He couldn’t write that to Sabrina, either.
What could he tell her? That he was scared? That he was strung as tight as he’d been at any point during his incarceration? That he walked the corridors of the prison with an eye for every shadow, constantly on guard lest someone make a last attempt to trip him up?
He couldn’t tell her that he rarely slept at night, that too many thoughts plagued his mind—thoughts and fears and dreams that were as intricately connected and as fragile as a house of cards.
And so he who had hated writing from the start but had come so far wasn’t able to scrawl much more than the briefest of responses to Sabrina’s letters. He bottled everything in, and grew more tense. His daily run did little for the cramping muscles in his shoulder or the clenching muscles at his jaw. Nothing could help, he feared, but release.
Eventually, in the name of emotional survival, he tuned out all else but the thought of his parole. He didn’t think about what he’d do when he was released. He didn’t think about Noel Greer and revenge. And he didn’t think about Sabrina.
The only thing that mattered was getting out. Just getting out.
On November ninth, the parole board interviewed twenty-two men whose parole eligibility was forthcoming. Seven were granted parole, fifteen were denied it, and word spread through Pine Island that things were tough.
As fate would have it, Derek wasn’t called before the board until November tenth. Of the sixteen inmates interviewed that day, nine were approved and seven deferred. Derek was one of the nine.
Chapter 11
ON THE fifteenth of November at seven in the morning, Derek left Pine Island and returned to the mainland a free man. As they’d arranged, he was met by David, who had driven Derek’s Saab from New York the night before. The two men talked over breakfast.
“How do you feel?”
“Tired,” Derek said because it was the first thing that came to mind. He hadn’t slept in two days, hadn’t really slept in far longer than that. “A little numb,” he added, casting a glance around the modest coffee shop where at his own request they’d stopped. “A little incredulous. A little skeptical.”
David felt a little sad, because Derek’s response illustrated the toll the past two years had taken. Derek had always been a positive man, but his faith in the positive had been badly shaken.
“How about excited?” David asked, giving him a push in the right direction.
Derek smiled. “That’ll come once the numbness wears off.” The smile faded as he stole another darting glance around the shop. Then he looked down at his half-eaten Belgian waffle, then, in more surreptitious glances, at the jeans and shirt he wore. The jeans were faded Calvins, the shirt a plaid number with a similar label. They were his, taken from his closet and forwarded on by David in anticipation of his release. They didn’t fit as well as they once had.
“Do I look funny?”
“Of course not.”
“I feel it. I feel like those people can tell right off just where I’ve been. I should have told you not to send jeans.”
David arched a brow. “My friend, there wasn’t a hell of a lot of a casual nature in your closet but jeans. I didn’t think you’d want to travel in a blazer and slacks, or a suit or a tux.”
Derek was silent. Lifting his fork and knife, he carefully cut off another piece of the waffle. After he’d swallowed it, he said, “I’ll have to shop when I get back to New York.”
“Where are you headed now?”
Putting down the fork and knife, Derek dropped his hands, pressed his palms to his thighs. “To the airport to drop you off so you can catch a shuttle home. I really appreciate this, David. The thought of being confined in an airplane didn’t appeal to me.” He paused. “The thought of being confined anywhere didn’t appeal to me. Doesn’t. This way I can take my time, stop and get out when I want, roll down the windows and breathe fresh air.” He jumped a little when the waitress suddenly appeared at his elbow with refills of coffee. When she left, he asked, “Are you sure you won’t drive back with me?”
“I don’t drive in no forty-degree weather with the windows down,” David drawled, then added, “And besides, I have to be back for a hearing at eleven.” He scratched his cheek. “To tell you the truth, I thought you’d be heading to Vermont.”
Derek raised his coffee cup, took a careful sip, set the cup down. He wiped his upper lip with his lower one. His eyes went to those of his lawyer and friend. “Did you call her?”
“Right after you called me.” Which had been on the tenth, several hours after Derek had learned that he’d been granted parole.
“What did she say?”
“Nothing at first. It took me a while to figure out she was crying.”
Derek squeezed his eyes shut and sucked in a shaky breath. “She did that to me once, too.” It was a minute before he opened his eyes. “She’s a special lady.”
“Yeah. So why aren’t you driving up to see her?”
Derek had been asking himself the same question for the last four days. “I need distance. I need distance between me and”—he tossed his head in the vague direction of the harbor—“that place before I go to her. I need to feel a little more human. I need a good night’s sleep. I need to know I can get one without jerking up in a panicky sweat.” He took another shaky breath. “It’s been a fucking lousy few weeks.”
“It’s been a fucking lousy few years.”
Having no argument with that, Derek cut off another piece of waffle and nudged it idly around his plate. “What’s the latest on Greer?”
“He’s running. He’ll probably announce it right after the first of the year.”
“Do you think he’ll be watching what I do?”
“You bet. I don’t think he’ll try any more funny stuff, though. It was one thing when you were in the can with dozens of violent men. A murder there can easily be made to look like something else. But he knows you were transferred from Parkersville, and he knows why, and he knows I know why. He won’t risk murder again, particularly not after he declares his candidacy.”
