Laura was quiet, running her finger lightly over the cover of the little album that Creighton had passed to her. I turned the ignition and put the air on to cool the car down, but didn’t drive off immediately.
“Is he always that way?” I asked.
“He’s been lovely, really. Appreciative, and … and engaged … and more positive than I could ever be in his circumstances. It’s just the news today about the execution actually being scheduled that threw him.” When I didn’t respond, she said, “You think he’s dissembling.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“That’s what you’re thinking.”
“What gets me is, why so certain the children are alive? So certain. But that business with him talking like it’s sixteen years ago.”
Laura said, “It’s years of wanting something so bad he’s convinced himself,” but then her face clouded. “For all I know they still could be alive. I don’t know.”
She opened the album and started to page through it. I looked, too, having been too far away at the other end of the table to see it well.
The album was the kind with clear plastic sleeves, one per page, each holding a five-by-seven photo. The cover had been decorated with multicolored sequins, glued on to spell “Happy Father’s Day.” At least originally. After all those years, most of the sequins had fallen off, with “H pp ath ’s Da” remaining, the rest of the letters filled in with spots of white glue where the sequins had been.
Laura opened the album. The first photo showed two babies, one blissfully sucking on his toe. Maybe he had just discovered his foot. As she continued to turn the pages, I saw a rough chronological progression, two bigger babies in a top-of-the-line double stroller, with an older but still-small child reaching up to the bar to push them. The three children, two on tricycles and one on a two-wheeler, in a row facing the camera. A group photo at the beach, all five of the Creightons building a sand castle. Mom in happier times. A fishing trip, the younger children in those orange life preservers, the little boy holding a fish that wasn’t much bigger than the feathery lure in its mouth. Maybe Lake Orange.
The pictures were pretty much the same as would be found in any well-to-do family’s collection. But here is what was different about this album, now that I was able to take a closer look:
There was fifteen years of body oil from a man’s fingers on the clear plastic covering each photograph. The way you could tell was that, over the years, the oil attracted the grime of the prison and left spots of rough, raised dirt stuck to the pages. Of course, that would only happen if the book had been handled hundreds, thousands of times. Other, less dense spots showed on top of the faces. There some of the grime had been rubbed away.
He had touched their faces repeatedly.
All the pages were that way, spotted with the dirt of the prison years.
I put the car in drive and headed away from the prison. “Did Creighton ever show you this photograph album?”
“Never. Even though he used to talk to me about them, for purposes of my getting him exonerated, he always said to keep the family out of it. He said he didn’t want people to see his emotion and think it was an act. He was always very firm about not including anything about the children in his appeals. It made me respect him.”
And more than respect him? I wondered. Laura let her fingertips settle onto the same spots on a photograph where his fingers must have touched. It looked like it was the closest she could allow herself to come to touching the man himself. She said, “Brigid, does a man who keeps this in his cell, looks at the pictures as much as he must have looked at them over the years, who talks about his children as if they were still alive, who gives the album into my keeping in order to keep it safe after his death—is that a man who killed his children?”
No. No. Or only if he was insane with guilt. But not even that, because, while he might have been standard death-row crazy, I didn’t sense anyone could pin a psychiatric label on him. No.
I said, “I have to tell you, it troubled me when you made that promise to save him.”
“But what do you think? Do you still think he’s guilty?”
“I wish to God he was.”
“You’re not answering,” Laura said. “Say you don’t think he did it. Say it flat out.”
“All my instincts say he’s not guilty, but that doesn’t mean you’ll win the case. Laura, I have to know that you fully realize, even if we get the evidence you’re looking for, if the Law wants someone dead, it’s pretty hard to stop it no matter what the evidence. I want you to say that flat out.”
“I understand,” she said. “But you have to understand I’m going to fight like hell.”
I turned to look at her as she said that, and watched her mouth get thin and straight with judgment, and I hated that. So I said, and this was pretty much the truth, same as what I had said before, “I tell you, Coleman, I trusted you once before and you were right. Maybe this time you’re wrong. But right now I can say I think it’s a good thing, what you’re doing.”
We were coming to I-95, and as I pulled onto the ramp there was thunder, and lightning, and then a deluge that felt like being followed by a waterfall. I slowed a bit and glanced at my watch. Yep, in Florida in June you can almost set your watch by the afternoon storm.
“Should we pull off the road?” Laura asked.
She was clearly not a Floridian like I was. “No. Two miles from here it will stop. That loan shark Creighton borrowed from. Do you have a name?”
“Manuel Gutierrez,” Laura said, gripping her knees and watching the road for me.
“No shit? I know Manny Gutierrez. I wonder if he’s still alive.”
No response, just the stare through the rain.
“Then tell me about Madame Defarge,” I said to distract her so she wouldn’t worry about me getting us killed.
“Will keeps calling her that, and I haven’t had time to google it.”
“Madame Defarge is a Dickens character. She knits a stitch for every aristocrat who gets guillotined during the French Revolution.”
“So it just means that Alison Samuels is bloodthirsty.”
“Doh, why didn’t I think of saying it that way. Tell me about her. Why did she give Creighton that photograph?”
“She’s the spokesperson for the Haven, that group that helps with retrieving missing and exploited children. She tells how she ran away from abusive parents, got involved in prostitution for a while, but got out of the game when she was nineteen, pulled herself up and got a graduate degree in sociology, working some bona fide job nights while she did it. She’s been with the Haven for three years, came up the ranks fast, made a name for herself. Last year when she was going over some old cases, she got interested in finding out where the Creighton children are buried, or whether they even died that night. She has this idea that Marcus had given them to someone and they’ve been working the sex trade because Marcus saw them as baggage that would keep him from getting Shayna Murry. Only he didn’t have the balls to kill them. Something like that. Crazy.”
“But why the obsession with the Creightons? There’s lots of other cases of missing children and runaways.”
“None in Florida where three children disappear overnight and their bodies are never found. They’re seen one day and then gone. Apparently she has aged photographs of Devon, Sara, and Kirsten and compares them to photographs she finds online. She shoves them in his face and makes horrible suggestions about what became of them, and he continues to let her in. She’s feeding his obsession that they’re alive, and he wants her to find them.”
“That’s pretty sick.”
“He wants to believe her, that the kids are alive. The only good thing about her is that she keeps him from giving up. Otherwise it’s like—”
“Like trying to push a freight train with your shoulder? Or like trying to fill up his lungs for him?”
Laura took a deep breath. I think it reassured her that someone else had felt the same. “Exactly like. You know.”
The mention of lungs and the slowing of the rain made me call the hospital again. Mom answered this time, and I tried not to beat myself up for not being there when she was always there, as if we were in competition. Sure, I cared, I worried, but I could not sit there. You can’t just sit there breathing for the other person. You have to come and go from the hospital room.
Right? Am I right?
Yet you think about them while you’re away, and when you find yourself not thinking about them, you feel guilty. Or you wonder if you’ve somehow sealed their death sentence with your momentary lack of caring. Superstitious crap.
Where was I? Oh, right. Mom said Dad was resting, weak but not in too much discomfort. Just weak. I said I would be there by the late afternoon.
I hung up and noticed we were approaching I-95. The rain had stopped.
“How far to the Creighton house?” I asked.
“Not far. But there’s nothing to see.”
I knew we both had our reasons for heading back to Fort Lauderdale, but a different route wouldn’t take that much more time, I told myself. I talked Laura into stopping by the Creighton house. Something compelled me to go there, like a pilgrimage.