Chapter 11
Logan
“I’ve driven past this place … I can’t tell you how many times over the years.
Had no idea it was a parole office.” My mother leans forward in the driver’s seat to peer out at the old brown-brick house on the corner of a residential street, its backyard paved over for cars.
A picnic table sits on a patch of grass by the sidewalk.
There’s no obvious signage to identify it for what it is, but I’m sure the residents around here have a good idea who’s strolling in and out that front door.
The clock on the truck dashboard shows three minutes to ten. “I should get in there.”
“Do you want me to come with you?” She looks at me expectantly.
I chuckle. It’s bad enough I’m thirty-eight and needing a ride everywhere from my mother. She’s not meeting my parole officer with me. “I can handle it. But I don’t know how long this’ll take.”
“That’s okay. I can kill time at the feed store. They have a special on fertilizer. Just text me when you’re done.” She holds up the new phone sitting in the cup holder. I would have left it there. “Do you remember how?”
“I’ll figure it out.” The last time I texted anyone, it was with a tiny flip phone, the messages short and painful to send with the three-letter number pad. This thing? Nothing makes me feel my absence from civilization more acutely than a tiny computer I’m supposed to carry around in my pocket.
Thomas showed me a few basics yesterday—how to set up a face-screening password and connect my email address—his fingers flying over the screen as he prattled words like iOS and AirDrop. He may as well have been speaking German.
“Okay, honey. Just get this over with so we can go to the bank, and the license office, and all that other fun stuff. We’ve got a long list of things to attack today.” She reaches across and smooths a wrinkled hand over my forearm, squeezing once before she releases me.
“See you in a bit.” I slide out of the truck and move for a front porch decorated with various flower planters and palms, browning at the ends with the colder temperatures. The wooden steps creak under my weight.
The foyer inside is cramped, the left side delegated to holding coat hooks and shoe mats.
The air smells of freshly brewed coffee, perfume, and citrus cleaner.
Everything is gray and beige except for the floors, which look like original hardwood refinished in a golden oak.
Framed motivational pictures decorate the wall.
Images of daunting snowcapped mountains and scenic meadows with slogans like “From setbacks come comebacks,” “Rebuild. Renew. Rise,” and “The past is a lesson, not a life sentence.” That, I’d argue, is false advertising.
A middle-aged brunette with black-brown eyes and long, red-painted nails peers up at me from her reception desk. “Name.”
She sounds as excited to be here as I am. “Logan Landry. I have a ten a.m. with—”
“Glen Howard. So you’re the one causing such a stir.” She appraises me with a gaze that says she deals with convicts all day long and isn’t the least bit unsettled by me.
“How am I doing that?”
Her eyes flitter over my face, slowing on the scar a beat, and then she reaches across her desk to collect a clipboard. “Fill this out.” She nods toward a row of chairs. “I’ll call you when he’s ready.”
With a nod of thanks—because Farrah, as the name plate reads, isn’t interested in conversation either—I take my seat.
“They really made an example out of you, huh?” Glen Howard flips one page after another from the thick stack before him, pausing only briefly to skim the highlights.
“And on your eighteenth birthday too. You couldn’t have committed your crimes a week earlier?
” My parole officer’s tone is dry, his expression flat, but I sense his pokes are meant to test me—my reaction, my remorse, or both—so I stay quiet and study his pockmarked cheeks and small eyes.
He must be close to sixty, his middle thick, and his tawny-beige skin heavily creased.
The pack of smokes sitting on a nearby filing cabinet label him a smoker, but even if they weren’t there, the stench of tobacco gives him away.
A moment passes and then he flips the page over. “Exemplary inmate for years, until the day Travis Dorsey stabbed you. Here—” He taps his own body. “What was that about?”
“Can’t remember,” I lie.
By Glen’s fleeting smirk, he knows it. “I used to work out of Sudbury. I remember Dorsey. He’s what we called a frequent flyer.
Brief stints, in and out, until he ended up doing real time.
Something about the name Murphy rang a bell, so I checked Dorsey’s old files and saw the no-contact restriction with a Hank Murphy.
He’s the brother of the deceased Ian Murphy.
What a coincidence.” His deadpan tone suggests otherwise.
The man has done his homework on me. “So, you knew Dorsey?”
“Not until I went inside,” I answer truthfully.
“What’d he have beef with you over? Or was it the other way around?”
“He came after me. It was self-defense.”
“Self-defense,” he echoes. “Severe concussion with brain swelling, broken jaw, internal bleeding, partial permanent paralysis …” He reads out loud the details I’m well acquainted with. “Guess you don’t like getting stabbed.”
It had nothing to do with getting stabbed and everything to do with the threats Travis Dorsey uttered after he drove the shiv into my body. “Does anyone?”
“If there is, I haven’t met them yet.” Glen closes the file folder—he’s already read it front to back, many times over, likely—and reaches for another one.
“Well, you arrived on time for your initial reporting appointment, so that’s a good start.
” He scribbles something on a page. “My job today is to go over the terms of your release as well as your correctional plan and make sure you understand them both so you don’t end up back in custody.
At the end of each meeting, I will file a report laying out everything we’ve discussed with the Offender Management System, which is accessible to the Parole Board of Canada.
Any questions so far? Good,” he goes on without waiting for my answer.
