Page 59 of Nobody's Fool

“They said maybe I could get temporary furlough to attend her funeral.” He shakes his head in bewilderment. “What a weird system, right? Funeral leave is compassion, but saying goodbye while the person is alive, while they can still hear and be comforted by it and maybe get some closure, that’s a bridge too far.”

He looks at me as though he expects me to agree.

“Nicole’s mother died four years ago,” I tell him. “Toward the end, she would call out her only daughter’s name. It was the saddest sound I ever heard.”

We just stand there for a moment.

“Where’s your evidence you didn’t do it?” I ask.

“Tell me, Kierce, how does a man prove a negative?”

“That’s what you wanted to tell me?”

“No,” he says. “I didn’t want to tell you anything at all.”

I step back. “I’m not following.”

“My mother does,” Tad Grayson says. “She’s the reason I asked you here.”

He turns back to her door and puts his hand on the knob. He looks back at me to make sure I’m ready. I really don’t want to go in. I’m not good with these sorts of things. Who is? I don’t like hanging with sickpeople. I’m a bit of a germophobe, and this place is crawling with too many varieties.

But I follow him into his mother’s sickroom.

I expect her to be hooked up to a million machines. She is not. She is sitting up in the made bed, the cover over her lower extremities. Her hair is thin and gray. I can see her scalp. Her skin is ashen. Her eyes seem too large, too bright, too blue, as they follow us. I try to match the woman I see now with the woman in the photographs, with the one I saw take the stand during her son’s trial all those years ago. It’s hard to make that match anyplace but those blue eyes that stare into mine, trying to pierce me, just as she did when she was on the stand.

I don’t flinch.

“Tad?” his mother says.

“Yes, Mom.”

“Did you offer our guest a drink?”

I handle that. “He didn’t, I’m not a guest, and I don’t want a drink.”

Her eyes slide toward her son. “Wait outside, please.”

That seems to catch Tad off guard. “Mom?”

“Please, Tad,” and while the voice is weak, I think he still hears steel from his childhood in it. “Wait outside.”

Tad leaves, closing the door behind him. I don’t move. The smells are all still here, fighting past some kind of lemon-scented spray that somehow makes them even worse. There is a chair pulled up next to the bed. I don’t take it. I don’t move. I just stay standing.

“Tad was here with me,” she says, “the night Nicole was shot.”

This is not news to me.

“Yeah, I was in the court when you testified, remember? You had nothing to corroborate your alibi. No one else who lived on your street saw Tad that night. The jury didn’t buy it then. I don’t buy it now.”

“I’m dying.”

“I know,” I say. “That doesn’t change anything. A mother’s dying declaration to get her son off doesn’t add weight to your testimony.Another witness saw your son right near the murder scene at the same time you claim he was here.”

“Brian Ansell,” she says.

“Yes.”

She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and says, “I’ve thought about that for a long time.”