larry was—he and I were gonna have a talk. The next day was a Saturday. I woke before Jeremy and made pancakes. After we ate, we headed downtown to buy Jeremy a cell phone, one of those cheap ones that let you add minutes when you need them. When we got back to the apartment, I programmed my phone number into his contact list, making my number the only number on his list. I showed him how to call me, how to turn it on, how to find my number, and how to press the send button. He had never had his own phone before, so we practiced. I told him to hide the phone behind his dresser. After that, I let him beat me in two games of checkers to distract him from his new phone. Then I had him find the phone and call me, to make sure he remembered how to do it. He did. “If anyone tries to hurt you…” I said. “If this Larry hits you or does anything like that, you call me. You got a phone of your own now. You call me. Okay, Jeremy?” “Maybe I will call you with my new phone,” he said, smiling with pride. After lunch we played some more checkers and then turned on a movie: his movie. As Jeremy watched the movie, I watched the street, waiting for my mother to drive up. I also watched the clock; I had to work at Molly's at seven. The last time I'd bailed on Molly, she told me that I would not be getting any more breaks, and if I didn't show up, I would be fired. My mom left her cell phone in her dresser drawer; I know this because that's where it rang when I tried to call her. With the drive time to the Twin Cities, I would need to leave Austin by 4:30. As I watched the hands of the clock slide past 3 p.m., I asked Jeremy, “Did Mom say when she was going to be back from her meeting?” Jeremy pulled his attention from the movie and concentrated hard, his eyes moving back and forth slowly as if reading lines on a page. “Maybe she didn't say,” he said. I found a deck of cards and started playing solitaire on the coffee table. I lost three hands in quick succession, unable to focus my attention anywhere other than the driveway. As the clock inched close to four o'clock, I began going through options in my head. I could take Jeremy back to my apartment, but when I was working or in class, he was apt to find trouble there as easily as he would find it here. I could ask Lila to watch him, but he wasn't her responsibility—for that matter he wasn't supposed to be my responsibility. I could leave him here, alone, but one more problem and Bremer would follow through on his threat to kick them out. Or I could cancel on Molly again and lose my job. I reshuffled my cards and started laying out a new hand of solitaire. At five minutes before four o'clock, my mother pulled into the driveway. I turned up the volume on the television to drown out the yelling that would be coming from the front yard, and I headed out the door. “Where have you been?” I said through gritted teeth. I don't know if it was my tone, my presence at her apartment, or her double-vodka lunch that confused her, but she stared at me as though she had just woken up from a deep sleep. “Joey,” she said. “I didn't see your car.” A tall man with stringy gray hair and a body shaped like a bowling pin stood behind her curling his upper lip in a snarl. I recognized Larry. I had thrown him out of the Piedmont about a year earlier for getting drunk and slapping a woman. “You left him alone,” I said. “He nearly burned the place down. Where the hell you been?” “Now you just hold on,” Larry said, brushing past my mother. “Don't you talk to your mother like—” Larry raised his right hand, as if reaching to poke me in the chest. That was the exact wrong thing to do. Before his finger could touch me, I shot my right hand across my chest, grabbing the back of his hand and curling my fingers around the pinky side of his palm. In one swift motion I ripped his hand away from my chest, twisting it clockwise and dropping Larry to his knees. The move was called a wristlock takedown. One of the regulars at the Piedmont, a cop we called Smiley, showed me that move. It had always been one of my favorites. With very little torque, I curled Larry into a ball, his face a few inches from the ground, his arm cocked skyward behind his back, his wrist wrenched forward in my hand. It took everything I had not to kick Larry in the teeth. I leaned down over him and grabbed a tuft of his hair. His ears turned red and his features contorted as he winced with pain. Behind me my mother screeched some nonsense about how it was an accident, and how Larry was really a good guy deep down. Her pleading evaporated into the air around me, no more important to me than traffic noise in the distance. I pressed Larry's nose and forehead into the grit of the sidewalk. “I know what you did to my brother.” I said. Larry didn't respond, so I gave the pressure point in his wrist a tweak and he grunted. “Let me be very clear about this,” I said. “If you ever touch Jeremy again I will come down on you like nothing you've ever known. Nobody touches my brother. Do you understand?” “Fuck you,” he said. “Wrong answer,” I said, lifting his face off the concrete and tapping it back down just hard enough to make a mark and draw some blood. “I said: do you understand?” “Yes,” he said. I jerked Larry to his feet and shoved him toward the street. He walked down to the curb holding his bleeding nose and forehead, saying something under his breath that I couldn't hear. I turned my attention back to my mother. “Mr. Bremer called me.” “We just went to the casino,” she said. “We were only gone a couple days.” “What were you thinking? You can't leave him alone for a couple days.” “He's eighteen years old now,” she said. “He's not eighteen,” I said. “He'll never be eighteen. That's the point. When he's forty he'll still be a seven-year-old. You know that.” “I'm entitled to have some fun too, ain't I?” “You're his mother, for God sakes.” My contempt seethed in my words. “You can't just run off whenever you want to.” “And you're his brother,” she shot back, trying to gain some footing in the argument, “but that don't stop you from running off? Does it? Big college boy.” I stopped talking until the boil in my chest dropped to a simmer, my stare falling on my mother as hard and as cold as winter metal. “Bremer said he's kicking you out if he gets another call.” I turned to walk to my car, my eye on Larry as I passed him, waiting for an excuse to light into him again. As I pulled away from the curb, I saw Jeremy standing at the front window. I waved to him, but he didn't wave back. He just stood there watching me. To the rest of the world he would have appeared