Alex Cross's Trial

stated, “The hanging was most exciting, gruesome and, I must add, satisfying in its vengefulness for the niggerman’s impertinence.”

    I was glad that I kept reading, even though I wanted to look away. The final sentences were, for me, the most startling:

    When interviewed, Chief of Police Phineas Eversman said that he was unaware of any lynching that previous evening in Eudora. A visitor in Chief Eversman’s office, the respected Eudora Justice Everett Corbett, agreed. “I too know nothing about a lynching in Eudora,” Judge Corbett said.

    I let the newspapers fall to the floor. No wonder Roosevelt needed someone to sort out this tangle of contradictions, half-truths, and outright lies.

    Loneliness also gives a man time for thinking. It broke my heart to be so far away from my family—and to have left on this trip without a single kind word between Meg and me. From my valise I drew a small pewter picture frame, hinged in the middle. I opened the frame and stared at the joined photographs.

    On the left was Meg, her smile so warm, so bright and unforced, that I found myself smiling back at her.

    On the right were Alice and Amelia, posed on the sofa in our parlor. Both of them wore stiff expressions, but I knew the girls were seconds away from exploding into laughter.

    I studied the images for a few minutes, thinking only good thoughts. I wished there were some way I could blink my eyes and bring the pictures to life so that all three of them could be here with me.

    Chapter 27

    EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, I discovered that the current Maybelle, a pleasant and blustery woman, was not much of a cook. I sat at the dining room table, poking at breakfast: a biscuit as tough as old harness leather, grits that were more lumps than grits, and a piece of salt pork that was 100 percent gristle.

    “Miss Maybelle, who belongs to that bicycle I saw leaning against the shed out back?” I finally asked. “I need to see a few people around town.”

    “I keep that for the boy runs errands for me after school,” she said. “You welcome to borry it, if you like.”

    Five minutes later I was rolling up my pant legs to protect them from bicycle chain grease. Two minutes after that I was sailing down Commerce Street. I felt like a nine-year-old boy again, keeping my balance with my knees while extending my arms sideways in a respectable display of balancing skills.

    I was nine again, but everything I saw was filtered through the eyes of a thirty-year-old man.

    I rode the bicycle two circuits around the tiny park in front of the Methodist church, took a left at the minister’s house and another left at the scuppernong arbor. At the end of the vine-covered trellis stood a simple white wooden structure that was unsupervised by anyone’s eyes and universally known among the young people of Eudora as the Catch-a-Kiss Gazebo.

    It was here that I came with Elizabeth the summer I was fifteen. It was here, on that same wooden bench, that I leaned in to kiss Elizabeth and was startled down to my toes by an open-mouthed kiss in return, full of passion and tongue and spit. At the same moment I felt her hand running smoothly up the side of my thigh. I felt the pressure of her nails. My own hand moved from her waist to her small, rounded bosom.

    Then Elizabeth pulled away and shook her head, spilling blond curls onto her shoulders. “Oh, Ben, I want to kiss you and kiss you. And more. I want to do everything, Ben. But I can’t. You know we can’t.”

    I had never heard a girl talk like that. Most boys my age were hopeless when it came to discussing such matters—at least, in Eudora they were.

    There were tears in Elizabeth’s eyes. “It’s all right,” I said, but then I grinned. “But we could kiss some more. No harm in that.” So Elizabeth and I kissed, and sometimes we touched each other, but it never went any farther than that, and eventually I went away to Harvard, where I met Meg.

    Now I rode that bicycle fast down the lane, leaning into the curve, rounding the corner at the preacher’s house, faster and faster, remembering Elizabeth Begley and the first taste of sex that had ever happened to me anywhere but in my own head.

    Chapter 28

    I PEDALED THAT BICYCLE all the way from my growing-up years to the present day. And I began to see people I knew, shopkeepers, old neighbors, and I waved and called out “Hi.” A couple of times I stopped and talked with somebody from my school days, and that was fine.

    I rode over to Commerce