My mouth opened and closed silently. I could only barely force out a whisper: "Murder. What do you mean?"

"I mean you're a killer," said the big man with a heavy nod. "You were tried in a court of law and convicted by a jury of the murder of Alex Hauser."

PART TWO.

CHAPTER TWENTY.

Rose

Morning came, and the cell door opened. I was sitting on the edge of the cot with my head in my hands. I looked up and a deputy was standing over me, a giant of a man with a face like granite.

"Come on, West," he said. "Let's go."

I stood up wearily, slowly, aching and stiff in every muscle. My wounds had been treated when I was brought into jail, but I still hurt all over. I stepped out of the cell. The deputy put my hands behind my back and handcuffed me again. Then he took hold of my elbow and led me down the hallway.

It had been a long, long night. The police had taken my clothes away and made me dress in an orange jumpsuit with County Jail stamped on the back of it. I'd tried and tried to tell them I was innocent. I'd made my voice hoa.r.s.e trying to tell them. But no one would listen. They'd dragged me to the cell and threw me in and walked away.

The cell was hardly bigger than a closet. There was just a narrow cot bolted to the wall, a steel toilet in one corner and a steel sink. Instead of bars, the door was a big piece of Plexiglas with airholes in it. There was a security camera hanging up in the hall outside, looking right in at me. It took pictures of me every second. Even when I went to the bathroom, the camera watched me. It was humiliating. It made me feel as if I weren't a human being, as if I were a rat in a cage being observed for a laboratory experiment or something.

I hardly slept at all. Whenever I did sleep, nightmares swarmed through my brain. In the nightmares, there were faces, grinning, leaning in on me. There were voices whispering: . . . Homelander One.

We'll never get another shot at Yarrow.

. . . two more days . . .

. . . can send Orton . . .

. . . knows the bridge as well as West.

But when I woke up the voices were gone. They trailed away like wisps of smoke, and I could barely remember them or what they'd said. Whatever was left of the nightmares was crowded out of my mind by the nightmare reality around me: this cell, this cot, this jail.

You were tried in a court of law and convicted by a jury of the murder of Alex Hauser.

I still couldn't comprehend it, couldn't take it in. A year of my life had vanished. Alex was dead. They thought I had killed him. I'd been convicted of killing him. It wasn't just the bad guysa"the Homelandersa"who were after me. It was the good guys too. The police. Everyone.

By the time morning broke, I was exhausted. As the deputy led me down the hall, I was too tired to ask questions, too tired to do anything but go wherever he took me. We went down the hall in silence. Neither of us said a word.

He brought me into a large, messy room. There were several gunmetal-gray desks arrayed around. A lot of papers tacked to the wall. There were men sitting at the desks, men in suits and ties. They stopped talking as I entered, wearing my orange jumpsuit. They watched curiously as the deputy led me past them. He took me to a far corner of the room and through another door.

We came into a smaller room, almost as small as my cell. There was nothing in here but a heavy wooden table and three plastic chairs. There was grimy white soundproofing on the walls. A fluorescent light hung from the ceiling. Now and then, it snapped and flickered. In a corner of the ceiling there was a security camera, just like the one outside my cell. A red light burned on top of it as it took its pictures.

The deputy helped me sit down in the chair behind the heavy table. He uncuffed my hands so I could bring them out from behind my back, but then he handcuffed my right hand to a rail set into one side of the table. That way, I couldn't break free and run for it.

Then the deputy walked out of the room and left me there.

I sat in silence, handcuffed to the table. I felt empty and hollow and alone. Ten minutes went by. It felt like an hour. Then the door opened, and a man came in.

He was a black guy. Not big, shorter than me, but he was trim, and you could see he was in good shape. He was wearing a sort of colorless suit with a bright blue shirt and a tie that looked like the TV picture when the satellite goes on the fritz. He had a round face with a high forehead and short hair, flat features and a thin mustache. He had very steady eyes. You could see he was smart just looking in his eyes. He was smart and cool and nothing fooled him.

He had a big black binder in one hand. It was filled with papers. I could see some numbers on the back of it and my name: West, Charlie.

He dropped the black binder on the table in front of me. It made a loud whap when it fell.

"Well, well, well," he said. His voice was like his eyes, smart and cool and not very friendly. "Charlie West. We meet again at last."

I narrowed my eyes at him. I'd never seen him before.

"I'm sorry," I said. My voice came out so soft and hoa.r.s.e, I had to clear my throat and start again: "I'm sorry. I don't know you. I don't know who you are."

The man gave a short laugh. He looked around as if someone else were standing there, as if he wanted to share the joke.

"You don't know me, huh," he said.

"I . . . I don't remember."

