Chapter Twelve
Cora opened the door to the Gothic library on the second floor and stepped inside.
The cavernous room was kept dim. The shutters were always drawn, to protect the ancient texts and priceless first editions.
It felt reverent, with its dark walnut panels and honeycombed ceiling hung with heavy lanterns.
The library was the place where Byrd kept his old newspapers—a copy for every day of the past seventeen years, locked away in dated drawers to age like wine.
Cora grabbed a duster from the closet and quickly brushed it over two bookshelves.
All the while, she soundlessly opened the drawers, gliding through the years and closing them again.
Each day had once been a blank page, now inked with the choices and actions of life’s grandest winners and losers.
News was only given to those on either end of the spectrum, and Cora wondered what she had done to fill each of those days.
She, like most people, was part of the in-betweens.
Her quiet life had passed through the years like whispers, and never once warranted a drop of ink.
Except for one single, solitary day.
It had started the afternoon Cora had been sent to the commissary for milk.
The Pelican Island commissary had been perched on the civilian side of the fence, near the pier where the ferry came in, sloshing the gray waves of the Bay onto the white wooden dock.
Cora had loved that commissary, with its drawers of paper and stamps and tins of coffee; the way it smelled of musty pine and the dust swirled in sunbeams. The store windows were always brilliant and clean, the light sluicing through them to fall in shafts on the newspapers, taffy, tobacco, crates of powdered milk.
Margaret, who worked the cash register, had fingers stained by tobacco and a laugh that sounded like hinges turning.
Beneath the counter there was a warped wooden crate of saltwater taffies, each wrapped in a crisp white paper.
Cora’s favorites were the banana creams.
Cora saw a copy of The Chronicle with a photograph of Warden Thomas pacing in front of a tight line of guards.
Her father was near the end on the left, standing at attention.
IMPENETRABLE FORTRESS, the headline said.
Pelican had been branded as the most secure prison in the United States—a golden charm winking in the light, urging criminals to even try to escape it.
Cora eyed the paper and then turned to the bottles of Moxie.
She had bought a lukewarm bottle of it for the first time with Dina at Tito’s, and she wanted to tell Jack that he was right, it tasted like rust and molasses.
The prisoners weren’t ever allowed to set foot in that store.
She stood in the golden light of the commissary and reached into her pocket for an extra coin.
She thought about getting him a lemon piece of taffy, like the pie of his mother’s he liked so well, but she had tried them all and finally settled on the one she thought was best. She slid a pair of coins to Margaret across the counter for two banana creams and then walked past Warden Thomas’s home, holding the milk and wearing an oversized sweater pulled tight around her shoulders, gravel crunching like shattered glass under her feet.
Two pieces of soft, chewy taffy sat in her pocket.
She put the powdered milk away, thinking of what her father had said about the new hire, and waited until the tower guard was likely listening to the daily radio serial, his attention divided.
Then she went to the barbed-wire fence, lacing her fingers through the iron links.
A light, misty rain was falling, and the fog seemed to be eating through the sunlight.
Jack had been crouched fifty yards away on his knees, mud splotching his trousers, a thin coat pulled around the collared blue chambray shirt all of the inmates wore.
Cora smiled at him and held out the taffy, wordlessly.
He rose and slowly moseyed over to the fence, all lanky limbs.
His face seemed to Cora to be growing sharper the longer he was on Pelican, his muscles growing more defined beneath his shirt, even though he was painfully thin.
The day was cold, but his hair was slicked to his forehead, sweating.
He saw the taffy she offered, and hesitated; Cora still remembered how deliberate and careful he was not to touch even her fingers when he took the small white package.
He unpeeled the delicate wrapper as though it were the last present he might ever get.
After a quick glance up at the guard tower, he bit into half of it.
Chewed it slowly, savoring it. His lashes were long and dark when he closed his eyes.
Cora unpeeled hers and ate it alongside him. Silently, on the other side of the fence, jaw working. It was almost better to watch him savor it than eating it herself. He swallowed the first bite and examined the soft marks his teeth had left.
“Do you mind if I save the rest?” he asked quietly. “For my brother?”
