CHAPTER 43
TRAVERSING THE HALLWAYS WAS AN ACCOMPLISHMENT, BUT STILL CARRIED the weight of embarrassment.
The corridors were tackled only after a nurse set him up with his walker and got him started like a child bicycling for the first time without training wheels.
Look at him go! Gus could almost hear the nurse yell that when she let go of the tennis-ball coated walker as he took off shuffling the linoleum runways.
But he swallowed his pride and kept his ass moving.
Navigating the room, too, was becoming something he could handle.
Thanks to Jason’s drill-sergeant-style physical-therapy sessions, Gus could manage his way into and out of bed all on his own.
He had become proficient at attaching his prosthesis and was able to hobble around his room on crutches, no longer at the staff’s mercy when he needed to take a leak.
It was a healthy milestone both for him and for the nurses he was driving to the brink of insanity.
Tonight he waited until the rehab prison was dark and quiet.
Until the hallways outside his room were soft with night lighting.
He knew he had two or three unfettered hours now that the overnight nurse had left his room.
He no longer needed the hourly medicine checks, the repositioning, or the drainage of his tubes and catheters.
His hard work had earned him three hours of freedom each night, and he planned to take advantage of them.
It took twenty minutes to drag the boxes to the bedside chair but, finally, retired Detective Gustavo Morelli sat with his files stacked around him.
For a moment, he felt like his old self.
He opened the first box, plucked a folder from within, and spread the contents across the overbed table.
The pain in his hip, from the last thirty minutes of effort, faded. He hadn’t felt this alive in years.
The files were marked 1999. It had been so long, he hadn’t been sure of the name.
But over the Fourth of July weekend when he binge watched the Grace Sebold documentary on Jason’s iPad, it had come to him.
Now the file of Henry Anderson was in front of him.
He ran his index finger under the name: Henry Anderson.
The boy was eighteen years old when he died.
Gus, who finished his career with the New York Police Department’s Detective Bureau, had been a senior detective out in the sticks of Wilmington, New York, back in 1999 and was called to investigate the boy’s death, which occurred on Whiteface Mountain.
A few minutes of paging through the reports was all it took to transport Gus across the years.
The memories flooded back to him. Two hours into reviewing the file, the rising sun brought dawn through his hospital window and slanted a bright streak across his table.
By then, Gus remembered vividly the boy named Henry Anderson, as if Gus were still working the case.
As if it hadn’t been put to rest nearly twenty years before, but instead were alive and active and exhaling hot breaths of air that fogged the prism of his mind the way all his homicides used to do.
He slipped the pages back into the boxes.
He didn’t have the energy to stow them in the closet, but knew Jason would be the first person to arrive this morning.
He climbed back into bed and removed his prosthesis.
Then he pulled the table over to him. He clicked his pen to life and touched it to the blank page. The heading was easy:
Dear Ms. Ryan,
I believe you’ve made a great error ...