expressionless, but I knew better. He was my brother and I was his; and only I could see the sadness behind his calm, blue eyes. The next morning I was pulled from a bad dream by a knock at my door. In my dream, I was back in high school, wrestling at a tournament, trying to execute a simple escape maneuver. As I ripped the guy's grip from around my stomach, another hand grabbed my chest and yet another hand pulled at my arm. I pried each new hand loose only to create two more hands, like a hydra growing new heads. Soon I could only twist and scream under the onslaught of hands pulling and tearing at me. That's when I heard the noise that woke me. It took a while to purge the cloud of sleep from my head. I sat up in bed, not sure of what I had heard, waiting, listening—then, another knock. I hadn't dreamt it. I threw on a pair of shorts and a sweatshirt and opened the door to find Lila on the other side, holding two cups of coffee and a file folder. “I read the diary,” she said, walking past me, handing me one of the cups of coffee. “You do drink coffee, don't you?” “Yeah, I drink coffee,” I said. I grabbed a baseball cap from a hook on the wall to cover up my bed head and followed Lila to my couch. I had left the box of files with Lila in my apartment two days earlier when I charged out to go to Austin. She took some of the files home, including the one marked diary to comb through in my absence. “I read her diary last night,” she said. “Crystal's?” Lila looked at me like I was an idiot. In my defense, I was still groggy with sleep. She turned back to her train of thought. “The diary starts out in May of 1980,” Lila said, laying her notes on the coffee table in front of me. “The first few months are full of normal teenage crap. She's excited about starting high school one day and scared about it the next. For the most part she's a happy kid. She has fifteen entries about Carl between June and September, usually referring to him as the pervo next door, or Creepy Carl.” “What'd she say about him?” I asked. Lila had marked some of the pages with yellow tabs. She turned to the first tab in the diary, which was dated June 15: June 15 – I was practicing in the back yard and saw Creepy Carl watching me from his window. I flipped him off and he just stood there. What a pervo. “Just like the prosecutor said,” Lila commented, turning to the next tab. “‘He's watching me again. He stared at me while I did my routines.’ There's one…” She turned the pages of the diary to another marked passage, “Here it is.” Sept. 8 – Creepy Carl was watching me again from the window. He wasn't wearing a shirt. I bet he wasn't wearing pants either. Lila looked at me for a response. I shrugged. “I can see why the prosecutor liked the diary.” I think Lila wanted more of a reaction from me, but I moved on. “What else you got?” “Most of August is tame,” Lila said. “When school starts, she meets that guy, Andrew Fisher, in her typing class. She writes all about her plan to get Andy to invite her to homecoming—which he did. Then around mid-September the entries started getting darker. Read this one.” September 19 – Parking in the alley with Andy. Just when things were getting interesting, Creepy Carl walks up and looks in the window like he's Lurch or something. I could have died. “Again, just like the prosecutor told the jury,” I said. “Carl caught ’em getting it on in the alley.” “Two days later she starts writing about something bad happening, but she writes some of it in code.” “Code?” “Yeah. There're a few passages where Crystal uses a substitution code—you know, writing numbers instead of letters.” Lila pulled a stack of diary pages out of the folder. She had marked the coded entries with green tabs. “Look here.” September 21 – Terrible day today. 7,22,13,1,14,6,13,25,17,24,18,11,1. I am freaking out. This is very very bad. “What's it mean?” I asked. “Did I mention it's a code?” Lila said. “Maybe this was Crystal's way of making sure that if her stepdad ever found the diary, she wouldn't get shipped off to private school.” “Yeah, but it's the code of a fourteen-year-old girl,” I said. “Did you try matching the numbers up with letters?” “You mean like: A equals one, and B equals two, that sort of thing?” Lila rolled her eyes and pulled out the notebook pages where she'd been matching up numbers with letters. “I tried the alphabet forward; I tried it backward; I tried shifting so that A started at the number 2, then three, and so on. I tried matching the most frequent number with the letter E or T because those are the most often used letters in the alphabet. I looked for clues in her diary. I came up with nothing but gibberish.” “Did you try online?” I asked. “I think there are websites that can break codes.” “I thought of that, too,” she said. “Crystal didn't leave spaces between her words, so it's just strings of numbers. Nothing I found on the internet could solve it. There are eight billion possible combinations of numbers and letters.” “Eight billion?” I said. “Holy crap.” “Exactly. She must have had a key hidden away, or maybe she memorized a pattern to match the letters to the numbers. Either way, I can't figure it out.” Lila spread the pages on the table. “There are only seven coded entries, the last one written on the day she was murdered. I put them together,” she said, laying her own list on top of the diary pages. September 21 – Terrible day today. 7,22,13,1,14,6,13,25,17,24,26,21, 22,19,19,3,19. I am freaking out. This is very very bad. September 28 – 25,16,14,11,5,13,25,17,24, 26,21,22,19,19,3,19,26, 21,22,19,19,3,19. If I don't do what he wants he'll tell everyone. He'll ruin my life. September 30 – 6,25,6,25,25,16,12,6,1,2,17,24,2,22,13,25. I hate him. I feel sick. October 8 – 25,16,12,11,13,1,26,6,20,3,17,3,17,24,26,21,22,19,19,3, 19,9,22,7,8. He keeps threatening me. 2,3,12,22,13,1,19,17,3,1,11,5, 19,3,17,24,17,11,5,1,2. October 9 – 6,26,22,20,3,25,16,12,2,22,1,2,3,12,22,13,1,3,25. He forced me. I want to kill myself. I want to kill him. October 17 –5,16,17,22,25,3,17,3,25,11,6,1,22,26,22,6,13,2,3,12,22, 19,10,11,5,26,2,6,1,2,5, 10,1. October 29 – 6,1,19,10,22,18,3,25,16,19,10,22,18,6,13,26,17,3. Mrs. Tate said so. She said that the age difference means he'll go to prison for sure. It stops today. I am so happy. “October 29 is the day she was killed,” Lila said. “How do we know she's talking about Carl?” “There are dozens of pages where she talks about Carl being the pervert that watched her from his window,” Lila said. “He snuck up on her when she was having sex with Andy. It's not a coincidence that the threats began right after that.” “The