The Silent Hour Read Free

these windows looking out on the creek and
the pond and the woods. It was only from the back that you could see the house.
From the front, it was just the door in the hillside. Alexandra wanted it to
feel that way. She wanted it to be a place where you could escape from the
world."
        I had
a strong sense that he was no longer seeing me, that I could stand up and do
jumping jacks and he wouldn't blink. He was back at this place, this house in
the earth, and from watching his face I knew that he recalled every detail perfectly,
that it was the setting of a vivid movie he played regularly in his head.
        "I
helped them grow vegetables, and I kept the grass cut and the trees trimmed and
the creek flowing and the pond clean," he said. "In the fall I
cleared the leaves; in the winter I cleared the snow. No power tools, not even
a mower. I did it all by hand, and at first I thought they were crazy for
requiring that, but I needed the job. Then I came to understand how important
it was. How the sound of an engine would have destroyed what was there."
        "Who
were they—" I asked, and the interruption seemed as harsh to him as a slap
in the face. He blinked at me a few times, then nodded.
        "The
owners were Alexandra and Joshua Cantrell, and while I was not close to Joshua,
I became closer to Alexandra in a year than I would have thought possible. She
was a very spiritual person, deeply in touch with the earth, and when she
learned I had Shawnee ancestry, she wanted to hear all of the stories I'd
heard, was just fascinated with the culture. I learned from her, and she
learned from me, and for that one single year everything in my life seemed to
have some harmony."
        He
paused, lifted his head, tilted it slightly, and looked me in the eye.
        "They
left that place, that beautiful home they'd built, without any warning, just
drove away and left it all behind. I never saw them or heard from them again.
That was twelve years ago."
        It
was quiet, and I let it stay that way. One of the reasons I didn't speak, truth
be told, was that I could feel a sort of electric tingle, and I wanted to hold
on to it for a moment. It came not from his story, which was intriguing but
could also be total bullshit, but from the way he told it. The light in his
eyes, the energy that came from him when he spoke, had an almost rapturous
quality. There was a depth of caring in what he said that I hadn't seen often
before. The depth of caring you could probably develop if you spent more than a
decade in a cell and then were released to the place he'd just described.
        "I'm
sure there's a simple explanation," I said. "One you could probably
find with a little computer research. Maybe they overextended when they built
that house, and the bank foreclosed. Maybe they moved to be closer to family.
Maybe they decided to go overseas."
        "You
think I haven't done computer research—" he said. "You think that's a
new idea to me— I've researched, Lincoln."
        "You
didn't find anything—"
        "Nothing.
I turned up some addresses for people with the same name, wrote some letters,
never got a response unless the letter bounced back to me.
        "Not
all of them did— Then you probably got through to them and they didn't care to
respond. No offense, Harrison, but correspondence with a murderer isn't high on
most people's list of priorities. I can see why they'd ignore your letters. I
tried to do the same."
        He
spoke with infinite patience. "Alexandra would never have ignored my
letters. She was a better person than that."
        "People
change."
        "I
have six thousand dollars," he began again.
        I
waved him off. "I know, Harrison. You've told me."
        He
looked at me sadly, then spoke with his eyes on the floor.
        "I
need to know what happened. If it takes every dime I have, I won't feel that it
was wasted. What I told you in my letters came from the heart. I see