Birdy Waterman 01 - The Bone Box

subject came up).
    For every inmate with a visitor that afternoon, Birdy knew, there were probably scores of others who never had that human contact with anyone from outside. Never had visits with anyone, except maybe the occasional convict groupie or an eager-beaver churchgoer who wanted to save someone’s hardened soul from the system that only existed to make them pay for their sins in an earthly way.
    And then there was Tommy.
    As far as Birdy Waterman knew, until that afternoon when she came calling, he hadn’t had a single visitor. Birdy wondered if someone could be the same person they always were if they had no contact with those who knew him. Wasn’t part of who you were how others related to you, feeding your personality traits, shaping your character with their own? And yet Tommy still seemed like Tommy. A little subdued, certainly thin and haggard, but still Tommy nevertheless. During the visit he occasionally punctuated what he said with a short laugh—even if nothing was funny. When she heard the laugh, she was transported back to the Tommy he was before he became the Tommy who killed Anna Jo.
    Birdy remembered how the two of them had spent one insufferably hot day picking huckleberries. They’d cursed how small the berries were and worried that they’d never get enough to fill that half-gallon container that her mother had insisted was required for a pie. It was a couple weeks before Anna Jo’s murder. Now it seemed like days ago, not decades. She and Tommy had picked and picked and picked for hours. When it looked like they’d never get enough berries, Tommy had the bright idea of buying some from a vendor.
    “Your mom is too much of a stickler,” he’d said. “So let’s give her what she wants to make her happy.”
    The berries cost him his last dollar, but he didn’t care.
    Natalie Waterman did care. The berries they bought were not huckleberries, but blueberries.
    “Sorry, Aunt Natalie,” Tommy said. “I thought they looked a little large for hucks.” He flashed his bright white smile, gave that little laugh, and shrugged in the way that just made it easy. Everything was easier with Tommy, back then.
    As Birdy followed the queue and turned the corner toward the metal detectors and the glass-walled station where the guards monitored every blink of someone’s eyelash, a finger jabbed at her shoulder. It startled her.
    “I know why you’re here,” a man’s voice said, as she spun around. “Maybe even more than you do.”
    It was the same guard—the one who’d watched her and her cousin as they visited.
    “Excuse me?” she answered, looking him over. She read his ID badge: Ken Holloway. He was smaller there in the corridor than he was when he commanded a chair upfront overlooking the prisoners in his quadrant of the room. He had soft green eyes and a pockmarked face. Not handsome, not ugly. Despite the fact that he carried a gun, worked with the worst of humanity day in and day out, Sgt. Holloway seemed concerned.
    “Your cousin isn’t well,” he said.
    “What do you mean well ?” she asked.
    The guard stopped walking. Birdy stayed with him as the other visitors shuffled toward the doorway. “It was all he could do to get out of his cell and get down to see you.”
    “What’s wrong with him?” she asked.
    “It’s none of my business,” Sgt. Holloway said. “But I like the guy. He’s probably the most decent guy in the prison—that includes the guards and the superintendent’s so-called staff. Them for sure.”
    He wasn’t answering her question. She asked again, this time directly. “Is he sick?”
    Holloway shook his head. “Worse than sick. He’s dying. Leukemia. He’ll be dead before Christmas. At least that’s what the docs tell him. Anyway, you need to know that.”
    “Why are you telling me this? Why didn’t he?”
    He stared into her eyes, searching. “He’s proud, Dr. Waterman.”
    The use of her name surprised her. “You know who I am?”
    He nodded. “Hell yeah, he’s bragged about you for years. I know all about you, your backstory, the crime that sent him here. I know stuff you don’t even know.”
    “Like what, for instance?”
    “Like Tom Freeland didn’t kill that girl up in Neah Bay.”
    “I’m sure you’ve heard claims of innocence before around here,” she said, looking at an inmate pushing a laundry cart down the hall.
    “Yeah. More times than you probably think. But Tommy’s different. He has honor. He’s never