Monument Road

by Michael Wiley

Then we were outside in the heat of the July afternoon, thunderclouds piling on top of each other. As we walked across the empty lot to our bus stops, her hand brushed mine. I put my hands in my pockets.

  She would need to cross the highway to get from my stop to hers. But she stood with me as cars and trucks rushed past. ‘Are you going to take me home with you?’ she asked.

  I felt a shiver. Dread. Desire. Mostly fear. ‘Do you want me to?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe.’

  Jared thought I needed to get laid. But Dr Patel warned about going from zero to ninety. Viaducts and all that. ‘I’m pretty much wrecked right now,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ she said, as if that added interest.

  ‘When I get this way, I sometimes throw up.’

  She nodded. ‘Maybe we should wait until next time.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe,’ I said.

  She stared at me as if wondering whether I was worth the bother. ‘Tomorrow night?’ she said.

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Pick me up at the theater at eight,’ she said. ‘Find a car. We’ll go someplace.’ Then she stepped into the traffic.

  TEN

  Back at the Cardinal, I stretched on my bed with the lamp off, thinking about Cynthia at home with her parents and how far away that seemed from me. The blue light from the TV flickered on the furniture and ceiling. My head spun. After a while, Bill Higby appeared on the TV screen in footage of him leaving county jail – clean-shaved, wearing khakis and a blue sport coat, two women at his side, one of them gripping his hand. With that look in his eyes, I figured his head was spinning too. I got down on the carpet and did a hundred forty pushups and three hundred sit-ups. But when I got back on my bed, my head still spun and spun until I fell asleep.

  When I woke again in the middle of the night, staring at the flickering on the ceiling, I thought for a moment that I was breaking apart, shattering into shards of light. I watched the wavering and fluttering, and decided that if I did break, I would let myself smash into pieces without resisting. Then I slept again and woke the next morning only when my neighbors – Bill Hopper had called them Jimmy and Susan – started fighting outside my room. Good people, Hopper had called them. I looked through the window shades. Broken glass on the parking lot glinted in the early-morning sunlight. Jimmy wore black jeans and a black T-shirt, and Susan, both eyes bruised now, wore a short green dress, as if they’d just come from an all-night party, though I couldn’t figure who would invite them.

  I pulled on pants, opened the door, and said, ‘Would you mind quieting down or taking it to your room?’

  Susan glared at me. Jimmy said, ‘What kind of sick-ass freak are you?’

  I said, ‘Huh?’

  He gestured at my door.

  A pair of white Fruit of the Loom boy’s underwear hung from the handle. It was threadbare and streaked with blood or something that looked like it.

  I yelled, ‘Jesus!’ and jumped away. My heart pounded. Sweat broke from my skin. I screamed at Jimmy, ‘Get it off my door!’

  ‘Freak,’ he said, and walked toward the motel office.

  ‘Who put them there?’ I yelled at Susan.

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Get it off,’ I said. ‘Please.’

  ‘Sorry, honey.’ She followed Jimmy to the office.

  I ran out to the highway and sat in the gravel along the shoulder. I stared at my door. It remained half open. I stared at the underwear hanging from the handle. It matched Steven Bronson’s pair, as the prosecution presented it at my trial. The fumes of a passing truck washed over me. Bits of gravel – kicked up by a car – stung my back.

  Jimmy and Susan left the motel office, glanced at me as if I was wrecking the neighborhood, and disappeared into their room.

  So I went to a bush on the roadside and tore off a branch.

  Then I went to my door and poked at the underwear until it hung from the end of the stick. I carried it to the office and dropped it on the counter.

  I was shaking with anger. ‘Someone left this on my door.’

  ‘The other guests are complaining about you,’ Hopper said.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Playing your TV too loud last night. Yelling at them outside their room. You know I welcome all kinds, but—’

  ‘I had my TV on quiet,’ I said, ‘and I yelled at them because they were yelling and’ – I pointed at the underwear – ‘because these were hanging on my door handle.’

  ‘Why would Jimmy and Susan put those on your door?’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t say they did.’

