CHAPTER 56

LEEWOOD FOLCRUM

I NMATE 82145

Fun fact: Leewood Folcrum's canteen account had over $74,000 in it. Prisoners can only spend a hundred dollars a week, and he barely did that, so his spending couldn't keep up with the donations that came in. He was real popular with the ladies, and they showed their affection in a few different ways, one of them being money.

—William Smith, Lancaster Prison corrections officer

If I was right and Tim was the blonde's brother, it meant that any day, he'd be getting my letter with my faux confession.

Either he hadn't gotten the letter yet or he wasn't the brother, because he was on the other side of the glass, still waxing on with these stupid questions and wanting to know what had really happened.

"Given your condition," Tim said slowly, his pen spinning between his thin fingers, "it just seems that you'd want someone to know. Before you pass and take it with you."

Given your condition ... Again, if he wasn't my secret pen pal, I still needed to figure out how much he knew about me and how he knew what he knew. As shitty as I looked and felt, it was still a stretch for him to have assumed with such confidence that I was dying.

"Someone to know what?" I spit out. Today was a bad day. My entire body was weak; just moving my hand to my mouth felt like I was dragging shackles. The fries he'd brought were cold, and I was beginning to lose my taste for anything.

"What happened that night. You've got to be itching to tell someone the truth of why you did it."

"Sometimes people just do things, Timmy."

"Only if there's a psychological break. Is that what you had? Did your mind crack open one day, Leewood?"

To that, I kept my mouth shut. This guy was like a boxer. Circling and circling, looking for an opening so he could land a punch. Normally, I'd be getting up and leaving. But frankly, I didn't have the energy to move.

"Leewood?"

I yawned.

"I don't think you had a psychological break. You didn't just snap one day and decide to take out a trio of preteens." He shook his head. If anyone here was losing it, it was him.

"Sounds like you got it all figured out." I picked up the burger with both hands and brought it to my mouth but caught a whiff of the scent and stopped, suddenly turned off by the smell of the chargrilled patty.

"Which means you had a motivation. Hedonistic, financial, jealousy, anger—what was it, Lee? Huh?" He leaned forward, and the glass fogged from the hot blow of his breath.

"I think I know why you did it." He said it with such confidence that I cracked one eye open. He was smiling, but it was a grim smile, like he was pleased and upset all at the same time. It reminded me of the Would You Rather quiz we gave the new inmates. Would you rather sit on a cake and eat a dick? Or sit on a dick and eat a cake? It was good 'cause there was cake involved—not that any of us was getting to eat cake anytime soon—but it was also bad because there were dicks involved, and in this place, the chance of getting a dick was uncomfortably high. The question made the newbies hella uncomfortable, as if their answer would decide their fate. Sometimes it did.

That was one thing I'd never sunk to, not even twenty-plus years in. A shrink might say it was because I liked little girls, but the truth was, I lost all sexual inclinations after what happened that night. You hold a little body in your arms, one growing limp and still, and you stop looking at that thing as a sexual object. You pull a knife across virginal skin and have blood spray like a hose across your living room—you start to see that shit when you close your eyes. All you see is blood, and maybe that would be different if they hadn't locked me up in here, but they did, so that's the image I've had stuck in my head when I think about anyone under the age of puberty. Bloody dead girls, one still flopping in my hands like a fish. The way she had stared up at me—her mouth gaping open, hurt filling those eyes—I still saw it when I lay down at night.

"I think you did it because of Jenny," he said hoarsely.

"Whatcha mean, ‘because of Jenny'?" I couldn't help it. I was a horse led to water. Damned if I wouldn't drink.

"I think you killed her because you were scared of her."

"I didn't kill her," I said, for the tenth time, as if I had known what would happen.

As if I'd known she would survive.