code could change everything.” “There are other entries that aren't coded,” she said. “Look at this one from September twenty-second, the day after the ‘terrible day’ when she got caught with Andy Fisher.” September 22 – If they find out, it'll destroy me. They will send me to Catholic school. Goodbye cheerleading, goodbye life. “Don't you think that seems a bit dramatic,” I said. “I mean, they have cheerleaders at Catholic schools, too, don't they?” Lila shot a skeptical glance at me. “You obviously don't understand the brain of an adolescent girl. Everything is the end of the world. They're emotional to the point of being suicidal.” She paused, as if distracted by a thought. Then she continued. “Some things can truly seem like the end of the world.” “Who is Mrs. Tate?” I asked, looking at the last entry. “You didn't read the transcripts, did you?” Lila said, sounding exasperated. “I sort of read ’em,” I said. “But I don't remember Mrs. Tate.” “She was a school guidance counselor.” Lila pulled one of the transcripts from the box and started flipping through it until she got to Mrs. Tate's testimony. “Here it is.” She handed the transcript to me and I read: Q: And when you met with Crystal Hagen that day, what were her concerns, what did she talk about? A: She was real vague. She wanted to know if oral sex was sex. I mean, she wanted to know if someone forced you to have oral sex, could that be called rape. Q: Did she tell you why she wanted to know? A: No. She wouldn't say. She kept saying that she was asking for a friend. That happens a lot in my business. I tried to get her to tell me more. I asked her if someone was forcing her to have oral sex. She didn't answer. Then she asked me if it's force if the person was making you do it by threatening to tell a secret about you. Q: And what did you tell her? A: I said that it could be considered coercion. Then she asked me, “What if the guy is older?” Q: And you responded how? A: As a school counselor, we receive training on the law regarding stuff like this. I told her that given her age, if a man is more than two years older than her, it doesn't matter if there is coercion or not. Consent is not an issue. If an older man is having sex with a fourteen-year-old, it's rape. I told her that if something like that was happening she needed to tell me, or tell the police, or her parents. I told her if something like that was happening, the man will go to prison for it. Q: And what was her response to that? A: She just smiled a really big smile. Then she thanked me and left my office. Q: And you're sure that conversation took place on October 29 of last year? A: That conversation took place the day that Crystal was killed. I'm sure of that. I closed the transcript. “So, Crystal went home, wrote an entry in her diary, and then went to Carl's house to confront him?” “Either that or she took the diary with her to school,” Lila said. “It makes sense, doesn't it? Crystal knew that she had the upper hand. It would be his life that got ruined, not hers.” “So the same day she's planning to put an end to it, Carl's out buying a gun?” “Maybe he was planning on putting an end to it, too,” Lila said. “Maybe his plan all along was to kill her that day.” I stared down at the coded pages, their secret knowledge taunting me. “I wish we could break that code,” I said. “I can't believe his lawyer didn't work harder to break it.” “He did,” she said. Lila pulled a piece of paper out of the file and handed it to me. It was a copy of a letter to the Department of Defense. The date on the letter showed that it was written two months before the trial. It had been signed by Carl's attorney, John Peterson. In the letter Peterson was asking the Department of Defense to help decipher the diary code. “Did the Department of Defense ever respond?” I asked. “Not that I could find,” she said. “There's no other mention of the code being deciphered at all.” “You would think that they would move heaven and Earth to decipher the code before they went to trial.” “Unless…” Lila looked at me and shrugged. “Unless what?” “Unless Carl already knew what it would say. Maybe he didn't want the code deciphered because he knew it would be the final nail in his coffin.” I called Janet the next day and made an appointment for that evening to see Carl. I wanted to ask him about the diary and the code. I wanted to know why such an important part of the prosecutor's case went unchallenged. I wanted to see his face when he told me whether or not he knew what Crystal Hagen meant when she wrote in her diary that it “stops today.” I wanted to test his honesty. But first I needed to talk to Berthel Collins. It took me several tries, leaving messages each time. And when he finally called me back, I was already on the road driving to Hillview Manor. “What can I do for you, Joe?” he asked. “Thanks for calling me back, Mr. Collins,” I said. “I came across something odd in the trial file that I wanted to ask you about.” “That was a long time ago, but I'll do my best to give you an answer,” he said. “There was this diary, Crystal Hagen's diary. It had a code. Do you remember that?” Collins paused on the other side of the line and then, in a low, somber tone, said, “Yeah, I remember it.” “Well, I found a letter to the Department of Defense where Mr. Peterson tried to get it deciphered. What happened with that?” Another pause, then Collins answered. “Peterson signed that letter, but I wrote it. That was one of my contributions to the case. We didn't have personal computers back in 1980, at least nothing like we have today. We figured that the Department of Defense would have the technology to break the code, so Peterson assigned me the task of contacting the DoD. I spent hours trying to find someone to take my call. After a couple weeks of trying I found this guy who said he would see what he could do.” “So what happened? Did you ever get an answer?” “No. Things were moving at the speed of light on our end, but dealing with the DoD. was like swimming in jelly. I don't know if you saw this in the file, but Iverson demanded a speedy trial.” “A speedy trial? What's that mean?” “A defendant can request that his case be brought to trial within sixty days. We rarely do that because the longer a case lingers, the better it gets for the defense. We get more discovery; we have time to do a thorough investigation of our own; witnesses become less reliable. There was no reason for Iverson to demand a speedy trial, but he did. I was there when Peterson tried to convince him to back off the demand. We needed time to prepare. We needed to hear back from