  ‘Then why were you yelling at them? You can’t be disturbing the other guests.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘They say you were,’ he said.

  ‘Do you have a security camera?’ I asked.

  ‘It broke four years ago.’

  ‘This place sucks,’ I said, and I turned to go.

  ‘Hey!’ he said. ‘Take those with you.’

  I carried the underwear out on the end of the stick. Like a flag of surrender. I took them to the trash bin and dropped them in. I chucked the stick in after them.

  My mind raced and I sweated and stank on the bus downtown. The other passengers gave me space and eyed me as if they heard me ticking. First thing when I climbed the stairs to the Justice Now Initiative and went in, Jane looked at me and did a double take. She said, ‘What happened?’

  I told her and Hank about my morning.

  ‘A nasty prank,’ she said. ‘At that place, I’m not surprised.’

  I said, ‘It was someone who knew the details. It was the same brand. Same everything.’

  Hank looked skeptical.

  ‘I remember,’ I said. ‘I remember everything.’

  ‘You’ve got to get your mind off it,’ Jane said. ‘Put all of that bad energy into good work.’

  ‘I’m staying at this motel because the people there have no right to judge me.’

  Hank said, ‘You’ve got to stop taking yourself down to the lowest common denominator.’

  Now I turned my anger on him. ‘I’ve been lower than the lowest. For eight years. This is a big step up.’

  His face flushed.

  ‘No one has a right to judge you,’ Jane said. ‘Least of all for what happened to the Bronson brothers.’ She picked up a folder and carried it to Thelma’s empty desk. ‘Thelma comes in at ten today. In the meantime, take a look at this file. Maybe you can make something of it.’

  I was still sweating. ‘You know what? I can’t handle this today.’ I turned to leave.

  Jane went back to her desk. ‘I think the file will interest you.’

  I kept going.

  ‘It’s on Bill Higby,’ she said.

  I stopped. ‘What about him?’

  She just stared at me, so I went to the desk and opened the folder.

  The file was twelve pages long – a tightly formatted list of citizen complaints and commendations, reaching back to the beginning of Higby’s career at the Sheriff’s Office. There were thirty-one entries in all, and they appeared with columns marked Dates, Complainant or Endorser, Actions, and Resolutions. When I was in prison, I spent years tracking down information about Higby, but I’d come up with only about half of the list.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ I asked.

  ‘Your case isn’t over,’ Jane said. ‘The State Attorney might decide to try you again. And you still have your civil suit.’

  ‘Right. But where did you get it?’

  ‘Take a look at numbers eighteen, twenty-three, and twenty-seven.’

  The three entries involved the Skooner family. I already knew about twenty-three and twenty-seven. The Skooners filed formal complaints after Higby came to their house to intercede in the fight between the judge and his wife, and again to stop Josh from playing loud music. According to the report for the first of those incidents, Higby wore a pistol on his belt, and though he never drew it, he kept touching it – ‘c
aressing’ was the word Melody Skooner used.

  But entry eighteen – filed four years before the marital dispute – praised him for tracking down and returning Josh Skooner, who, at age eleven, ran away from home. The Actions column said Higby found him fifty miles away, east of the town of Bostwick along the St Johns River, on land owned by a company named Tomhanson Mill. The incident report ended with the notation Fam prop. No charge.

  I figured No charge meant the Tomhanson Mill owners decided against prosecuting Josh for trespassing and whatever else he did.

  I typed the letters Fam prop into Google, and the top hits came from real estate ads and records of last wills. In them, Fam prop meant Family property. Did the Skooners own Tomhanson Mill or a stake in the company? If they did, that would explain how an eleven-year-old knew to go to this place, fifty miles from home, though not how he got there. And it would explain why Higby knew to look for him there.

  I searched the pairing ‘Eric Skooner’ and ‘Tomhanson.’ The names brought up three links to reunion events for alumni of Episcopal High School, where ‘Eric Skooner’ and ‘Melody Tomhanson Skooner’ graduated. They also brought up a funeral announcement for Melody Skooner’s father, Geoffrey Tomhanson, a year after Josh ran away and another funeral announcement, for Melody Skooner, five years ago.

