Finally I was ushered into a narrow corridor lined with Plexiglas booths, where I waited some more on a rickety metal folding chair. It smelled like disinfectant and basement and grease all at once. A guard on the other side of the glass led Bradford Stockton over to me. Brad sat down and frowned.
The friendly, long-eyelashed kid from the pictures in Danielle’s scrapbook was gone. He was thirty-four now, tall and lean and serious-looking in orange prison garb that seemed to glow against his smooth, dark skin. His angular face was still handsome, but now it was also a little bit mean.
I picked up the grimy handset next to the glass and waited for Brad to do the same. When he did, his movements were slow and fluid like we both had all the time in the world.
“Who’re you?” he said.
“Roxane Weary. Your sister hired me—”
“What happened to the other guy?”
“Novotny?” I said.
Brad nodded.
“He retired.”
“So Dani’s paying for the lawyer and for you now?”
It was a strange thing to be concerned about, given his circumstances. “Yes, I guess so.”
“How much?” He slouched low in his seat. “How much is she paying you?”
“You can ask her that,” I said.
He glared at me some more. “Where the hell did she find you, anyway? Because you look a little, I don’t know, like you might not be doing all that much better than me.”
“Thank you for that,” I said. I tucked the handset between my ear and my shoulder and I folded my arms across my chest. It was cold in the prison, like the heat was set to about forty-five degrees.
“Are you here to ask me if I did it? Try to see if you can tell if I’m lying or not?”
I ignored the attitude. “Did your sister tell you she saw Sarah?”
Brad gave a slight nod. “So she said.”
“You don’t believe her?”
“She wants everything to be okay,” he said. “She tries real hard. And she can believe whatever she wants, if it makes her feel better. But it doesn’t have to make me feel better.”
“You don’t think I can help you.”
“No offense, lady, but no, I do not.”
I couldn’t blame him for that. Fifteen years of white strangers trying to help him hadn’t done fuck-all for Brad Stockton. But I wasn’t sure that I believed he meant the no offense. I wanted to hear his side of the story but I wasn’t about to beg him for it if he was going to sit there and insult me. “Listen, it’s up to you,” I said. “The date’s been set. You’re almost done, Brad, and your sister wants to feel like she did every fucking thing she could. Because even though you’ll be dead, she’s still going to have to live the rest of her life. So you talk to me or you don’t, but I’m doing this for her, not for you. And I’m getting paid regardless.”
He looked a bit startled and said nothing for a while, as if he was trying to decide about me. Then he straightened up a little, brows knitting together.
“Okay,” I said. “Where do you think Sarah is?”
“I don’t know.”
“I know you don’t know, Brad. But help me out here. Speculate.”
“Help you?” He sighed heavily before he answered. “I think she must be gone.”
“Gone?” I repeated.
“Passed on. It took me a long time to accept that she wasn’t going to come back, because that meant she had to be gone. But there’s no way Sarah would leave me here, to face what I face.” He sighed, a short forceful burst of air through the phone. “I don’t want to talk about Sarah. How is that going to help?”
“You let me worry about that. This is the easiest thing you’ll do all day. It’s just answering questions.”
He shook his head but eventually he shrugged.
“Did you ever meet her parents?”
“A few times.”
“And?”
Another shrug. “They were, I don’t know, nice. Polite to me. That’s why it was such a shock, everything Mrs. Cook’s sister said at the trial. That they were afraid of me? We played Scrabble together once.” He sighed. “But, I guess you never know what people say behind your back. My mom used to say, What people say about you behind your back is none of your business.”
Unless it gets you convicted of murder. “Do you think Mrs. Cook really said those things?”
“I don’t know what I think anymore,” Brad said.
“I talked to Kenny Brayfield yesterday,” I said. “He told me you guys used to get into some trouble together. The kind of trouble that makes people afraid of you?”
He shrugged. “Vandalism, whatever. Kenny used to sell weed around school. Figures he would bring up that shit—dude still wants to be a gangster. But his parents are loaded. He never got in trouble for anything.”
We were starting to get off topic. “Tell me about what went on that day, when you saw her last.”
He let out a long breath. “I don’t want to think about it. Every time, it’s like it rips me open again.” He started shaking his head again. “Do you really think you’re going to be able to do something nobody could do for fifteen years? Prove anything that nobody could prove? You act like it should be so easy for me to sit here and talk to you, but it isn’t. Maybe I’m done talking now. I don’t like my sister spending more money anyway.”
“You don’t like her spending money on trying to get you not executed?” I said. “That doesn’t sound like an innocent man talking.”
He flinched. “Fuck you.” He leaned forward, jabbing an index finger in my direction. “You don’t know anything about me or my sister.”
“I’m on your side.”
“You think sides are going to help me now?” Brad said.
He had a point there.
“Listen. When I got in here at first,” he said, “I was so depressed. Everyone said I did these terrible things I didn’t do, and it wasn’t like some situation that would pass, it was forever. I tried to make a, you know, a noose, from my sheets. Like, no sense in waiting around.” He looked up at the ceiling. “But I couldn’t do it—I mean, I tried, but I couldn’t get it right, what the fuck do I know about making a noose from sheets. Then they put me in the hospital here and I was all fucked up on lithium, and all I could do was stare up at the ceiling. When I went back to my cell after that, I was like, okay, this is happening. It’s like that song, you sing it when you’re a kid. About a bear hunt.”
I knew the song he meant. “Can’t go over it,” I said. “Can’t go under it.”
“Can’t go around it,” Brad said, smiling very faintly. “Gotta go through it.”
We watched each other for another long while.