World Gone By: A Novel Read Free Page A

attracted to her, but he was all business when it came to discussing her plea. She would agree before the court that she had committed voluntary manslaughter with extenuating circumstances, a plea that would normally ensure someone with a criminal record as extensive as her own twelve years in prison. But today and today only, Archibald Boll assured her, the district attorney’s office of the city of Tampa was offering sixty-two months, to be served at the women’s wing of the state prison in Raiford. Which was the location, yes, of Old Sparky, but Archibald Boll promised Theresa she’d never see it.
    “Five years.” Theresa couldn’t believe it.
    “And two months,” Archibald Boll said, his moony gaze gliding up from her waist to her breasts. “You make the plea tomorrow, we’ll have you on the bus out the next morning.”
    So tomorrow night, Theresa knew, you’ll pay your visit.
    But she didn’t care—for five years and a chance to be out in time for Peter’s eighth birthday, she’d fuck not only Archibald Boll but every ADA in his office and still consider herself lucky not to have a metal cap placed to her skull and ten thousand volts of electricity sent surging through her veins.
    “Do we have a deal?” Archibald Boll asked, eyes on her legs now.
    “We have a deal.”
    In court, when the judge asked how she pled, Theresa answered, “Guilty,” and the judge conferred upon her a sentence of “not more than one thousand eight hundred and ninety days, less time served.” They took Theresa back to the jail to await the morning bus to Raiford. Early that evening, when her first visitor wasannounced, she expected to see Archibald Boll enter the gloamy corridor outside her cell, the tent already pitched in his linen trousers.
    Instead it was Jimmy Arnold. He brought her a meal of cold fried chicken and potato salad, better than any meal she’d have for the next sixty-two months, and she wolfed down the chicken and sucked the grease off her fingers without any pretense of dignity. Jimmy Arnold took no interest in any of this. When she handed the plate back to him, he handed her the photograph of her and Peter that had sat atop her dresser. He also handed her the drawing Peter had made of her—a featureless and misshapen oval on top of an askew triangle with a single stick arm, no feet. He’d drawn it shortly after his second birthday, however, and by those standards it was a Rembrandt. Theresa looked down at Jimmy Arnold’s two gifts and tried to keep the emotion from her eyes and her throat.
    Jimmy Arnold crossed his legs at the ankles and stretched in his chair. He let out a loud yawn and dry-coughed into his fist. He said, “We’ll miss you, Theresa.”
    She ate the last of the potato salad. “Back before you know it.”
    “There’re just so few with your talents.”
    “In floral arrangement?”
    He watched her carefully as his chuckle died. “No, the other thing.”
    “That just takes a gray heart.”
    “There’s more to it.” He waved a finger at her. “Don’t sell yourself short.”
    She shrugged and looked back at the picture her son had drawn.
    “Now that you’re on the shelf for a while,” he said, “who would you say is the best?”
    She looked up at the ceiling and out at the other cells. “At floral arrangements.”
    He smiled. “Yeah, let’s call it that. Who’s the best florist in Tampa now that you’re no longer in the running for the title?”
    She didn’t have to think long on the subject. “Billy.”
    “Kovich?”
    She nodded.
    Jimmy Arnold took that into consideration. “You consider him better than Mank?”
    She nodded. “You see Mank coming.”
    “And on whose shift should this happen?”
    She didn’t follow the question. “Shift?”
    “Detectives,” he said.
    “You mean locally?”
    He nodded.
    “You . . .” She looked around the cell, as if to assure herself she was still in it and of this earth. “You want a local contractor to handle a local