  I looked at Jane and said, ‘Done.’

  She’d just gotten back to work. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Josh Skooner was camping out on his grandfather’s land. Higby brought him back. That’s all.’

  ‘That was quick,’ Hank said.

  Jane said, ‘The point is, he did bring him back. He knew the kid. And he helped the Skooners before everything went wrong between them.’

  ‘Even a bad man does good now and then,’ I said. ‘Probably by accident.’ I laid the file on her desk. ‘I’m heading out.’

  But then Hank’s phone rang, and when he picked up, he said uh-huh a couple of times, listened for a moment, and held the phone to me. ‘It’s for you,’ he said.

  ‘You’re kidding?’

  He shrugged.

  I took the phone.

  Kim Jenkins, the witness in the crack house shooting, said, ‘How well do you know Thomas LaFlora?’ Before I could answer, she asked, ‘What’s he like now? Because I knew him. Back then, he could’ve killed those people, even if he didn’t. He was capable of it. I saw him do as bad as that to others.’

  ‘I can’t say what he did or didn’t do back then,’ I said. ‘I can only tell you what he was like on death row.’

  ‘That’s all I want.’

  ‘He was broken,’ I said. ‘He said nothing to anyone. He looked away if you talked to him. I would’ve thought someone had torn out his vocal cords except I sometimes heard him talking to himself in his cell at night. If they execute him now, they’ll just be finishing the job.’

  Jane and Hank watched me as if my finger hovered over the switch that would inject the lethal drugs into Thomas LaFlora’s body. On the phone, Kim Jenkins was quiet for a long time. Then she asked, ‘Is it too late for him? If he got out now, would it be too late?’

  I hadn’t seen him in five years, ever since they moved me from death row into general population. But I guessed it was already too late even then. I said, ‘If he didn’t kill them, you’ve got to say so.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  I felt a flash of anger. ‘You don’t know if he killed those people? Or you don’t know if you can say it?’

  She hung up.

  When I handed the phone back to Hank, he and Jane were all smiles.

  I shook my head. ‘I got mad at her.’

  ‘You did great,’ Jane said.

  ‘You have authority,’ Hank said. ‘She called to talk to you. She’ll come around.’

  Jane gave me a gentle look. ‘You’re doing good work. You’ve just got to go easy on yourself. Maybe you would do better to stay here today than to go back to the motel. Too much time to brood there.’

  Hank said, ‘Or if you need to take the day to yourself, do something you enjoy.’ Dr Patel’s advice too – as if they were in this together.

  I looked at him. I looked at Jane. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Give me something to do.’

  I spent the rest of the morning at Thelma’s desk, searching the internet for information on the lawyers who represented Thomas LaFlora in his original trial and his appeals, looking at transcripts of Eric Skooner’s original prosecution of him, and digging through the electronic case files of the judge who sentenced him to death. Even after Thelma came in, Jane let me continue at the computer. There was peace in the work. I liked the case numbers. I liked the clean fonts in the depositions, the transcripts of testimony, and the court rulings. I liked the neatly squared bureaucracy. I knew that much of what I saw might lie to me and anyone else who saw it. The documents I’d researched in my own case had lied and lied and had dripped with hypocrisy. But I also knew that if I looked long and hard enough, I could detect the lies as lies and see the hypocrisy as hypocrisy. And that meant that even if the world was screwed up, order might remain under the chaos. I just needed to find it and show it to others, and maybe, if the right people saw it – people like Jane and Hank, or the judge who released me – we could sweep the chaos aside.

  I worked through lunch, disappearing into the computer screen the way I sometimes did in prison, sweating again, working until Jane and Hank eyed each other, as if they smelled wires burning. At four o’clock, Jane said, ‘You’ve done enough for today.’

  ‘Plenty more to investigate,’ Hank said. ‘Can’t do it all at once.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said again. ‘Anyway, I have a date tonight.’

