Gathering Dark, Candice Fox [inspirational books for students .TXT] 📗

“Whoa! Look at this thing!” He shoved his nose against the side of the gopher mansion. “What is it? Is it … is it a mouse house? It’s a mouse house! Oh, man! Oh, man! Have you got Hugh Jackman? Is he here?”

“Jamie, just settle down a bit, will you?” Sasha sighed.

“Have you got the gopher?”

“He’s here.” I scooped Hugh Jackman out of my pocket and handed him to my child. “Take him.”

Jamie bundled the tiny gopher into his hands and ran to the edge of the porch, sitting down on the step. Sasha and I watched him giggling and snickering as the creature ran up his wrist to his shoulder. The boy took the gopher and rested it carefully on the crown of his head, laughing as it began digging and sifting through his hair.

“I know he’s your child,” Sasha said gently. I turned and looked at her. Her eyes were filled with tears. “I know you want more time with him. But I just can’t think about how to work out a custody arrangement with you right now. I’m looking at having to put my kid on a plane to Wyoming every second week.”

“I know,” I said. My heart actually felt heavy in my chest, like a warm, dull weight sitting painfully on my ribs. “It was unfair to ask you to do so.”

“I don’t want to share him with anyone,” Sasha said. We watched the boy together. “He’s mine.”

No, he’s mine, I thought. I bit my lip to stop it from trembling. Jamie was rubbing the gopher against his cheek, smiling, his eyes closed. He held the creature to his face and the animal gripped his nose in both hands, sniffed the tip, child and pet connected as its tiny whiskers tickled Jamie’s perfect skin.

The moment was eternal, yet suddenly gone forever. Jamie turned toward us, two women hiding their tears in the shade of the porch.

“I’m hungry,” the boy said. “Where’s Dad?”

JESSICA

The last time Jessica had been to San Quentin she had been visiting Jake Trelles, the Silver Lake Killer. The case that had begun it all. She’d had little hope of the man speaking to the cop who had put him away for the unsolved disappearances of women going back a decade, women like Bernice Beauvoir. Young, pretty, full of plans and ambitions, women walking to their cars in darkened parking lots or taking shortcuts between backstreets, the kind of women who had been fodder for serial killers seemingly forever. As she’d predicted, Trelles had stonewalled her on questions she still had about the case.

Now she put her gun, wallet, phone, and rental-car keys in the same coin-operated locker in the visitors’ center and took her badge and ID to the bored yet skeptical women running the processing center. It was outside of visiting hours, and staff had been specially called in from the prison to see Jessica through. Routines broken. Rules bent. They didn’t like it. Jessica stood with her arms outstretched as a guard ran the body scanner wand up and down her more times than was really necessary.

Jessica had been to San Quentin to talk to inmates maybe five times in her career. The prison was an hour and a half’s drive from the airport. Three hours of driving, one hour for a standard visit, and two hours’ worth of delays across arrival and departure—waiting on the tarmac, getting coffee at the airport, getting through security, hiring and then returning the car. She asked herself why she hadn’t recognized the pattern as soon as she saw the times attached to Dayly’s airline tickets. Jessica consoled herself that without the letters from John Fishwick, Dayly’s trip to San Quentin had been impossible to guess.

She followed a yellow painted stripe on the sidewalk toward death row. To her left, San Francisco Bay sprawled beyond the fences and watchtowers, glittering and thrumming with life under a hard blue sky. Ferries leaving Alcatraz, crab boats bringing in their loads, followed by enormous black seals. She showed her ID again at the heavy double doors to the row. The long room she entered was empty. The two lines of steel cages where full-contact visits were held were silent and still, their folding chairs stacked neatly against the inner walls of bulletproof glass and steel mesh. Vending machines hummed against one wall. The last time she had come here, she’d stood aside to make room while a little old woman carried a massive tray of snacks toward a cage where a man in his forties, presumably her son, sat waiting in his prison denims in the farthest cage, a pink party hat strapped on his head.

Jessica took a stool that was bolted to the ground near one of the glass visitation windows, as directed by a guard. When John Fishwick arrived he was not cuffed, and his pale denim shirt was rumpled. He was taller than Jessica expected, broad shoulders pulling the front of the shirt tight, a head of silver hair slicked back against the sides of his head. Jessica had only seen pictures of Dayly Lawlor, but she thought she recognized the girl’s long, thin nose and deep, thoughtful brown eyes in the man’s weathered visage.

“Well, this is a novelty,” John said when he picked up the intercom handset. He took a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket, lit one, and blew smoke against the glass as he looked over what he could see of Jessica’s body. “Visiting outside of hours. Cop or fed?”

“Cop,” Jessica said. “West LAPD. I’m here to talk about Dayly.”

“That’s a long way for a cop to come to investigate an assault charge,” John said. “So I assume it’s not that.”

“What?”

“She came here and visited. I assaulted her. That’s why I’m in here and not out there, where I usually am.” He pointed through the glass to the cages over Jessica’s shoulder. “I lost my contact privileges. Won’t get them back for a couple of years