dream. I paused and closed my eyes for a second. The one clear sound I could hear was that of my own pulse pounding in my ears. I opened my eyes and at that instant felt a little queasy.
She raised her left hand just above her head. I nodded toward her. She lowered her hands and head, and a second later my phone buzzed.
U ok?
I did not text her back. I nodded in her direction.
Another buzz.
Y U just standing there?
This time I did text back.
Hungry. Just airplane peanuts for three hours.
I cinched my backpack up on my shoulder and continued on down the concourse.
She was, like she said she would be, at the top of the stairs—sort of. The stairs, it turns out, were escalators separated from the concourse by a rail and by the TSA. When I got to the point that I would have to go down to the baggage claim area, she called out to me.
“Meet you at the baggage claim,” she said.
She swirled around and her hair did that thing where it seems to drift up in slow motion. Never seen anything like it.
I took the escalator down, and there she was at the bottom waiting for me. We stood there looking at each other for either two or three seconds or two or three hours.
“Glad you could make it,” she said.
And then she stepped toward me. I was afraid she was going to hug me. Instead she smacked me in the shoulder with a sideways fist. My stomach did a somersault.
8
It’s easy to remember a man named Shirley who’s built like a linebacker and carries a gun. It’s another thing to be standing next to him. Deputy Shirley Pickens was waiting near the baggage carrousel. He made everyone around him look small. I’m sure I got shorter as I approached him.
“Jason, good to see you,” he said as he extended his hand.
“Good to see you, too,” I said.
“You’ve grown, what—maybe an inch since we saw you in April?” he said.
“Almost,” I agreed.
Deputy Pickens turned to Leah and said, “He’s gaining on you, Leah.”
Leah replied, “He may be taller than me someday, but he’ll never catch me.”
It was true. I was almost as tall as Leah, even though she’s a year older than I am. It was also true that I would never catch her.
The drive from the airport to Dr. Carroll’s house, according to the GPS on Deputy Pickens’s dash, would take about ninety minutes. We were planning to stop and get something to eat along the way. I wanted to ask about Carl Morris and how he escaped. I just didn’t know how to bring it up.
“You’re probably wondering about Carl Morris and how he escaped,” said Leah.
At that instant I became less interested in Carl Morris than I was in how she managed to know what I was thinking.
Leah was sitting in the front seat next to her dad. I was sitting right behind her. She turned around to face me and said, “That is what you were thinking, isn’t it?”
Before I could answer, Deputy Pickens said, “In addition to all the state and local charges he was facing, there were federal charges because his crimes were committed in a national forest. He had to be transferred to Montgomery for an arraignment in federal court, and he convinced the marshals who were driving him to take the back roads around Gantt Lake. Just wanted to get one last look at the countryside before they locked him away for good, he said. Well, it’s about the same distance from Andalusia to Montgomery whether you take the Interstate or not, so they thought, why not? Somewhere up above the lake, Morris talked them into letting him get out and take a leak. That’s the last anyone saw of him.”
Leah had been watching me as Deputy Pickens told the story. She turned around and pulled down the sun visor, then she opened the mirror on the visor and tilted her head to one side so that she could see me as she said, “Nothin’ but swamp up there above Gantt Lake. I think the gators got ’im.”
“It’s possible,” her father replied, “but not likely. Gators avoid people whenever they can.”
“Well, he just disappeared somehow,” said Leah. “State troopers couldn’t even find him with their FLIR.”
“Fleer?” I said.
“FLIR, F-L-I-R,” said Deputy Pickens, “It stands for Forward Looking InfraRed. The troopers have one mounted on the front of one of their helicopters.”
“It’s a camera-like thing that sees heat instead of light,” said Leah. “The state troopers were down there flyin’ around the swamp within an hour. They shoulda seen Carl Morris.”
We rode in silence for a few minutes. Every now and then I would catch Leah glancing at me in the mirror. At last she turned around to look straight at me and said, “Maybe Carl Morris ain’t got no soul.”
She stared at me as I pondered her words. Then she said, “Think about it, Jason. Carl Morris ain’t got no soul. It makes perfect sense. He ain’t got no soul, so he don’t put off no heat.”
“Leah?” said Deputy Pickens, “What have I told you about talking like that?”
I thought the deputy was talking about Carl Morris having no soul until he continued, “No more saying ‘ain’t’ and no more double negatives.”
“Yes, Daddy,” Leah replied.
She turned around, closed the mirror, and flipped up the sun visor.
After a moment she muttered, “I still say Carl Morris has no soul.”
After another moment, “Either that or the alligators got him.”
And after another moment, “Maybe both. Now that would be a double negative.”
9
“Fate, providence, destiny. So easy it would be to believe that Ashley Allen was born to discover fossil trackways at the Union Chapel Mine. Look at all the things that had to come together for him so to do.”
Dr. C. C. had a strange way of talking.
“Long ago. Long, long, long ago, a thing amazing happened.”
Dr. Curtis Carroll had told us we could call
