She imagines being sent back to her cell, knowing that Frank’s words have won her more years behind bars. She imagines his triumphant smile.
And so instead she takes a Kleenex from the box they push toward her, and she presses it to her wet face. Presses it against her mouth to keep the truth contained.
All they see and hear are her tears, and they nod because, finally, she is broken.
Pete watches her emerge from the dark cocoon of the prison gateway and into the sunlight in a long smooth ripple of pink filmy scarf. The guard says something to her—he thinks it’s Baker, although he’s not sure. It’s been almost three years since she told him to stop coming.
As she turns to listen, he lets his eyes rest on her tight skirt and bright blouse and on her careful glossy smile. For her, the sixties have not ended. Jim and Janis and Jimi and Altamont—none of that has touched her.
He comes out from his own shadows, one hopeful step and then another and another, breath thick in his dry mouth and his hands damp. He thinks of how long it’s taken them to get here, of the lies he’s told, the vows he’s broken, and the money he’s spent. He thinks of Clyde Harrison and of his mother and father, and of the things he’s had to do for love.
She stands in the sun for a moment and closes her eyes, lifts her face to the light. As Pete walks toward her, his steps quickening, she opens her eyes and he stops.
There’s a little distance between them and she looks uncertainly across it, shades her eyes with her hand.
“Ruth. I came to . . . I thought maybe we could have lunch.”
She keeps looking at him, her eyes in shadow.
He pushes on. “And . . . I don’t know if you have a place to stay, but I . . .”
He trails off into her silence.
“I thought you’d want to celebrate.”
Her hand falls and she frowns, and now he sees what the years have done to her. The shadows underneath her eyes, the lines around her mouth. She looks old and tired and afraid.
“Celebrate?”
“Sure, why not? You’re free now. You’re a free woman.”
But she shakes her head, slowly at first and then faster, as though she can’t stop.
And she hears his voice as though from a great distance.
“Ruth?”
“How can I be free?”
“I don’t understand. I want . . . I wanted to take care of you.”
She stares at him and shakes her head again, and then the noise of a car horn breaks the silence. There is a streak of yellow and a cab opens up the space between them, and she is gone.
She feels his eyes on her all the way to the highway but she sits straight and tall on the worn vinyl seat, and she does not look back.
She has imagined this moment for a long time: driving away with a stranger, an empty road ahead of her. Anonymity. She wondered how she would feel, facing a life without Frankie and Cindy, without Lou, without the promise of endless gauzy nights.
Frank has changed everything. Since he left her with the truth, she has often thought she would not be able to bear the weight of her grief and her guilt. She has lain awake, imagining pills and vodka in a cheap motel room. She has fantasized about pure nothingness.
But now, looking ahead at the approaching city, feeling the half-forgotten rush and rhythm of a New York afternoon break over her, she realizes that she cannot give in. For their sake, for Frankie and Cindy, she will not let Frank win.
She sits a little straighter. Inhales gasoline and Juicy Fruit, the smell of warm doughnuts from a roadside stand, the sweet rich leather of the driver’s jacket. And the road rises before them and the car begins to climb into the blue infinity of the summer sky.
Acknowledgments
Little Deaths is a work of fiction. Readers who are interested in the case that inspired it can find more details in The Alice Crimmins Case by Kenneth Gross, and Ordeal by Trial by George Carpozi Jr.
There are a lot of people who helped shape this book and make it possible for me to write it, and I’m exercising the prerogative of the debut author to thank them all.
Thank you to my family. To my mum and dad, for instilling in me a love of history; for the sacrifices you made so that I could go to university and read for four years; and for being so proud of me. To my brother Martin, for widening my taste in crime fiction, and for showing me that people like us could write novels. I can’t wait to read yours. And to my grandma, Mary Cuthbert, for everything, with much love.