the DoD. Iverson didn't care. Remember how I said he didn't help with his case, like he was watching it on television? That's what I'm talking about.” “So what happened with the Department of Defense? Why didn't they break the code?” “We weren't a priority to them. This was before you were born, but that year, 1980, the Iranians were holding fifty-two Americans hostage. That was also an election year. Everyone was focused on the crisis, and I couldn't get anyone to talk to me or call me back. The packet I sent them disappeared into some black hole. After the trial I called them to tell them that it was too late, that they didn't need to work on our code anymore. They had no idea what code I was talking about.” “Did the prosecutor ever try to break the code?” “I don't think so. I mean, why would he? The inferences all pointed toward Iverson. He didn't need the code to be deciphered. He knew that the jury would read into it what he told them to read into it.” I pulled into the parking lot of Hillview and parked my car, laying my head against the headrest. I had one last question, but I hesitated to ask it. A part of me wanted to believe that he was not the monster that the prosecutor talked about. But I wanted the truth. “Mr. Collins, a friend of mine thinks that Carl didn't want the diary to be deciphered. She thinks that he knew that it would have pointed at him. Is that true?” “Your friend is perceptive,” he said, thoughtfully. “We had that same discussion thirty years ago. I think John Peterson agreed with your friend. I got the feeling that John didn't really want the code solved, that's why he gave it to me to do. I was a lowly clerk at the time. I think John wanted to document that we tried, but he didn't really want to receive the results because…well…” Collins took in a deep breath and sighed. “The truth is, it can be hard sometimes, to give it all you got defending a man that you know murdered his victim.” “Did you ever ask Carl about the diary code?” “Certainly. Like I said, John tried to convince Carl to back off the speedy-trial demand. That was one of our arguments—that we might get some good evidence from deciphering the code.” “What did Carl say?” “It's hard to explain. Most guys who are guilty will take a plea bargain. He refused a second degree. And, most guys who are innocent will delay trial for as long as it takes to get their case prepared. He demanded a speedy trial. We were trying to decipher the code, and it seemed like he was working against us. I gotta tell you, Joe, it seemed to me like Carl Iverson wanted to go to prison.” I walked over to Carl and sat down in the lounge chair beside him, his slight sideways glance being the only acknowledgement of my arrival. Then, after a moment, he said, “Beautiful day.” “It is,” I replied. I hesitated before launching into our interview. I wasn't going to pick up where we left off—talking about the day he got his draft notice. Instead, I wanted to talk about why he wanted the speedy trial, and why he seemed to not want the diary deciphered. I suspected that my choice of topic would spoil the rest of Carl's day, so I tried to ease into the conversation. “I talked to Berthel Collins today,” I said. “Who?” “Berthel Collins, he was one of your attorneys.” “My attorney was John Peterson,” he said. “And he died years ago, or at least that's what I heard.” “Collins worked as a law clerk on your case.” Carl thought for a moment, apparently trying to remember Collins, then he said,” I seem to remember a kid sitting in the room on some of the visits. That was so long ago. Is he a lawyer now?” “He's the chief public defender in Minneapolis,” I said. “Well good for him,” he said. “And why did you talk to Mr. Collins.” “I'm trying to figure out what those coded messages in Crystal Hagan's diary meant.” His gaze never shifted from the apartment balcony across the way. He seemed unmoved by my bringing up the diary, treating my announcement with the insignificance of a burp. “So,” he said, “you're a detective now, are you?” “No,” I said, “but I do like a good puzzle. And this one seems to be a real challenge.” “You want an interesting puzzle?” he said. “Take a look at the pictures.” That was not where I wanted our conversation to go. “I saw the pictures,” I said, as the images of Crystal Hagen's corpse flashed across my memory. “They almost made me throw up. I have no interest in looking at them again.” “Oh…no. Not those pictures,” he said, turning his body so that he faced me for the first time since I arrived. A sickly pallor washed over his face. “I…I'm so sorry you had to see those pictures.” I could tell by his face that he could still see the trial photos in his mind after all these years, his features giving way to a thirty-year-old gravity. “Those pictures were terrible. Nobody should have to look at them. No, I'm talking about the pictures taken of the fire, before the police arrived. Have you seen those?” “No,” I said. “What about them?” “You ever read a Highlights magazine when you were a kid?” “Highlights?” “Yeah, you'd find them in dentist offices and doctor's waiting rooms. They're magazines for kids.” “Can't say I've seen one,” I said. Carl smiled and nodded. “Well, they have these pictures in them, two pictures that appear to be identical, but there are small differences. The game is to find the differences, find the anomalies.” “Sure,” I said. “I did those kinds of things in grade school.” “If you like solving puzzles and riddles, find the pictures that were taken before and after the fire department arrived and look at them. Play that game. See if you can spot the anomaly. It's hard to see. It took me years to notice it—but then again, I didn't have the head start you'll have. I'll give you a hint, what you're looking at might be looking at you.” “You had the pictures in prison?” “My attorney sent me copies of most of the stuff in the file. Had all the time in the world to read it after they convicted me.” “Why didn't you take more of an interest in your case before they convicted you?” I asked. Carl looked at me like he was eyeing an unusual chess move. Maybe he saw where I was going with my question—my not-so-subtle segue. “What do you mean?” “Collins said that you demanded a speedy trial.” He thought for a moment and said, “That is true.” “Why?” “It's a long story,” he said. “Collins said they wanted more time, but you pushed to go to trial.” “Yes. I did.” “He thinks you wanted to go to prison.” Carl said nothing, setting his gaze back toward the window. I pressed on. “I want to know why you didn't fight harder to stay out of prison.” He hesitated