“Why?”
Absolute certainty—that was why. I wanted to be sure this time that what I believed was the truth. I wanted to be right for Detective Rummel and Louise. I wanted to be right for my mother and father. I wanted to be right for me too.
But I did not explain that to Rose. Instead, I just kept walking as she stood there in the hall calling after me.
SUSSEX COUNTY CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION—I stared at the sign as we drove through a series of gates at the prison. That very first night I opened my eyes to see Rummel at my bedside in the hospital, the man had seemed strong and impenetrable, a statue come to life. But as he spoke to the guards at the gates, the guards at the front doors, and still more guards in the maze inside that rambling brick compound, the detective seemed impossibly human. Something in his heavy footsteps, his quick breaths and occasional sighs, left me with the feeling that Rummel was nervous about this visit too.
Beforehand, we had agreed that he would stay with me the entire time, so when yet another guard led us to a room full of tables and told me to take a seat, the detective lingered nearby. That long, rectangular table where I sat waiting for Lynch was not unlike the ones in the school cafeteria. Thinking of school led me to think of Boshoff and the diary he had given me. I hadn’t been able to find it the night before, and now my only hope was that it was lost somewhere in the bowels of Howie’s theater, like so many dropped possessions of the people who came before me, only never to be found.
I kept thinking about the diary, and all I had written inside, until a door opened across the room, different from the one Rummel and I had come through. I looked up to see Albert Lynch being escorted in by another guard. Slowly, they walked to the table, Lynch in an orange jumpsuit, his gaze on the floor instead of me. The guard pulled back the chair, legs scraping the floor, and Lynch flopped into the seat. “Thirty,” the guard said, pointing to the large clock on the wall.
The half-hour limit was yet another detail that had been agreed upon beforehand. I knew we didn’t have much time, and yet for an extended moment, neither of us said anything. Lynch sat there, staring at me. Without his odd bug-eyed glasses, I was not sure how well he could see, but I wondered what I must have looked like to him. I felt much older than that girl who had witnessed him calling into the bushes outside the convention center in Ocala, more world-weary and wise than that girl who had walked to the end of Butter Lane with her mother to find him and his daughter waiting for us in their van.
Lynch had never been a heavy man, but he had lost a considerable amount of weight since those days. The hollows under his eyes and his sunken cheeks gave the impression of a tent collapsing from the inside. That smooth, babyish skin of his had gone crepey around the mouth. At last, he opened his thin lips and said quietly, “All these months in this godforsaken place, the only visitors I’ve had have been lawyers and detectives like your friend here. When they told me I had a visitation request this morning, you were the last person I expected.”
I stared down at my hands on the table. “No one has come to see you?”
“Who would, Sylvie? No one knows where my daughter is. She was my only family. My only life, in fact.”
I closed my eyes, for just a second or two, but long enough to conjure the memory of that conversation in the foundation with Abigail and the way I had turned from her, racing across the lane toward home the moment she informed me that my sister had returned. When I opened my eyes again, I told myself to put that memory away, to stay in the here and now. “I came,” I said, forcing my gaze upon his, “because I want to talk about that night in the church. The conversation you had with my parents, before—”
“You don’t need me to tell you, Sylvie,” he said, making no effort to hide his contempt. “I’ve given my account to the lawyers and detectives, including the one you brought with you. Just ask him for the transcript.”