  Jane smiled. ‘You’re full of surprises. That’s what Hank was talking about. Go out and enjoy yourself.’

  Hank looked more concerned. ‘You’re hanging on to a pendulum, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘It’s all or nothing? Swinging on a wrecking ball?’

  I stared at him.

  But Thelma came from behind me and ruffled my hair. ‘Our own Lazarus.’

  ‘One problem, though.’ I glanced from Jane to Hank. ‘I need to borrow a car.’

  Jane looked at Hank. ‘Can you give me a ride?’

  He tipped his head, as if to say he could.

  She reached for her purse but then asked, ‘Have you gotten a driver’s license?’

  ‘Soon,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it tomorrow.’

  She put her purse on the desk. ‘Well, you can borrow my car when you have it.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Hank said. ‘Same goes for me.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Thelma said, and she gave me the key to her car. ‘Don’t get pulled over or I’ll deny I let you borrow it.’

  So I drove her Nissan out of the parking garage. But instead of going back to the motel or straight to the Cineplex, I drove to the west side of the city, then south on the ring road. When I came to Blanding Boulevard, I exited and dropped past cinderblock carwashes, tire shops, credit unions, a cemetery, an IHOP, a pawnshop, and a Christian bookstore. Overhead, thunderclouds piled in the sky. My mind raced, and I wanted to pull over and close my eyes, but I kept driving, past dingy roadside businesses and then a scrappy patch of woods with vines that had killed the trees they grew on.

  I turned on to Henley Road, crossed Black Creek, and cut on to Byron Road. Four news vans and two police cruisers stood in front of the house next door to the mansion where Judge Skooner, with his older son beside him, gave a TV interview on the morning after Josh died. The people by the vans now seemed to be waiting for Bill Higby to stick his head out of his front door. I figured the police were there to keep the reporters from storming his house when they ran out of patience.

  Compared with the surrounding houses, Higby’s single-story ranch was small, but he kept the yard neat and landscaped. Three flower gardens, bordered by railroad ties, dotted the front lawn, and purple-flowered bougainvillea grew up a trellised arch where a brick walkway met the road. Through the side yar
d, I saw the slow dark water of Black Creek.

  I parked on the grass shoulder behind one of the news vans and walked toward the house. A man with a long-lensed camera said, ‘Don’t bother. He won’t answer the door.’ But I went up the two steps to the front porch and rang the doorbell.

  I waited for almost a minute, then rang again.

  A voice behind me on the driveway yelled, ‘Hey,’ and when I turned, the man with the camera took a picture. ‘Thanks,’ he said, and retreated to the road.

  I turned back to the door and was about to knock when I heard movement inside. I put my face by the glass peephole. I wanted Higby to see me. When no one answered, I touched the doorbell again.

  The door yanked open.

  Higby, who’d appeared dressed neatly on the news last night, had turned into a rough-faced, barefoot man in cargo shorts and a yellow golf shirt that barely covered his belly. The way he stared reminded me of how he’d held me against the wall of an interview room.

  I made myself grin and said, ‘I wanted to see what you look like. Because I know what’s going through your head right now. You’re thinking, This can’t be happening. It isn’t real. And most of all, you’re thinking that you’re screwed. But the difference is, you deserve it. I came by to tell you that.’

  He looked at me from my feet to my head and said, ‘To me, you should be dead. They should’ve strapped you to a table and put a needle in your arm. I would’ve come and watched.’

  The words punched me. But I managed to say, ‘I’m alive. And do you know how I spent my day? I looked into all kinds of nastiness that people have accused you of. It’s a long list. But I had time – because a judge said you messed up. The judge said to set me free. So now I can do whatever I want. Every day. You know what I think I’ll do tomorrow? I’ll dig up more dirt on you. Maybe I’ll find something to help put you in prison for shooting your neighbor.’

  I stared at him, waiting for an answer. His eyes had gone blank.

  Again I said, ‘I wanted to tell you that.’ I turned and started down the steps.

  ‘What makes you think you can come here?’ he said.

  I turned and faced him. ‘What makes you think you can stop me? Look at yourself.’