before answering. Then he said, “I thought it would silence the nightmare.” Now we're getting somewhere, I thought. “The nightmare?” I watched as he paused his breathing and swallowed hard. Then, in a low, calm voice, a voice that came from somewhere deep in his soul, he said, “I've done things…things that I thought I could live with…but I was wrong.” “This is your dying declaration,” I said, trying to jump into his thoughts, hoping to grease the skids of his catharsis. “This is why you're telling me your story, to get this off your chest.” I saw the surrender in his eye, the desire to tell me his story. I wanted to scream at him to confess, but I whispered my words instead, hoping not to frighten him away. “I'll listen to you. I promise I won't judge.” “Came here to bring me absolution, did you?” He spoke barely above a whisper. “Not absolution,” I said. “But telling me what happened might help. They say that confession is good for the soul.” “They say that, do they?” His attention shifted slowly toward me. “And do you agree with what they say?” he asked. “Sure,” I said. “I think that if you have something that is troubling you…telling someone about it can be a good thing.” “Should we try that,” he said. “Should we test that idea?” “I think we should,” I said. “Then tell me about your grandfather,” he said. I felt a thump in my chest that stunned me. I looked away from him while I tried to calm my thoughts. “What about my grandpa?” I said. Carl leaned in. Still speaking in that soft voice, he said, “That first day that we met, I mentioned him, just in passing. I asked how he died, and you froze. Something heavy came over you. I could see it in your eyes. Tell me what happened to him?” “He died when I was eleven years old. That's all.” For a long while, Carl said nothing, letting the heaviness of my hypocrisy settle onto my shoulders. Then he sighed and shrugged. “I understand,” he said. “I'm just a school project.” An unsettling voice began to bounce around inside my head, fed by my own guilt, a voice that whispered to me, urging me to tell Carl my secret. Why not tell him, the voice said. He would take my secret to the grave in a matter of weeks. Besides, it would be my good-faith payment to him for the confession that he would give to me. But then another voice, a quieter voice, told me that good faith had nothing to do with why I needed to tell Carl my secret. I wanted to tell him. Carl looked down at his hands as he continued. “You don't have to tell me,” he said. “That was never our deal—” “I watched my grandpa die,” I blurted. The words escaped my brain and shot out of my mouth before I could stop them. Carl looked at me, startled by my interruption. Like a cliff diver leaving the safety of his perch, that single moment of courage or recklessness started an action I could not reverse. I stared out the window now, as I had seen Carl do so many times, and I gathered the details of my memory to me. When my thoughts were clear enough, I spoke again. “I've never told anybody this,” I said, “but it was my fault he died.” What I remembered most about my Grandpa Bill were his hands, powerful bulldog paws with stubby fingers as thick as lug nuts, fingers that pulsed with agility as he worked on the small engines that he repaired. I remembered him holding my hand in his when I was little, and the feeling it gave me that everything would be okay. I remembered how he moved through the world with utter patience, giving attention and purpose to every task he performed, whether it was cleaning his glasses or helping my mother through a bad day. He had been there for her in my earliest memories, his whispers drowning out her shouts, his hand on her shoulder able to tame a storm. She had always been bipolar—that's not a condition you can suddenly catch like the flu—but when my Grandpa Bill was alive, the waves never grew into whitecaps. He used to tell me stories about fishing the Minnesota River, up near Mankato where he grew up, hauling in catfish and walleye by the boatload, and I would dream of the day when I might go fishing with him. Then, when I was eleven years old, that day came. My grandpa borrowed a boat from a friend of his and we launched at the landing at Judson to float down the river with its slow yet powerful current, the plan being to end up at a park in Mankato before nightfall. That spring, the river had overflowed its banks with the snow runoff, but by July, when we went fishing, it had settled down. The flood had left behind a scattering of dead cottonwood trees jutting up from the river bottom, their branches breaking the water's surface like skeletal fingers. Grandpa Bill kept the motor of the little fishing boat idling so we could maneuver around the trees when we needed to. Occasionally, I would hear the screech of wood on aluminum as a branch, hiding just below the surface, scraped against the hull. The sound frightened me at first, but Grandpa Bill acted like it was as natural as the breeze rustling the leaves around us. That made me feel safe. I caught my first fish within the first hour, and I lit up like it was Christmas. I had never caught a fish before, and the feel of catching that fish, the twitching of my rod, seeing him lift out of the water flipping and flopping, thrilled me. I was a fisherman. The day meandered beneath a clear blue sky with him catching a few fish and me catching a few more. I think he fished without bait some of the time just to let me get ahead. By noon we had a decent stringer of fish. He told me to drop the anchor so that we could keep our lines in the water as we ate our lunch. The anchor, which was attached to the boat at the bow—where I sat—dragged along the bottom of the river for a ways until it finally caught and brought our boat to a halt in the middle of the river. We washed our hands with water from a canteen, and Grandpa Bill pulled ham-and-cheese sandwiches out of a plastic grocery bag. We ate the best sandwiches I'd ever tasted, washing them down with bottles of cold root beer. It was a glorious lunch, eaten in the middle of a river at the apex of a perfect day. When my Grandpa finished his food, he folded his sandwich bag into a small wad and carefully placed it in the grocery bag, which had now become our trash bag. Then, when he finished his root beer, he put his empty bottle in the bag, using the same deliberate motion. He handed the bag to me so that I could follow his lead. “Always keep the boat clean,” he said. “Don't leave trash lying around or the tackle box open. That's how accidents happen.” I listened with one ear as I sipped my root beer. Once I