Cora hesitated. She had bought it for him, to enjoy a small taste of freedom, and she knew they could both get in terrible trouble if the candy was found in a search.
But it made her love him a little bit that day, that he would save his only present to share with his brother.
And that was when she had noticed how bright his eyes were.
Feverish.
“Are you ill?” she asked.
He shrugged. “It’s always cold in there,” he said, and a sudden shiver racked his body like a seizure. The first floor of “D” block was kept clean enough, but the constant moisture made mold grow; made everything dank and cold and dim in the winter, in those small cells.
Cora watched him shake from within the warmth and softness of her knit sweater.
She half wished she could take it off and pass it through the tiny openings in the fence.
When she was sick, her mother placed a cool hand to Cora’s forehead, made squash and apple soup, read to her from Pilgrim’s Progress; and then hummed to the radio while she cleaned the dishes.
Her presence did more than all the rest to comfort Cora.
With one more glance up at the guard tower, Cora had gingerly touched her fingertips to the fence. “What did your mother used to do?” she asked. “When you fell ill?”
He always seemed to relax when he talked about his mother. Like he was warming up from the inside, finding something that hadn’t quite completely frozen yet. A look appeared on his face that was somehow both pained and grateful.
He cleared his throat. “She would sing.” Under his breath he hummed a song Cora had never heard before.
She pretended not to notice when his voice cracked a little, and he cleared his throat again.
He had seemed so much older than her, but really he hadn’t been.
“She used to make eggs and hash,” he said, almost embarrassed, “and she’d sprinkle salt and cheese on top and say ‘Abracadabra.’ ”
“What is her name?” Cora had asked. “Your mother?”
“Althea.” He had blinked, as though he had gone away and then returned to Pelican anew. “It’s going to be a long winter,” he said roughly. He tucked the unfinished taffy away.
“You probably won’t be outdoors much, soon?” she had asked, and she heard the wistfulness in her own voice. He would be tucking himself into the darkness for the winter, just like the flowers.
“I wish it were spring. I have to believe it isn’t always going to be this way,” he said roughly. “Gotta believe there’s something happening in the dark, that we just can’t see yet. Something better coming.”
“You should hang something in your cell to cheer you,” Cora said. “Pictures of flowers, from a magazine, maybe. That’s what Margaret does.”
“Margaret?” he asked.
“The lady in the commissary. You know where that is?” she asked.
He nodded. “Yeah. But I’ve never been in there. It’s on the civilian side of the fence. Right by where I planted those dahlias.”
“Yeah,” she said. “My da’s worried about that part. He says the ground there washes out in a heavy rain.”
Her face had flushed red. She could hardly believe she had said it.
“Enjoy the taffy,” she had said, and then she had taken off in a run.
It had been an accident. She hadn’t really meant to tell him and betray her father’s confidence like that.
Cora grimaced.
Not that first time, anyway.
Cora opened her eyes and forced herself to find the newspaper front page that still haunted her. Her hand closed around the drawer handle, and she slid it open. August 14, 1917.
Rusty Weathers’s familiar face looked back at her. She felt the familiar tightness clamp down in her chest. She looked into the halftone photograph of his face. He was wearing his Pelican uniform.
He used to come over to their house for dinner on the nights her mother made a roast. He liked clam chowder, and telling the same jokes over and over, and he had a chess set with pieces carved like forest animals.
He gave out licorice ropes and a nickel each on Easter.
Cora had known Rusty since she was five years old.
And then the Yates brothers had killed him.
GUARD SLAUGHTERED IN DARING PELICAN ESCAPE, the headline said.
Rusty’s obituary ran beneath it.
Cora stood in the still, dim room with golden dust swirling around her.
On the thirteenth of August every year, she sent Rusty’s daughter a wad of cash.
Anonymously. It was the one day of the year she went to church.
She wasn’t Catholic, but one year she considered going to confession, just to let the awful truth finally pass her lips.
Instead, she stayed at the back of the sanctuary, soundlessly mouthing the words to the hymns, and lit a candle before leaving halfway through.