Page 4 of Girl, Remembered

The light suspended itself in mid-air like the typical image of an alien spacecraft. Beneath the winking he could just resolve the shape carrying it: a small black cross.

His heart did something it hadn’t done since the day he got here.

It began to pound.

Not yet, he thought. It doesn’t mean it yet. Machines like that flew for real-estate agents and bored teenagers. It would tilt away in a second and go film a rooftop somewhere. He watched, and his breath fogged the glass and he wiped it and watched, and the drone rotated once on its own axis as though shaking out its shoulders.

Then it flew in a wide circle. An unmistakable circle. Out and around and back to its starting point. The red light drew the shape onto the night the way a child drew with a sparkler. It reached the top of the circle and stayed put.

If you ever see it, do yourself a favour.

Her voice arrived intact, albeit from distance. Her voice had been warm and encouraging and slightly amused, perhaps the voice of a woman explaining something reasonable to someone she was fond of. She said it like it was nothing, as though she was reminding a friend to take an umbrella in case it rained.

At the time, Tanner had just laughed and told her she had a flair for the dramatic, and she’d smiled and simply dropped the subject, having planted it exactly as she wanted it.

Well, this was it. Tanner didn’t have an umbrella, and the rain was coming now.

He stepped back from the window.

The strange part – and this part would have fascinated him if he wasn’t the unwilling patient – was the sudden emergence of his own reluctance. He didn’t want to do this. He wanted to see his trial. He wanted to hear what the experts made of him, wanted to watch the jurors watch him, wanted to force the state of Wisconsin to hear all of the grisly details as somebody finally read his work into the record. Until now, he’d survived this place on that wish alone.

And under the reluctance, holding it like a hand under an elbow, was the promise.

He’d made it freely. That was her genius and he’d known it was her genius even while it worked on him: she never took anything. She only ever arranged the room so that you handed it over yourself and felt the richer for giving. He of all people had recognized the technique. He’d recognized it with professional admiration, standing in the visitation room while she rearranged the furniture in his head.

She had kept every promise she’d ever made him. Every single one. There was a whole ledger of them, and her column was clean.

Now the ledger wanted balancing.

The drone was still there, but then dropped away below the sightline of his window, going home to whatever hand had thrown it.

Tanner stood in his cell and breathed. The jail went on manufacturing around him. The man opposite him was no longer crying, and the freeway carried its red beads north. None of it knew anything, and he envied that.

‘All right,’ he said, to nobody the cameras could see.

Then he pulled the sheets off his bunk and, with great care, rolled the first one tight.

***

Edgar Borden’s hands had been empty for two weeks, and that was, in his opinion, the worst cruelty prison could offer.

The rest of it he bore easily. Noise, smell, food, chit-chat, authority. The other men in here complained about those things like they deserved anything other than the bare minimum, and Edgar listened and nodded and found the complaints ungrateful. A locked room was not a hardship. A locked room was a life with the choices removed, and choices were where all his ruin had come from.

No, the cruelty was smaller than any of that. It lived in his fingers. For twenty years he’d read grain with his thumbs, and now the finest workpiece in his world was the edge of a concrete bunk, which he stroked sometimes in the dark, out of habit.

Back in his work days – which now felt a lifetime ago – he had once spent a week crafting a single drawer runner. A week for an item that would spend its life invisible seemed absurd on the surface, but now that he looked back, he wished he’d spent even longer on it. When the curtain came down, all that remained were the things you worked on. A wise man had once said that the goal in life was not to live forever, but to create something that would.

The parish had given him a cell to himself on account of what the newspapers said he was. He didn’t mind the newspapers. They needed him to be a monster the same way the bank had needed him to be an account number, and Borden was happy to take advantage. One such advantage was being able to stay awake well into the night and read the few books the powers-that-be had let him have. The night suited him better, he always thought.

Since arriving in this cell, Borden had found his thoughts blissfully empty. One might think that solitude and minimal distractions would be a recipe for introspection and therefore simmering rage, but it had been quite the opposite. Agent Ella Dark had found him in Austin Creed’s kitchen and rightfully taken him down, as was her job. He didn’t hate Agent Ella Dark. He’d thought he might, in the beginning, lying in the infirmary with his ribs strapped, but hate needed fuel and she hadn’t given him any. She had simply been what she was, the way a door was a door. What she’d taken from him that night was not so much his freedom as the choice to go back. He’d been promised Louisiana State, the vocational unit, the smell of pine in the workshop, and her voice moving down the row of benches. Miss Doyle, checking the work. Instead there was this parish cell, and silence, and the last message sitting in his memory where he could embrace it any time he wanted.

Do not call me anymore. Finish it. You know where.

He hadn’t finished it. That was the one splinter he lived with. Everything she had built in him, everything they had built together, and at the end he had sat down in a serial killer’s kitchen and waited for the agent instead. On the night of his capture, he’d ruminated on the events, looking for the flaw that explained the break. But within a day, he’d begun to understand it plainly: he was a restorer. He had never once in his life been able to destroy the final piece.

He was back to thinking about drawer runners when the light came up the window.

Third floor, his cell, and the window was a strip of green-tinted plastic with the parish streetlights smeared across it, and up through the smear rose a red star with a green star beside it.