drained the last of my drink, Grandpa Bill told me to pull up the anchor—another thing I had never done before. He had turned his attention to the motor, pumping a little ball in the gas line to get it ready to start. He wasn't watching as I laid my empty bottle on the floor of the boat. I would throw it away later, I told myself. I gripped the nylon rope that tethered us to the anchor and pulled. The anchor did not budge. I pulled harder and felt the boat edge upstream, the anchor still not moving. The boat had a flat stem plate for a bow, so I braced my feet against the stem and pulled hand over hand, pulling the boat slowly toward the anchor until my progress ground to a halt. Grandpa Bill saw my struggles and coached me to pull left and right, to work the anchor loose, but the thing would not come up. Then, behind me, I heard Grandpa Bill stir in his seat. I felt the boat rock. When I looked over my shoulder, I saw him making his way forward to help me. As he stepped over a bench seat that separated us, he put his foot down on my empty bottle. His ankle twisted, curling his foot sideways. He tilted and fell backward, his thigh crashing against the side of the boat, his arms swinging at the air, his torso wrenching around to face the river as he hit. The splash drenched me as the river swallowed my grandpa. I screamed his name as he disappeared into the murky water. I screamed twice more before he popped to the surface, grabbing for the boat, his hand missing the edge by the width of a penny. His second attempt wasn't even close. The current had him, and it pulled him away from me as I sat there holding on to that stupid anchor rope, never realizing that if I had let go of the rope, the boat would have floated downstream alongside my grandpa, at least for twenty feet or so. By the time he righted himself, he had moved well beyond the reach of the boat, even if I had released the anchor rope. I yelled and prayed and begged for him to swim. It all happened so fast. Then everything soared to a whole new level of bad. Grandpa Bill began to thrash around in the water, his arms flailing, clutching at the surface of the river, his leg pinned in place by something hidden in the wet darkness. Later, the sheriff would tell my mother that his boot caught on the branch of a dead cottonwood tree just beneath the surface of the river. I watched him struggle to keep his face above the water as the current pushed him under. He didn't have his lifejacket zipped shut. It pulled at his arms, tangling them above his head, his upper body tugging against the trapped boot. It was only then that it dawned on me to release my rope. I let it go and paddled with my hand until the rope snapped tight about thirty feet upstream of my grandfather. I could see him scratching and tearing to pull free of the life jacket. I couldn't move. I couldn't think. I just stood there and watched and yelled until my grandfather stopped moving and floated limp in the current. I told Carl my story, choking back my tears, pausing repeatedly to let my chest settle. It wasn't until I finished that I noticed that Carl had laid his hand on my arm in an attempt to comfort me. To my surprise, I didn't pull away from him. “You know, it wasn't your fault,” he said. “I don't know that at all,” I said. “That's the big lie I've been trying to tell myself for the past ten years. I could have put the bottle in the trash bag. I could have let go of that rope when he fell in. I had a knife in the tackle box; I could have cut the boat loose and saved him. Believe me, I've gone over it a million times. I could have done a hundred things differently. But I didn't do anything.” “You were just a kid,” Carl said. “I could have saved him,” I said. “I had the choice to try or to watch. I chose wrong. That's all there is to that.” “But—” “I don't want to talk about it anymore,” I snapped. Janet tapped me on the shoulder and I turned with a jerk. “I'm sorry, Joe,” she said, “but visiting hours are over.” I looked at the clock on the wall and saw that it was ten minutes past eight. I had been talking for the entire visit, and I felt drained. My mind spun as the memory of that terrible day swirled and bounced unfettered in my head, cut loose from its moorings by Carl Iverson. I felt cheated because we had never gotten around to talking about Carl. And, at the same time, I felt a sense of relief for having told my secret to someone. I stood and apologized to Janet for overstaying my permitted time. Then I nodded to Carl in place of saying goodbye and made my way out. As I walked out of the lounge, I paused to look back at Carl. He sat motionless, facing his reflection in the dark glass, his eyes closed tight as though holding back a deep pain, and I found myself wondering if it was the cancer again or if this time it was something else. To calm down, I cranked rock classics from my car's beat-up speakers on the drive home. I sang along with a string of one-hit wonders until I managed to force the dark thoughts out of my head, replacing them with thoughts of the puzzle that Carl had mentioned. Sure, the idea of a puzzle intrigued me, but it was the notion that I had another excuse to spend time with Lila that made me feel better about things. When I got back to the apartment, I dug through the box and found two files that held pictures taken of the burning shed. I spent half an hour making sure I had the right pictures then I packed the files under my arm and headed to Lila's apartment. “You like games?” I said to Lila. “That depends,” she said. “What ya got in mind?” Her response caught me off guard, and for a second there I thought that I detected a flirty smile. It nearly made me forget why I came. I smiled back and stumbled over myself. “I got some pictures,” I said. She looked a bit confused, then showed me to her dining-room table with a nod of her head. “Most guys bring flowers,” she said. “I'm not most guys,” I said. “I'm special.” “No argument there,” she said. I spread out a series of photographs, seven pictures in all. Of the seven, the first three showed the fire raging out of control with no firefighters on the scene yet. Those pictures were poorly framed, haphazard in the use of lighting, and one of them was terribly out of focus. The second set of photos showed the firefighters working the blaze and had been taken by a better photographer. The first of these showed the firefighters pulling a hose off the truck, the shed burning in the background. Another showed the water from the fire hose as it first hit the shed. Two more showed the firefighters spraying water on the fire from two