"Oh, come on. It hasn't been that long, Charlie." He waited a few seconds as if it would all come back to me. I didn't say anything. What could I say? A moment pa.s.sed and the fluorescent above us snapped and flickered. There was a little dance of shadows then a pale, sickly light. After a while, the man took a deep breath as if he was fighting down his anger. "Well, let me introduce myself," he said. "I'm Detective Rose." He waited again as if that would refresh my memory. It didn't. "I'm the man who arrested you for the Hauser killing."

I shook my head wearily. I rubbed my eyes with my free hand. It hardly seemed worth saying again, but I had to say it. "I didn't kill Alex!" I thumped my fist on the table as the words came out.

Detective Rose gave a little smile, a cold smile with no feeling in it. He pulled out one of the other chairs. Propped his foot up on it. He looked down at me. "Yes, you did, Charlie. Witnesses said you did. Murder weapon with your prints and DNA said you did. Blood on your clothes said you did. Jury said you did." He made a little gesture with his hand. "So you did."

It was all so insane, so horribly, frustratingly insane, that I actually laughed. It was a miserable laugh, but a laugh all the same. "I don't remember any of that," I said. "I don't remember you. I don't remember a jury. I didn't even know Alex was dead till the sheriff told me. The last time I saw him, we were talking. In my car by the park. Then I went home. I went to bed and I woke up in this room . . ."

"Strapped to a chair, yeah. You told the deputies last night."

"I don't remember anything else. I don't remember a whole year. A whole year of my life is gone!"

"Well, that's very convenient, isn't it?" He took his foot off the chair, turned the chair around and straddled it. That brought him down to my level so I was looking straight into those smart, cool eyes. "You murder your friend. You break out of prison. You outrun me for more than three months, and it's all . . ." He waved his hand dreamily. "Gone. Like a dream."

"It is. There's nothing there." I stared at him, shaking my head. "But it doesn't matter. It doesn't make sense. I would never murder anyone. And Alex . . . he was my friend. I keep telling you."

The fluorescent light crackled and flickered. The cold smile played at the detective's lips again. "Yeah, you keep telling me," he said. "You told me when we first brought you in. He was your friend. Except he threatened you, didn't he? You were going out with his girl and he didn't like it, and him and a couple of his boys threatened to bounce you around for it."

"Oh yeah, but that was . . ."

"And then you took a drive together and you fought with him."

"We didn't fight, exactly, we . . ."

"Witnesses saw it, Charlie. They heard you yelling."

I looked away from that cool stare. I remembered that much. I remembered Alex and I yelling at each other and the lady with the dog turning at the sound of our loud, angry voices.

"Then you followed him into the park," said Detective Rose. "And you stabbed him to death."

"No!" I shook my right fist so that my handcuff rattled against the rail. The words came tearing out of my mouth in a shout. "I didn't."

"How do you know? I thought you couldn't remember anything."

"I remember that!"

"Oh, that's convenient. You just forgot everything else, everything but your innocence."

"I didn't do it. I wouldn't do it. I'm not a killer!"

The fluorescent light went out for half a second, and when it came back on the detective's face had changed. The cool smile was gone and an angry sneer had taken its place beneath the thin mustache.

"You want to know something funny, Charlie?" he said. "I been a cop a long time. Worked the big city before I came to Spring Hill. I've arrested a lot of people, a lot of bad people, some really bad. But I never had any feelings about them one way or the other. They did what they did, I did what I did, we all knew the rules of the game. But you, Charlie . . ." He stood up, pushing the chair away from him so it sc.r.a.ped against the floor. "With you it was different." He sneered down at me. His mouth worked as if he wanted to spit out a bad taste. "I don't like you, Charlie. And I'll tell you why. It's not 'cause you lied to me. All you murdering punks lie, that's nothing. But you lied to me and I believed you. That's what it is. You looked me in the eye with that all-American face of yours, and I believed you were just who you said you were, just who everybody said you were. The decent kid. The kid who gets it. The kid who works hard and does right. The kid who walks like a mana"like a man oughta walk, anyway. I believed you were that kid, Charlie. You fooled me. And I don't know, but somehow I can't forgive you for that. And I'll never let it happen again."

"Look at me," I said to him. I pleaded with him. I lifted my hands so the handcuff on my right wrist pulled tight. "Please, Detective Rose, look at me. I'm scarred, bruised, beaten up. There are burns on me . . . look!" I tried to twist my handcuffed arm to show him. "Right there. Burns. Something happened to me. You can see that! I was captured. There were people . . . in the woods. A whole compound. They called themselves Homelanders. They hurt me. They tried to kill me. Why would I make it up?"

He laughed, but there was no humor in it. "You've been making things up since the first time I talked to you. Everything you say is made up. Far as I can tell, your whole life is a lie."

