The Never List

she’d cried, an animal howl from deep inside, until she slowly lost that final grip on consciousness.
    She woke up, probably days later—she couldn’t tell—in the cellar, on the cold stone floor, in a pool of her own vomit.

CHAPTER 8
    I sat on the bed in my hotel room, looking at my face in the mirror over the empty bureau. I gripped my cell phone, talking myself into making the call I knew I had to make. It was a Monday morning, and I had Tracy’s office number scribbled on a piece of paper in my other hand. I took a deep breath and dialed.
    After three rings I heard her voice answer hello, and I almost couldn’t summon my own to reply.
    “Hello!?” she said again, impatient as always.
    “Tracy?” She was the only one who hadn’t changed her name.
    “Yes, who’s this? Is this a sales call?” She was already annoyed.
    “No, Tracy, it’s me, Sarah.” I heard a sound of disgust, then a dial tone.
    “Well, that went well,” I said to my face in the mirror. I dialed again. It rang four times, then she picked up.
    “What do you want?” she said angrily. Her voice dripped with disdain.
    “Tracy, I know you don’t want to talk to me, but please hear me out.”
    “Is this about the parole hearing? You can save your breath. I’m going. I’ve talked to McCordy. You and I have nothing to talk about.”
    “It isn’t about that. Well, it is, but it isn’t.”
    “You’re not making sense, Sarah. Get it together.” She hadn’t changed much in the ten years since I’d spoken to her. I could tell I only had about twenty seconds to persuade her not to hang up. I got to the point.
    “Tracy, do you get letters?”
    A pause. She obviously knew what I meant. Finally, suspiciously, “Yes. Why?”
    “I do too, and listen, I think he’s telling us something in them.”
    “I’m sure in his crazy head he is, but they don’t make any sense at all. He is insane , remember, Sarah. Nutso. Maybe not legally, maybe not enough to get him off the hook. But crazy enough that we should be throwing out his letters unopened.”
    I gasped. “You don’t do that, do you? Throw them out?”
    Another pause. And then, quieter this time, with reluctance, “No. I have them.”
    “Maybe he’s crazy, maybe not. But listen, I think I’ve figured something out. I think he is sending messages to you in my letters, and maybe to Christine as well. I think there might be something in his letters to you that I might understand, and vice versa.”
    She didn’t answer for a long time, but I knew her well enough to know I should wait. She was thinking.
    “And how is this going to help us, Sarah? Do you think he’s letting us each know how special we are to him? How much he still loves us? Do you think he’s going to give us some key to put him in jail longer? He is many things, Sarah, but he is not stupid.”
    “No, he’s not stupid. But he likes to take risks. He likes games, and he might want to give us a fair hand. It would give him a lot of pleasure to think he was telling us something meaningful and we were too stupid to figure it out.”
    I could sense her mulling this over in the quiet over the line. “You have a point. So what do we do? Send each other our letters?”
    I took a deep breath. “I think it’s more complicated than that. I think … I think we need to meet.”
    “That seems indescribably unnecessary.” Her tone was icy. I could hear her hatred loud and clear.
    “Listen, Tracy, I’ll be back in New York in two days. Can you drive down and meet me there? I’m sure you have a lot going on right now with your journal and all that, but I don’t think we have time to waste. What is your cell number? I can text you when I get in, and we can meet.”
    “I’ll think about it,” she replied. And then the line went dead.

CHAPTER 9
    After ordering in herbal tea from room service to recover from my contact with Tracy, I drove back out to Keeler, to pay a visit to Noah Philben at his new office. As a rule, I didn’t like people with radical ideas, and I had, up until this point, structured my entire life to avoid them. Fanatics, mystics, and extremists all tended toward irrational and unexpected action. Statistics could not protect you from that.
    I wanted people to fit squarely within their appropriately delineated demographic category: age, education, income level. These facts should have predictive value, and when they didn’t, my ability to interpret and relate to people went askew. As Jennifer