different angles. One of these last two pictures was the one I'd seen in the newspaper article at the library. “So what's the game,” she said. “These pictures here…” I said, pointing at the first three pictures. “They came from the file of a witness named Oscar Reid. He lived across the alley from Carl and the Lockwoods. He saw the flames and called 911. While he waited for the cavalry to arrive, he grabbed an old instamatic and snapped a few pictures.” “Instead of—oh, I don't know—grabbing a water hose?” “He told the detective that he thought he might be able to sell a picture to the newspaper.” “A real humanitarian,” she said. “And these?” She pointed at the other four pictures. “These were taken by an actual newspaper photographer, Alden Cain. He heard the fire call over a scanner and ran over there to get some shots.” “Okay,” she said. “So what am I looking for?” “Remember in grade school, the teachers used to give out pictures that looked alike but weren't? And you had to spot the differences between them?” “That's the game?” she said. “That's it,” I said, lining the pictures up side by side. “What do you see?” We studied them carefully. In the early photos, flames shot out of a shed window that faced the alley and the photographer. The roof of the shed was intact, and thick black smoke rolled out of spaces where the two-by-four rafters rested on the walls. In the later photographs, the fire rose in a twisting swirl, like a whirlwind from a hole in the roof. The firefighters arrived and had just started dousing the flames with water. Cain stood in pretty much the same spot as Reid because the angles and backgrounds of the pictures were very similar. “I don't see any anomalies,” I said, “other than the firefighters moving around.” “Me neither,” Lila said. “Carl said to look at things that should be the same in each picture, so don't look at the fire because that changes as it grows.” We looked more carefully at the pictures, examining the background for any slight alteration. Other than an increase in light from the growing flames, Carl's house looked the same in every photo. Then I looked at the Lockwood house in the Reid photos: a standard two-story, blue-collar home with a small back porch, a set of three windows on the top floor, and a window on either side of the back door. I looked at the Lockwood house in the Cain photos. Again, it was brighter because of the flames, but otherwise nothing had changed. I went back and forth from one picture to another, wondering if Carl had played a joke on me. Then Lila saw it. She lifted two pictures off the table, one by Cain and one by Reid and inspected them. “There,” she said, “in that window to the right of the back door of the Lockwood house.” I took the pictures from her and looked at the window, going back and forth between the Reid photo and the Cain photo until I finally saw what she saw. The window to the right of the back door had a set of mini-blinds covering it from top to bottom. In the Reid picture the blinds fell to the bottom of the window. In the later picture, the one taken by Cain, the blinds had been lifted a few inches. I pulled the image closer and saw what looked like the shape of a head and maybe a face peering through the gap. “What the hell?” I said. “Who is that?” “That's a good question,” she said. “It looks like someone peeking out the bottom of the window.” “Someone was in the house?” I said. “Watching the fire?” “That's what it looks like to me.” “Who?” I could see Lila reaching back into her memory to conjure up the testimony of the Lockwood family. “There're only a handful of possibilities.” “More like a shop teacher's handful,” I said. “A shop teacher's handful?” Lila asked, looking puzzled. “You know…he's missing some fingers…so there're fewer options.” I forced a chuckle. Lila rolled her eyes and went back to work. “Crystal's stepfather, Douglas Lockwood, said that he and his son were at his car dealership that evening. He was doing paperwork and Danny was detailing a car. He said that they didn't get home until after the fire had been put out.” I added what I remembered. “Crystal's mom worked the late shift at Dillard's Caf?,” I said. “That's right,” Lila added, as if showing off her superior grasp of the details. “Her boss, Woody, confirmed it.” “Her boss, Woody? You're making that up.” “Look it up,” she smiled. “That leaves the boyfriend, what's-his-name?” “Andrew Fisher,” she said. “He testified that he brought Crystal home after school, drove through the alley, dropped her off, and left.” “So where does that leave us?” I said. Lila thought for a minute and then counted on her fingers. “I see four possibilities: first, that's not really someone peeking out the window, but I have to believe what I see, so I'm discarding that one. “I see a peeker, too,” I said. “Second, it's Carl Iverson—” “Why would Carl kill her at his house and then watch the fire from the Lockwood house?” “I didn't say these were probabilities—just possibilities. It is possible that Carl went to the Lockwood's house after he started the fire. Maybe he knew about the diary and wanted to find it. Although it makes no sense for him to start the fire before looking for the diary.” “No sense at all,” I said. “Third, there's a mystery man, someone who the police never thought about, someone who isn't anywhere in this box of files.” “And fourth?” “And fourth, someone lied to the police.” “Someone like…Andrew Fisher?” “It's a possibility,” Lila said with a defiant exhale. I could tell that she wanted to hold firm to her belief that Carl Iverson murdered Crystal Hagen, but I could also see her trying on these new clothes, slipping into the possibility that something had gone terribly wrong thirty years ago. We sat in silence for a while, unsure of what to make of this revelation, neither of us mentioning the tremor we felt pulse through the ground beneath our feet. It was as though we both saw the crack in the dam take shape, but we didn't understand its ramifications. It would not be long before that crack gaped open, releasing its torrent. By the time I returned to Hillview, I had fully recovered from my confession about my grandfather's death, and I felt rejuvenated by the mystery of the photographs. Carl owed me a confession—at least that is how I saw it. I beat myself up telling him my story, and now he had to answer some real questions. He looked healthier than I had ever seen him look. He wore a red flannel shirt in place of the dull blue robe, and his hollow cheeks sported a fresh shave. He smiled a tepid smile, the kind of smile you put on when you run into an