"If you could just . . . call my parents. Reallya"they'll tell you . . ."

With a loud snap, the fluorescent light flashed off and on. In that split second of darkness, Detective Rose leapt forward so that the next time I saw him, he was right up against the table, looming over me. At the same moment, he slapped his hand angrily down on the table.

"Your parents aren't gonna help you," he said through his teeth. "You were tried as an adult, convicted as an adult. You got twenty-five years to life for murder, and they're sure to tack on more 'cause you ran away."

"I didn't do anything!" I cried up at him. "I don't remember anything! I don't know what's happening! Please! Please!"

Despair flooded up through me. The fluorescent light flickered and snapped. The handcuffs rattled as I leaned my elbows on the table and buried my face in my hands.

"Please," I said again. "Somebody's gotta believe me."

But when I looked up, Detective Rose had moved away from me to the door. He was still sneering. Shaking his head as if he was disgusted by what a low creature I was.

"It's going to be a pleasure to take you back to prison, Charlie," he said. "And I plan to make personally certain that you don't get out again until you're an old, old man."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

A Voice in the Crowd

The granite-faced deputy came and took me back to my cell. He brought me a breakfast of hash and coffee. I was hungry enough to eat it. It lay on my stomach like lead.

When I was done, I sat on the edge of the cot. I stared down at the cell's stone floor.

It's a funny thing when despair gets to you. It doesn't even feel like despair. You don't think to yourself: Oh, I have no hope. Oh, I give up. Oh, there's nothing I can do. That's just everyday complaining. That's just feeling sorry for yourself.

Real despair is different. It creeps up on you in disguise. It comes as a kind of sleepiness, a kind of heavy sadness that weighs you down. It makes you lazy. It makes you just want to go along, drift with the current of events, drift and drift as if you were lying on a raft floating down a river on a sweet summer day. Whatever happens, you don't fight it. You just go where events take you and then sit and wait for the next event to take you on.

That's what I did. I sat and waited. I didn't say to myself: Don't give up. I didn't say: Remember the Churchill Card. Never give in. I didn't really say much of anything to myself anymore. I was just too tired. I was just waiting for the next thing. They were coming to take me to prison. I was going to be behind bars for the next twenty-five years, maybe more. What was the use in fighting it? No one would believe me. No one would help me. Nothing to do but just drift along.

After a while, I lay back on the cot and dozed.

I don't know if I had another nightmare. Maybe I did. All I'm sure of is that suddenly my eyes were wide open and my heart was hammering in my chest and there was a clammy sweat on my face. I swallowed hard, staring up at the stone ceiling. A weird and terrible thought began to work its way into my mind.

Everything you say is made up. Your whole life is a lie.

The thought was kind of like a whisper, as if someone invisible were crouching next to me with his lips to my ear, whispering very low. The whisper was so low I didn't really even hear the words at first. Slowly, they just sort of worked their way into my consciousness until I was aware of them.

Your whole life is a lie. That's what Detective Rose had said to me.

And now the whisper was saying to me, What if he's right? What if it's true?

It was a good question, wasn't it? What if Detective Rose was right? What if everything I thought was true was a lie and everything I thought was a lie was really true? I mean, what if I did kill Alex? What if I was a phony, just pretending to be a good guy when really I was the worst, the lowest, a killer? What if everything I believed about myself, everything I remembered about my life, was false? It was possible, wasn't it? I mean, I couldn't remember a whole year. How could I tell whether the things I did remember had actually happened?

Everything you say is made up. Your whole life . . .

I rolled up into a sitting position. I held my head in my hands and groaned.

It was then that the despair rose up inside me with its true face. That laziness, that heavy sadness, that sleepy pa.s.sivity, waiting for the next thing to happen: the hopelessness had crept up on me like thata"had worked its way inside me like a spy, like one of those spies that gets into a city and opens the gates for the enemy army to come charging in.

And now it was here in full forcea"a horrible feeling, a twisting, hollow anguish of despair.

I took my hands off my head. I clasped them in front of my mouth. I wanted to pray. I tried. But I couldn't. I couldn't even do that because I was too afraid. That accusing whisper spoke to me: What if it's true? What if your whole life is a lie?

And I was afraid because I realized I might be a murderer. I might deserve everything that was happening to me. I might deserve to go to prison until I was old. What if I prayed to G.o.d and G.o.d condemned me? Like the sheriff did. Like Detective Rose did. Like everyone.

I was afraid to pray, but I had to do something and that was all I could think of. I pressed my clasped hands hard against my mouth. I bit into them. I forced the words into my mind.

Please. G.o.d. Help me. I'm beaten. I admit it. I'm lost. I've got nothing left. Please. Help.

But no help came.