“He writes. I’ve tried to get him to use the computer, but he prefers his notepad. You’ll see.” She glanced at me from the corner of her eye. “I was surprised he allowed you to come. He doesn’t bother with most folks anymore. Says they wear him out. But he got up and shaved this morning for you.”
At the back of the house was an unexpectedly cheerful sitting room. A fire blazed at one end, and before it, in one of those mammoth, corduroy La-Z-Boy recliners favored by old people, sat a man. He pushed the chair upright when I entered and rose to shake my hand. Snow was stooped and shriveled and didn’t look as if he’d been tall to begin with. The top of his scaly, bald head barely reached my chin. His skin was sallow and flecks of dried blood dotted his jaw, casualties from his attempt at a morning shave. I felt a wave of pity, imagining him splashing at the sink, the effort it must have required.
Snow gestured for me to sit. He lined his own heels up against the edge of the recliner, stuck out his bottom, and allowed himself to fall backward into the deep chair, the way I remembered my grandmother doing after she got too frail to sit and stand on her own. Snow and I studied each other. He might be in the advanced stages of cancer, but his eyes were clear and lucid. Intelligent. Marie was right: his mind seemed sharp as a tack.
“Thank you for seeing me. Do you know why I’m here?”
He reached toward a wooden side table between us. On it lay a pen and a brown moleskin notebook.
How do you do, he wrote, then met my eye and nodded formally. On the next line, in a spidery scrawl: Why don’t you tell me.
So I did. I told him about what had happened to the Smiths in the house on Eulalia Road. About how I had been raised in another city, by another family, and had only recently learned of the existence of my first family. About how I had lived almost my entire life with a bullet inside my neck. He appeared to listen closely, scratching out the occasional ! at dramatic moments in my narrative, and once a ? when he seemed to want me to elaborate.
“They never caught my parents’ killer,” I concluded. “But you know one of the people who was questioned. He was your lawyer.”
Snow nodded and wrote, Ethan.
“You told the police that you were with him all that afternoon.”
Another nod.
“Was that true?”
The intelligent eyes held mine. His hand rested motionless on the notebook. That had been too abrupt a way to ask; I needed to come at the question more subtly. But I felt impatient, and the stitches on my neck itched, and this room felt stiflingly hot.
“Mr. Sinclare came to see me a couple of weeks ago,” I tried again.
Verlin Snow had no eyebrows, but the wrinkles on his forehead wiggled in a way that suggested he would have raised his eyebrows if he could.
“He was kind. But some of the things he said—or, rather, things he chose not to say—don’t make sense to me.” I leaned forward and placed my hand on Snow’s emaciated knee. “One other thing that you should know. I was attacked, in my house in Washington, one night last week. Someone tried to hurt me. I think—I don’t know, but I think it was someone who knew that the bullet in my neck posed a threat to them. Someone who knew it could send them to prison.”
Snow’s forehead contracted in a spasm of wrinkles. !!!, he wrote.
“Please help me.”
Still his eyes held mine.
“I don’t care why you had to hire Ethan Sinclare as your attorney. I don’t care what kind of trouble you were in. That’s not why I’m here.” I squeezed Snow’s knee, hard. “That day. The day my parents died. Could Ethan Sinclare have been at their house? You swore it was impossible. That the two of you were locked up together in a conference room.”
Verlin Snow picked up the pen. Slowly, in cramped, shaky letters, he wrote:
I lied.
Forty-three
* * *
I pried the moleskin notebook from Snow’s hands. Rotated it so I could read right side up, ran my finger over his words.
I lied.
“You weren’t with him, then? That afternoon?”
He took back the notebook and wrote, Part.
“Meaning what? You were with him part of the time, but not the whole afternoon?”
A tired nod.
“So he has no alibi,” I whispered. “He never did. He could have been at Boone and Sadie Rawson’s house.”
Snow flinched and scribbled furiously: I don’t know that. He underlined the words, four heavy lines.
“Okay, you don’t know where he was. Only that he wasn’t with you.”
Rapid nodding. I narrowed my eyes. “You lied for him. Lied to police in a murder investigation. And you never bothered to ask where he really was? How could you not be curious? What did the guy have on you?”
This was met with a shrug.
“Why did you lie?”
If I was not mistaken, Snow rolled his eyes.
“I suppose that you don’t think it matters at this point. But, Mr. Snow . . .” My voice tightened with rage. “Mr. Snow, my parents died. I was shot. If Ethan Sinclare did that—if he was there—he shot a three-year-old girl and left her to bleed to death. You must have heard about it; you must have seen the newspaper account. How could you live with yourself? How could you lie for him?”
All at once Verlin Snow lurched forward in his seat and made a grotesque, rasping noise, halfway between a croak and a howl. He made it again and then was seized by a fit of coughing. I leapt to my feet and searched the room for a glass of water or a tissue. Nothing. Should I find Marie? But he was quieting now, clutching his chest, tears and snot rolling down his wasted face. He wiped his face on his sleeve and groped around for the pen. He wrote steadily for several minutes before looking up and pushing the notebook across to me.
I was sued. Insider trading, securities fraud. I wd have lost everything!! Fought back. But pre-trial discovery turned up evidence. Record of phone call, typed by my secretary. Ethan required to turn it over. You see?