ex-girlfriend at a party. I think he knew where we were going to go. It was his turn to open up. My writing assignment had a mid-term paper coming due; I had to write about a major turning point in Carl's life, and I needed to have it to the professor in a week. The time had come to unbury his dead, and he knew it. “Hello, Joe.” Carl waved me to the chair beside him. “Look at that,” he said, pointing out the window. I scanned the random balconies of the apartment across the way, seeing nothing had changed. “What?” I asked. “Snow,” he said. “It's snowing.” I'd seen the snow falling lightly on my drive down, but I'd taken no notice other than to wonder if my car would last through another Minnesota winter. My car's body had gotten so perforated from decay that water from the wet street soaked the carpeting in the trunk after every rain, filling the car with the smell of stale washcloths. Luckily for me, there hadn't been enough snow to accumulate yet. “You're happy because it's snowing?” I said. “I spent thirty years in prison, much of that time in segregation. I rarely got to watch the snow fall. I love snow.” He followed individual flakes as they floated past the window, rose in a curving breeze, and then fell again, disappearing into the grass. I gave him a few minutes of peace and allowed him to enjoy the snowfall for the moment. Eventually, it was Carl that started our conversation. “Virgil stopped by this morning,” he said. “He tells me you and he had quite a talk.” “We did.” “And what did Virgil have to say?” I pulled the small recorder out of my backpack and placed it on the arm of my chair, close enough to pick up Carl's voice. “He says you're an innocent man. He says you didn't kill Crystal Hagen.” Carl pondered that statement for a moment and then asked. “Do you believe him?” “I read your court file,” I said. “I read the trial transcript and Crystal's diary.” “I see,” Carl said. He stopped looking out the window and instead stared at the dingy carpet in front of him. “Did Virgil tell you why he believed so strongly in my innocence?” “He told me the story of how you saved his life in Vietnam. He said you ran headlong into a barrage of enemy bullets—knelt down between him and the people trying to kill him. He said you stayed there until the VC were pushed back.” “You gotta love that Virgil.” Carl chuckled under his breath. “Why?” I asked. “He'll go to his grave believing that I'm innocent because of what happened that day, even though he's got the story all wrong.” “You didn't save his life?” “Oh, I suppose I did save his life, but that's not why I charged that position.” “I don't understand.” Carl's smile turned a shade more melancholy as he thought about that day in Vietnam. “I was Catholic back then,” he said. “My upbringing forbade suicide. It was one of those sins that could never be forgiven. The priest said that if you killed yourself you went straight to hell, no questions asked. The Bible also says that there's no greater sacrifice than to give one's life for one's brother. And Virgil was my brother.” “So when you saw Virgil go down that day—” “I saw it as my chance. I would get in front of Virgil and take the bullet that was meant for him. It was kind of like killing two birds with one stone. I could save Virgil's life and end mine all at the same time.” “It didn't quite work out, did it?” I said, prodding him on. “That's the messed up part of it all,” he said. “Instead of getting my head shot off they gave me medals, a Purple Heart and a Silver Star. Everyone thought I was being brave. I just wanted to die. You see, Virgil's belief in me, his loyalty to me, is based on a lie.” “So the only person who believes that you are innocent is wrong?” I asked, sliding into my intended conversation with an easy subtlety. The snow outside had grown from a light flurry into a snowfall worthy of a snow globe, large wet flakes the size of popcorn kernels swirling in circles. I had asked the question I wanted to ask and received silence instead of an answer. So I watched the snow, determined not to speak again, giving Carl the time he needed to sort through his thoughts and find my answer. “You're asking me if I murdered Crystal Hagen,” he said finally. “I'm asking if you murdered her, or killed her, or in any way caused her to no longer be alive. Yes, that's what I'm asking.” I could hear a clock somewhere behind me ticking away the seconds as he paused again. “No,” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper. “I didn't.” I dropped my head in disappointment. “The day I met you—the day you preached all that bullshit about being honest—you told me you were both a killer and a murderer. Remember? You said killing people was not the same as murdering them and you had done both. I thought this was your dying declaration, your chance to come clean. And now you're telling me that you didn't cause her death in any way?” “I don't expect you to believe me,” he said. “Hell, no one's believed me, not even my own lawyer.” “I read the file, Carl. I read the diary. You bought a gun that day. She called you a pervert because you were always watching her.” “I am well aware of the evidence, Joe,” he said, speaking his words with the patience of a glacier. “I know what they used against me in court. I've relived the telling of that story every day for the past thirty years, but that doesn't change the fact that I didn't murder her. I have no way to prove that point to you or anyone else. I'm not even going to try to prove it. I'm going to tell you the truth. You can believe it or not. It doesn't matter to me.” “What about the other story from Vietnam?” I asked. Carl shot me a look of faint surprise, then, as if to call my bluff, he said, “What story would that be?” “Virgil said it's your story to tell. He said it proves you didn't kill Crystal Hagen.” Carl sank back into his wheelchair. He put his fingers to his lips, his hand trembling slightly. There was another story; I could see that now, so I pressed on. “You said you'd tell me the truth Carl. It can't be the truth unless it's the whole story. I want to know everything.” Once again, Carl looked past the window, past the snow, and past the apartment balconies. “I'll tell you about Vietnam,” he said. “You can decide what it proves or doesn't prove. But I promise you, it will be the truth.” For the next two hours I didn't speak; I barely breathed. I listened to Carl Iverson go back in his memory—back to Vietnam. When he had finished, I stood, shook his hand, and thanked him. Then I went home and wrote that part of Carl Iverson's story that marked the turning point of his life.