“The terms of your release are pretty basic. Report to me every other week, get a job, no drugs or alcohol. You’ll fill one of these before you leave today—” He holds up a medical plastic bag with a piss cup inside before tossing it onto the desk in front of me.
“And every visit until I decide we don’t need to.
It doesn’t look like you had any addictions before you went in and there’s nothing to suggest you developed one while on the inside, so I honestly don’t give a shit if you have the odd beer, ’kay?
Just don’t be stupid about it, like ordering at the bar where everyone’s a witness.
You know I’m gonna make you piss in a cup every two weeks, so let’s make sure your test comes back clean, got it? ”
I nod.
“But drugs? Those are a no-go. Don’t touch ’em.
What else …” He returns his attention to his folder.
“No traveling outside of Canada, and you need to be on your property between ten p.m. and six a.m. every day unless you have prior written permission from me, and it better be for a good reason. A ski trip to Banff is not a good reason. Clear?”
“Crystal.”
“Says here you’re living with your parents. Holt and Annie Landry.”
“That’s right.”
“In their home?”
“In an apartment above a detached garage.”
“Okay.” More scribbles. “The Landrys … I’ve heard of ’em. Great farmer’s market. They’re bison ranchers. Any guns on the premises?”
“Yeah, of course. They have to deal with wolves.” It’s a regular problem, especially with the calves.
“They can deal with them. You can’t. The guns are locked up and not accessible to you?”
“In a safe. Not accessible to me.”
“Good. Your sentence prohibits you from owning or handling a firearm for life. If you so much as sneeze on one and I hear about it, you’ll be back behind bars before you can sneeze a second time. Is that understood?”
I study my open palm for a beat, remembering when Jay and I used to shoot empty cans off the fence with the .22. We’d spend all day out in the field, laughing and burning through pellets.
Now, the idea of holding a gun makes my body break out in a cold sweat.
“No worries there.”
“Good. And my guess is you came home to work on their ranch? In the market?”
“On the ranch, yeah. Not the market.”
“No?” His eyebrows arch. “A paycheck’s a paycheck.”
“I’m not dealing with customers.” People will come in there knowing my history. Or, more likely, not come in anymore because they know my history. Who suffers then? My family. Not a chance I’ll allow that. I shake my head to punctuate my refusal. “Give me a quiet field and a fence to mend any day.”
“Sounds like you’ve got a lot of fences to mend.” He closes the folder, tosses it aside, and I can’t help but hear the double meaning in his words. “Now, while there aren’t any no-contact terms, I strongly suggest you stay far away from Jessica Whitley and her children.”
“Eric Whitley’s family.”
“That’s right.”
I note there’s no mention of David Combs’s family.
But they were only up here for David’s job and they left soon after his death, wanting to move on from the entire tragedy.
Where the Whitleys would have fought to bring back the death penalty, Melissa Combs asked the court for clemency on my behalf. Neither family got what they wanted.
“Is that gonna be a problem?” Glen asks.
“No, but I wouldn’t know them to see them.” Jessica Whitley came to the sentencing meeting, but it’s been decades. The kids were young. I’d never be able to pick them out of a crowd.
I once wrote letters to Jessica and Melissa to apologize for what happened. It was part of my therapy, when I finally started going. Melissa wrote back a few months later. She had moved on, remarried, and said she held no ill-will toward me.
An envelope from Jessica came back, stuffed with my letter, shredded to bits, the message loud and clear: There would be no forgiveness.
I can’t blame her.
Glen peers at me over his reading glasses. “You better get to know their faces just so you can avoid them. If you don’t, Brad Whitley will pursue a restraining order against you. How far he’ll get with that, I have no idea, but it’s not a good look for someone on parole.”
“How do you know this?”
Glen sighs heavily. “Because he paid me a visit. Maybe thirty minutes before you showed up.”
My eyebrows arch. “You’re kidding me. Brad Whitley came here?” Isn’t that some sort of violation?
“Ask Farrah if you don’t believe me.” He waves a dismissive hand toward the door.
I don’t need to. That’s what her comment meant. “What’d he say?”
“He’s convinced you’re a danger to the community, and he’s made it clear he’d like to see you back behind bars tomorrow.”
“And what’d you say?”
“That he doesn’t make the rules, no matter which tiny hiccup of a town they named after his grandfather or how much money he has.”
Interesting. “You’re not a fan of the Whitleys.”
“I’m here to make sure you keep yourself out of prison, not help put you back in, ’kay? I’m here for you. Consider me your fan, Logan.”
I snort. “How often do you use that line?”
His smile is tight. “I’ve been doing this a long time.
I’ve had plenty of failures, like Dorsey, but I’ve also had successes.
Men who needed a second chance and someone to believe in them.
Now, I don’t know what kind of kid you were back then.
” He taps the folder holding my past. “Your file doesn’t read like the Travis Dorseys and the Ian Murphys of the world. ”
“I’m not like them.”
“But prison changes a person. Especially when you’ve been inside as long as you have.” He reopens a folder, flips through the pages until he finds what he’s looking for, holding up one of my bare torso and the stitches, and another of Dorsey’s swollen, battered face.
Sometimes I can still feel his bones breaking under my fist.
“I think you learned that too.” Glen tucks them away.
“You’re gonna be seeing me for the next eight-odd years, unless I keel over from eating one too many poutines from Sam’s Chip Truck or I catch that winning lottery ticket.
So do us both a big favor and stay the fuck away from the Whitleys. Got it?”