Free Fox River by Emilie Richards Page B

drifted down the stairwell.
    “Would you like your tea again?” Jake said.
    Julia wanted her life again. She did not want to be a tormented, hysterical, sightless woman who was forced to depend on her stepfather to put a mug of tea in her hand.
    She shook her head. “No, I’m going to find it on my own, thanks.”
    She waited for someone to argue. No one did.
    “We’ll leave you to it, then,” Jake said. “And just so you know, if you happen to knock that particular mug to the floor, that would be fine with me.”
    “Not one of my better efforts,” Maisy agreed.
    “Definitely not.”
    Julia could picture Jake, his arm slung over Maisy’s shoulder, leading his wife from the room. Tears filled her eyes again.
    She took a moment to mourn all she had lost. Then she swallowed her tears and began her search.

6
    F idelity Sutherland, her long blond hair woven in a flawless French braid, came to Christian that night. Her smile was as sassy as ever, her throat a gaping caricature, a hideously grinning half-moon that spouted a river of blood down the front of a tailored white shirt.
    He awoke without a sound and sat up quickly, but Fidelity would not be purged. In death, as in life, she was tenacious. As a young woman she had found ways to have everything she wanted. Dead almost ten years, she hadn’t lost her touch.
    By the faint lightening of the sky Christian saw that dawn was perched on the horizon. There was a small barred window in his cell, too high for any purpose other than to let in slivers of light. He’d often wondered why windows had been included in the prison’s design. To remind the refuse of society that the sun rose and set without them?
    Christian pillowed his head on his arms and stared up at the window. One year a red-winged blackbird had taken a liking to the narrow ledge and landed there intermittently all summer, vocalizing his own version of “nevermore,” which had seemed all too appropriate to Christian. He’d found himself looking for the blackbird whenever he was in his cell, but the moment Christian had begun to count on finding it there, the bird disappeared.
    Blackbirds had darkened the skies at Claymore Park. Christian had grown up with them. Telephone lines crowded with glistening feathered bodies like endless ropes of Tahitian pearls. Once he had told Julia Ashbourne that her hair reminded him of a blackbird’s wing.
    Once he had been a foolishly romantic young man with no idea of how quickly everything in his life could change.
    “You awake?”
    Christian didn’t take his eyes from the window. His cell mate, a man named Landis, always woke early. Landis, not yet twenty-one, was getting a head start on a lifetime of mornings like this one. Like Christian, his chances of encountering dawn any place else were almost nonexistent.
    “Go back to sleep,” Christian said. “You have time.”
    “Shit, I don’t sleep. You don’t know what can happen to you when you’re sleeping.”
    “Nothing’s going to happen in here. You’re not my type.”
    “You got a type?”
    Christian’s type had been female and deceptively fragile, black-haired, blue-eyed and much too serious. In the company of the more flamboyant Fidelity Sutherland she had been easy for some people to overlook. He hadn’t been one of them.
    He thought the sky was growing lighter quickly, which was too bad. “My type is female. Which means you’re safe.”
    “Shit, most people got that idea when they come in here. But look what goes on.”
    “Don’t look. You’ll be better off.”
    “How you get to be so bored with all this? You don’t care about bein’ here?”
    “What good would it do to care?”
    “I never met nobody as alone as you.” Landis continued, buoyed by Christian’s silence. “You got no family?”
    “All gone.”
    “No woman waiting?”
    “That would be a long wait, wouldn’t it?”
    “You get mail, but you don’t even read it.”
    Christian shifted, easing the pressure on his