Free It's a Crime by Jacqueline Carey Page A

walls of mysteries and one of plant books. (She’d been collecting mysteries longer.) There she would sit in a large leather armchair under a full-spectrum light and either read novels or memorize plant lists. Before his arrest Frank had left for work before six in the morning. Now she would find him in the early hours gazing through his study window at the untidy sweep of Manhattan skyline. Or holding his closet door open and looking at his suits. Or stroking the ears of the Boston terrier, who was the only one of the dogs he really got along with.
    Curiously, when Ruby went back to Hart Ridge–Tooner Academy in the fall, her schedule seemed to become more erratic as well. In the morning Pat dropped her off at the park across the street from the school, where the bad kids had always hung out. Then Ruby would show up at odd hours, saying that there weren’t enough computers to go around, or that there had been a fire drill and she’d gotten cold. Once after Pat returned her to school for her last-period class, Frank asked irritably, “How much do we pay for her to go there? I want you to keep an eye on her.” Without waiting for a reply, he said, “I’m going to prison. I still can’t believe it, but I’m really going to prison.”
    Absently he asked Pat to take off her clothes, which she did. Then he brought up his “last supper” as a free man. Frank wanted to make love at all hours of the day, but he often got sidetracked and started to talk instead. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. He had to be at Allenwood on the following Tuesday, and Monday evening was not the best time to eat out. “I don’t care how expensive the restaurant is; they’re liable to serve food they couldn’t get rid of over the weekend.”
    “How true,” said Pat, lying naked in the same place she would be a week later, alone. Her pillow was unaccountably familiar; it was her head that held the strange future in it.
    She offered to cook Julia Child’s chicken in cream and port wine, Marcella Hazen’s pasta with Bolognese sauce, or Eula Mae Dore’s yellow cake, each of which he had declared to be his favorite dish at one time or another. Better not to mention that she would miss the sex: its frequency, yes, its regularity, yes, yes, but also its continuing capacity to surprise. He would not see such a remark as a compliment. He would take it as a criticism of his present inaction or he’d remember it later and worry about her fidelity.
    Still startlingly present and palpable, Frank made a face and shook his head so slightly the movement could have been involuntary. Whether this meant “No” or “Don’t bother me, I’m thinking,” Pat couldn’t tell.
    It occurred to her that Frank was behaving as he thought a “man” should under the circumstances. This struck her as funny, because she never thought of him as a “man,” just as Frank. She idly wondered if she ever tried to behave like a “woman.” No, she decided, definitely not.
    The last weekend was an intense version of the days preceding it. Frank couldn’t have slept at all, except for an occasional hour or two of wine-induced napping. He had always been single-minded, and now his focus seemed to be on consuming as much as possible before the deadline. After a midmorning shower on Saturday, he wandered into their bedroom, slapping the white flesh at his waist and saying, “I think I’ve put on twenty pounds in the last two weeks.”
    He was a tallish man, skinny and gangly most of his life, but he’d finally started to thicken through both the shoulders and the stomach. The tension in his voice did not express dissatisfaction over his weight, however. It reflected the intensity of his unconscious goal: to incorporate as much of this life into the only thing he would be allowed to take with him on Tuesday—his body.
    He picked up the Chilean wine he’d left on Pat’s dresser. “Veal, maybe,” he said. “They keep veal calves in little cages, so I