Derek wasn’t sure whether the logic was correct, but his mind had already moved on down the road. “If he’s running, I’ve got, a year. One year to link him to Lloyd Ballantine.”
David shifted in his seat. He was always uncomfortable when Derek started in on the business with Ballantine. Not that there was any doubt that Derek had been set up for murder, nor that powerful fingers had pulled strings during the trial. David just wasn’t so sure of the Ballantine connection. He’d hate to see Derek waste valuable time chasing a wild goose.
“Don’t go at it yet. Take some time off. You need it, Derek. You said so yourself, you need to breathe a little. Relax. Have some fun. Decide what you want to do about work, and when you’ve got yourself together, then you go after the Ballantine files.”
* * *
Derek thought about David’s words a lot in the week to come, especially the part about relaxing and having fun. He didn’t do much of either. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to, just that it didn’t work out—which wasn’t to say that he didn’t enjoy his freedom. He valued all the little things he’d taken for granted for years. He went where he wanted when he wanted, did what he wanted when he wanted—and if that meant taking a hot shower at two in the morning, going out for a Big Mac at nine o’clock at night or wandering around the city for hours at a stretch, so much the better. The problem was, he couldn’t forget where he’d been.
He was self-conscious. He felt as though anyone who looked at him knew. Unfortunately, many people did. He’d been seen regularly on prime-time television for four years before his arrest, and the publicity that had accompanied the trial had, if anything, raised his familiarity quotient. People with familiar faces did double takes, then stared, cracking wary smiles only in response to Derek’s quiet-spoken hello. Even his agent, Craig Jacobs, seemed not quite sure what to do with him when he met him for lunch the day after he got back. For the first fi
ve minutes they were together, he went on and on about how surprised—and pleased!—he’d been to receive Derek’s call and how wonderful Derek looked. Derek knew that he looked tired, pale and thin, so Craig had already blown his credibility by the time he reached the part about things not being the same since Derek had left.
But Derek was polite. He nodded and thanked Craig for the thought, then suffered through the gossip session that accompanied a lunch so “nouvelle” that he would have found it bizarre even if he’d spent the last two years in Paris, rather than prison.
He was experiencing culture shock. After his prolonged period of confinement, New York was overwhelming. When he left his apartment on even the simplest of errands, his pulse raced. He was familiar with it all—the traffic, the people, the buildings—yet he wasn’t. Any sudden noise made him jump, and the city streets were full of sudden noises: the honk of a horn, the blare of a siren, the squeal of brakes. And sudden movement. That set him off, too. For two years of his life, sudden noise or movement had spelled trouble. The deconditioning, he realized, would take some time. In many respects he was still a prisoner.
And a murderer. That fact hit him now that he was free in ways it hadn’t hit him when he was in prison. He could understand why, he supposed. In prison, he’d been but one of many, and most of those had been such clearly violent types that he hadn’t identified with them. Here, he stood out. It occurred to him more than once when he bumped into someone he knew that what he interpreted as awkwardness was, in fact, fear. He was a murderer. He’d done hard time with hard men. He could be dangerous.
What bothered him most, though, was not what people thought. It was what he thought. For two years, he’d refused to dwell on it. He’d relived the crime, but mainly in terms of what had happened where and when and why. He had preoccupied himself with a sort of mental police report, and when his mind had dared stray to the moral implications of the crime, he pushed them aside by focusing on the farce that had been his trial and the horrors of prison.
He couldn’t do that now. He was a free man. And Joey Padilla? He was dead. Derek had made him dead—unintentionally, perhaps, but it had been his hand that directed the gun to Padilla’s stomach.
Derek thought about that. He thought about it a lot, and it dragged him into a blue funk. Because two other thoughts came on the heels of that one.
The first was that he was his old man’s son.
The second was that Sabrina deserved better.
Sabrina. As the week went on, he thought about her more and more. Each thought tugged at his heart a little, stirred his insides a little, did something vaguely debilitating around the backs of his knees. He might have called or written, but he didn’t, and he knew that she was very probably worried and hurt. More than once he told himself that it was for the best, that if she was worried and hurt, she’d realize sooner that she was buying grief she didn’t need.
The problem was, he didn’t want her to realize that. He wanted to be with her. And the bitch of that was that the ball was in his corner now. She’d had it before. She’d been the one to go to Parkersville, then return month after month. She’d been the first to write after his transfer to Pine Island. But now she was in her farmhouse in Vermont and she wasn’t making a move. She knew that he’d been released. She could have gotten his phone number and called. But she hadn’t. Because it was his turn.
Even in the bluest of moments, when Derek felt like the scum on the pond in Central Park as he ran by it each day, it never occurred to him not to go. The only question was when.
After six days in the city, when he’d reached the point where Sabrina dominated his thoughts, he knew the time had come.
Packing a duffle with clothes to last him anywhere from two days to a month, he drove north. He had her address packed away in his mind, committed to memory since the instant it had appeared on the left-hand corner of the envelope that came in David’s packet. With each rest stop he passed, he wondered if he should call. But he should have called a week before. Since he hadn’t done that, and since she might be upset with him, and since her love might even have fizzled and died in that time, he didn’t dare.
