that his book was still a best seller, but I suppose just writing one seems glamorous.”
He sat up and lowered his filthy shoes to the floor. “To you, you mean.”
Now I understand that those detectives had written their story before they asked me a single question. I was a lovelorn librarian, crazed with jealousy over my neighbor’s good luck. “ Everyone loved Geoffrey,” I insisted, a quote that got repeated at the trial more times than I can count.
In recent years, the most famous false confessions came from the Harlem Five—the teenagers convicted of the Central Park Jogger assault who served thirteen years in prison until another man confessed to the crime. After DNA confirmed their innocence, all five were exonerated and released from jail along with their sad stories: one had an IQ of 87, and another, 73. None could read above a second-grade level. Though we don’t share these numbers, we share the same mistakes and believed the same lies. We’ve sat across from police officers and told them exactly what they wanted to hear. Without getting my hopes up, I’ve started reading a little more about exonerees freed since that Phil Donohue Show . Most of them have been black men, victimized by a mistaken eyewitness, their crime nothing more than walking down the wrong street wearing the same gray sweatshirt or blue baseball cap a victim described to police a few hours earlier. Overeager police have a hard time letting go of wardrobe coincidences, I’ve learned. If anything, these men are more innocent than I. Most were nowhere near the crime, never knew the victim, and had no idea why they were brought to a police station for questioning.
I knew the victim. I had become an unreliable confidante and repository of her secrets. I participated in “neighborly” efforts to help Linda Sue that I see now only isolated her further and sealed her fate. If I didn’t leave my hair in a pool of blood beside her body, I am not without some culpability. Though I still don’t remember what happened that night, I remember all too well what happened in the weeks and days before Linda Sue’s death. And what I can remember from that night—what we talked about in her living room, what I saw upstairs—made me wish her, if not dead, then eradicated somehow. Gone from our lives. No, whatever the DNA tests show, I’m not wholly innocent.
I suspect none of us is.
Three weeks ago, Jeremy got the results of the test on the hair found in the blood beside the body. It wasn’t mine or the victim’s. Traditional DNA testing on hair is a fallible science—hair is not composed of living material and therefore has no genetic markers. But as luck would have it, the follicle, still attached, contained enough markers for three out of four experts to conclude it wasn’t mine. Enough evidence for a sympathetic judge to rule in my favor, a judge who is on record as having opposed the death penalty and mandatory sentencing. For once in this whole process I got lucky. The judge wanted to make an example of the flaws in the judicial system he’ll be retiring from soon. “Everyone wants to leave a mark,” Jeremy told me. “You’re his.”
I’ve tried to keep this a secret, but I’m not sure it’s worked. I’ve learned that women in prison can be extraordinarily generous, especially in hard times. I’ve watched my fellow inmates nurse one another through sickness and spend their last commissary dollar on Christmas presents they hand out wrapped in toilet paper. I’ve also seen the wall of silence that goes up around anyone who gets special treatment. I fear it’s already started. At lunch, when I asked Taneesha to pass the salt, she said I was a bitch if I thought I could get whatever I wanted around here. Everyone’s been prickly, even Wanda, who says she doesn’t want to know when I get the news. She’s not around when the guard finds me in the library and tells me my lawyer is here.
I walk into the small, beige-colored