“I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you,” Maggie answered, guarded. She suspected the woman was a reporter. “And you are?”
“You don’t know me, I’m Chris Silas, Samantha Silas’s mother. Our daughters were friends.”
“Oh, yes.” Maggie remembered Samantha, with the MINI Cooper and the tattoos.
“This must be so difficult for you.”
Maggie couldn’t begin to respond, so she didn’t try. “How’s Samantha? It must be hard for her, too.”
“She ran away.” Chris’s face fell.
“What do you mean?”
“She’s gone. She’s run away before. This time I think it was because of Anna, you know, her death.”
Maggie felt a stab of sympathy. She hadn’t even thought of the rippleeffects of Anna’s murder. “I’m so sorry to hear that. Samantha’s a very nice girl.”
“You met her?”
“Yes, when she dropped Anna off, and she came to our barbecue, too.” Maggie couldn’t begin to remember that night. The powder room. Anna crying. Noah’s lies. The photo from Jordan’s hotel room.
“Thanks. Appreciate it.” Chris smiled, sadly.
“Did you tell the police?”
“Yes, but no luck. I’m hoping she’ll come back soon.” Chris patted Maggie’s shoulder. “You take care. I have to get to work.”
“Thanks,” Maggie said, withdrawing to the comfort of her shell.
Chapter Sixty-three
Noah, After
Noah sat hunched over on the bus seat, shackled at the wrists and ankles, which rendered it impossible to sit up straight. His back ached after the long ride in that position, but he ignored it. The Department of Corrections bus was unheated, and a few windows were stuck open, letting in frigid air and smoky exhaust. It was dark by the time they’d left SCI Camp Hill, which served as the Classification and Evaluation Center for the Pennsylvania prison system. He’d been bused there from the courtroom, and now he’d been shaved, deloused, classified, processed with an inmate ID number, and given a wristband with a barcode and a GPS tracker. He’d been assigned to SCI Graterford, which was Pennsylvania’s largest maximum-security facility, housing four thousand convicted felons, like him.
Except that he was innocent.
Graterford was located on a thousand-acre parcel about thirty miles from Philadelphia, and it had been built in the 1920s, one of the older prisons in the system. It was at 105 percent overcrowding, second-highest in the state, but its replacement, SCI Phoenix, was already under construction on the same parcel, behind schedule and overbudget at a cost of $400 million. Noah knew the statistics because he’d read the inmate manual in the library at SCI Camp Hill, undoubtedly the only inmate to have done so.
His only goal was to survive, though for how long he didn’t know. He hadn’t been sentenced yet, and he was just trying to survive another day, though he wasn’t sure why. He was fine not knowing why, for now. It was instinct. Every living thing fought to stay alive. People. Animals. Plants. Cells. Viruses. Allergens. He felt reduced to his primal self, following his only reflex. Survival.
He inhaled, and the exhaust fumes nauseated him, but he ignored that, too. He kept his head to the glass, which was covered by a wire lattice, and he looked out as they rumbled along the highway. Families in SUVs and minivans passed them, and he could see the kids buckled into their car seats and watching videos, the fathers straight-arming the wheel, and the mothers in the passenger seats, reading Facebook on their phones. He didn’t permit himself to think of Maggie or Caleb. Or Anna. Or even Wreck-It Ralph.
Inmates filled the bus, all hunched over in shackles, sitting nearest the window like he was, spread out to avoid contact with each other. None of them appeared to be first-timers, since nobody was crying or talking. They all knew the unwritten rules, which they made and communicated by actions. Stay in your lane. Mind your own business. Don’t discuss your case with another inmate or they’ll use the information against you or trade it to reduce their own sentence. Above all, find your kind. There was safety in numbers.
Noah knew that would be his immediate problem, since he doubted there were other pediatric allergists at Graterford. He had no group to join. He was a generic white guy, but not a white nationalist. He wasn’t black, Hispanic, or Asian, which were automatic groups. He wasn’t a gang member of any stripe, another automatic group. He wasn’t a Jesus freak or a “girlfriend,” inmate slang nobody needed to spell out. He was on his own, which made him vulnerable.
Noah kept his eye out the window. His bid at Montgomery County Correctional Facility hadn’t prepared him for what lay ahead because MCCF was a minimum-security facility. That was kindergarten compared to Graterford, with its general population of murderers, drug-dealers, arsonists, rapists, burglars, robbers, addicts,schizophrenics, and psychopaths. Graterford would be “hard time,” not “smooth time” like MCCF. And Graterford housed the only Death Row in the state.
The bus crossed the border into Skippack Township, signified by a small green sign, and in time, they turned off of Route 73 onto an unmarked single-lane road that traveled downhill. It lead to Graterford, and massive lights made a white halo as bright as a major-league baseball stadium. Noah shifted up in his seat to see the prison, and so did the others, blinking from the sudden brightness after the long, dark drive. He wondered if they were all thinking the same thing.
This is the last time I’ll see it from the outside.
Graterford was a massive conglomeration of buildings, and Noah could see only the lit office complex in front because the entire prison was encircled by a thirty-five-foot high concrete wall, barbed concertina wire, and guard towers with smoked-glass windows.
They traveled to the prison and were hustled out of the bus, shuffling along like a line of hunchbacks because of the shackles. They were ordered into an intake area, where they were unshackled, stripped, showered, and examined, then changed into a reddish-brown shirt with yellow trim and baggy pants with white prison slippers. They were photographed, cuffed up, and given a toilet kit, mattress, blanket, sheets, and towels, then split up by cellblock.
