Page 98 of The Chain House

“I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS is happening,” Warden Wren said inside the waiting room, with the same woeful expression Sam had seen on his face minutes earlier inside his office, when he’d watched out the window toward the yard as prison personnel readied the area for Sal Batise’s execution.

The news crew, outside the window, seeming as anxious as the rest of them here on the inside, had been setting up cameras and testing microphones as Warden Wren watched from above, muttering the same thing he was now: I can’t believe this is happening.

Governor Hawthorne had gotten a call thirty minutes before from the President of the United States, insisting to the governor and the warden that this could not happen. You cannot go through with this, Governor. We can’t have a death row inmate shot to death by firing squad on live television. It was incomprehensible, he’d gone on to say, with Sam and the rest listening in disbelief on speakerphone. But when the President had urged them to allow the FBI to do their job and end this another way, Governor Hawthorne had blown up on the phone, telling the man in the White House who he’d voted for in both terms, that there was no other way, and that Justice Minks, the man they now knew was born Luther Wright, was enough of a psychopath to do anything to anyone. Maybe he was being naive, but as he’d told the President, The only way my wife stays alive is if Batise goes down exactly as he said.

We don’t fall prey to ransom demands, the President had told him.

And Hawthorne had said, With all due respect sir, I do, this time.

Minutes ago, after waiving a chance to speak to a priest or preacher or spiritual supervisor, Batise had been taken away for a requested shower and shave, a change into fresh clothes, and what he’d called a thorough brushing of his teeth.

Now here they were—Sam, Warden Wren, Agent Givens, and Governor Hawthorne—inside what Sam had earlier dubbed the War Room, as the four tried to think a way out of this nightmare.

The only one of the four not sitting now was Agent Givens, who paced the windowless room, animatedly gyrating his left hand as he spoke to this person and that person, ending one call only to jump right into another, all of them waiting to see if Emily Hawthorne’s laptop could be recovered from the Hawthorne mansion. The governor’s cousin lived there now with her family, and Gavin had made the initial call, warning her that FBI agents would be there within minutes to search the upstairs room where he’d stored all of Emily’s things, and to let them do anything they needed to do. His cousin, understanding the situation, said, Of course, of course, Gavin …

But that had been thirty minutes ago, if not more, and they’d yet to hear a word from that end. Governor Hawthorne looked like he might come apart at any moment. In the middle of the table, all seven of the Mallard Malone novels rested in a stack, not unlike Sam had seen at his father’s house the day before, but even though the books had been brought for possible reference, they’d yet to be touched, and were mostly viewed by those in the room like they were cursed.

Governor Hawthorne reached across the table and grabbed the first book in the series, Long Pale Moon, from the top of the stack. He opened the cover, closed it, and said to Sam and Warden Wren, “My sister and I, when we were little, we both liked to read and write stories. She was much better, a faster reader, a better writer, for sure, but we used to, when we got bored, we’d play a stupid game. We’d take the first word from each chapter and combine them to see if they ever made sense as a sentence of their own.”

Sam said, “Did they?”

He smiled longingly. “No. Maybe a few times there’d be a string of a few words that could make sense, but mostly it was nonsense. Just stupid, kid stuff.” He sighed, clenched his jaw. “But it became our thing. She’d go to summer camp and she’d write me letters. Just checking in, telling me about her stay in the woods.” He opened the book again, flipped a few pages, stopped, as if reading, but then looked up again. “She’d leave a hidden message in her letter, every time. The first word of every paragraph,” Hawthorne said, sniffling. “Just stupid stuff, the letters were short, so the messages were short, but she’d sneak in something like, your bedroom smells like farts. Or you will never be as smart as me. And I’d write her back and attempt to do the same … she was better at it than me.” As he spoke, he flipped through more pages, his eyes scanning. And then he flipped through another few pages, stopping again to scan. He looked up at Sam. “Can you hand me that pen and paper?”

Sam did as requested, asking, “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” said the governor, even as he wrote three words and skipped to what Sam assumed was the beginning of the next chapter. He wrote another word and sat straighter in his chair as he flipped through more pages, faster now, and with an urgency that brought Sam out of his chair in anticipation. The governor wrote another word and said, “Holy shit.”

Warden Wren said it this time, “What is it? Gavin?”

Hawthorne’s face had gone pale. “Emily’s alive.” He stood from the table, turned the sheet toward them. “Sam, you talked to Mallard Malone’s editor? She said his books came in clean, like they didn’t even need to be edited.”

“Like they’d already been edited.”

Governor Hawthorne turned the paper toward them so they could read the words he’d written. “The first words of the first six chapters.”

Sam read.

I

Am

Alive

Please

Help

Me

Governor Hawthorne showed the first smile Sam had seen since he’d come into the prison hours ago. “That’s her. That’s my sister. She’s alive.” He looked at the warden. “Get Batise.”

At that point, Agent Givens stepped toward the table with news of his own. After noticing their current reactions, he said, “What happened?”

“I’ll tell you in a minute,” Hawthorne said. “What do you have?”

Agent Givens said, “They located your sister’s laptop and booted it up. Talk about a needle in a haystack, but they found Batise’s manuscript submission attached to his query letter from twenty-three years ago. Oliver Crown is first introduced halfway through the book, as a new member of Malcolm Dodd’s cult. Batise goes into detail where Oliver Crown lives. Like the burials in the other books, it seems like unnecessary detail, extraneous detail that probably should have been cut, but I’ve got a SWAT team on the way there now. They’re ten minutes away. It may be his house.”

Gavin nodded, still scared, Sam could tell, but also saw a hint of hope in his eyes.