So he never did stop to call. He did stop, though, once to fill the car with gas, once to get some coffee, once to use the men’s room, once to stretch his legs and contemplate the blanket of clouds overhead. He was stalling, he knew, stalling like a yellow-bellied coward, and it gave him one more reason to hate himself.
Then, midway through the drive, two things happened. The first was outside. The clouds began to lighten, then thin, then slowly but surely allow for the spotty appearance of blue.
The second was inside, inside himself. He felt a pull. It came from the north, and it caused his foot to press a bit more heavily on the gas, caused his heart to beat just a little faster. He supposed that it might have been there all along; that it might have been responsible for the restlessness he’d felt those last few days in New York; that he might have sensed it earlier but for the doubts and fears that had worked against it. It was the magnetic force he’d felt before, and it grew stronger with each passing mile.
With strength came greater clarity and need. Just as he had seen Sabrina’s face in the cracks on the ceiling of his cell, now he saw it on his windshield. He could see her, see her smile, feel the warmth of her sun. His fingers felt not the hard leather of the steering wheel around which they were wrapped, but the softness of her skin. The scent of jasmine wafted through his mind, overpowering the diesel fumes that drifted through as he passed a truck.
By the time he turned off the highway and started along the back road that led to her farmhouse, his heart was thudding.
He had no trouble finding her driveway, since her mailbox was new and prominently marked with the number he knew. He paused for a minute, forced himself to breathe slowly and deeply, unclenched his hand from the wheel, shifted and drove on.
Thick, shady trees lined the route, crowding the road so tightly at times that branches slapped the sides of his car. And then it came again, an omen that was too trite to be believed. The farmhouse lay at the end of the drive, bathed in sunlight. The light at the end of the tunnel.
Swallowing his trepidation, Derek drove the last few yards and drew the Saab to a halt beside a small, sporty green Mercedes that wasn’t at all new but looked well kept. He’d often wondered what kind of car Sabrina drove. This one was classy and suited her well.
For that matter, he mused, shifting his gaze, the house suited her, too. It was of modest design, done in the finest of materials. In typical Cape style, only the first floor was visible from the front, but the size and slope of the roof suggested a bounty of second-floor space. The roof was of fresh cedar shingles, the facade of fieldstone, the sides of clapboard newly painted a light Nantucket gray.
He climbed from his car and started toward the front door, his stomach knotting in anticipation. At least she was home, he reflected. He’d have hated to arrive like this and find her out. Then again, he didn’t know she was here. She could be out with a friend. He should have called.
The antique brass knocker made a resounding thud against the door. Derek focused on its barnboard planks. He waited, listened for footsteps. Hearing nothing he lifted his hand and swung the knocker again. Though the sound jolted his own body, it had no apparent effect on any occupant of the house.
She was out. He should have called.
He looked around. The day had turned into a beauty—sunny and just warm enough for him to leave his jacket in the car. Maybe she’d taken advantage of the November treat, too. She’d written of woods and meadows and streams. He glanced to the side of the house, where deciduous trees stood mostly bare before more dense stands of pines and firs. Maybe she was out there. Somewhere.
Discouraged, he stuck his hands in his pockets and started walking idly around the house to the stretch of lawn that opened onto the river. Sabrina hadn’t exaggerated the beauty of the setting. The grass was still green, though strewn with
drying leaves in an assortment of late fall shades. The river curved around the edge of the lawn, not much more than twenty-five feet wide. The slate-blue water was lightened in spots by rocks beneath the surface. Several boulders broke the surface. A bird landed on an overhanging willow branch, but if it chirped, the sound was swallowed by the gentle rush of the water.
Derek stood still, drinking in the serenity of the scene. Or did the serenity come from Sabrina? He always thought it, though what he’d felt during the drive from New York had not been exactly serene.
Remembrance of those feelings brought the moment to an end. Turning away from the river, he spotted the barn. He’d always been intrigued by barns. They represented everything he’d never had as a kid—a loft to play in, a pet to care for, a way of life that was slower, wholesome, more gentle. There was something peaceful about barns, and though this one wasn’t anything special to look at, it beckoned.
He completed the walk around the back of the house until he stood before it. As barns went, it was modest in size. A worn path leading from its front toward a break in the woods suggested that at one point it had housed some form of livestock. It showed its age. Random strips of weatherboarding had come unnailed, the hay door hung askew, and the red paint was tired and worn.
Unable to resist the invitation of the half-open great door, Derek moved forward. His deck shoes made no sound on the apron. He slipped through, then stopped and caught his breath.
Inside, the barn was a cavern of shadows. From a single high dormer, a beam of sunlight cut a conical swathe through the dark. In that small pool of sunlight was Sabrina.
She was sitting on her heels beside an old captain’s table. A piece of sandpaper lay on the wood; the ultrafine grains of sawdust floating in the light attested to the work she’d been doing. She wasn’t working now, though. She was grasping the edge of the table with one hand, while the sun glittered off her bowed blond head. And as Derek stood hidden in the shadows, he saw her brush tears from her cheeks.
Commitments Page 24
