Jude Read online

  Jude checked his watch and realized that it was getting late and he should go back to say good-bye. It was past ten when he rang the doorbell. Lizzie must have run to get it, because the door opened almost immediately and she was there.

  “Where have you been? Where are your things?” she demanded.

  Jude saw Davis appear over her shoulder.

  “Invite the man in, Lizzie. Don’t keep him standing on the front step.”

  “Thanks.” Jude stepped inside.

  “I held dinner for you,” she said. “Come on.”

  “She didn’t care that I was starving,” Davis said. “I told her that you might not be back tonight, but she insisted that you’d be here.”

  “And I was right,” she said.

  Jude followed them into the kitchen, and they sat down in their usual places.

  “Where are the files? And all the rest of your stuff?” Lizzie asked again, not making any move to help herself to any food.

  “Oh, a friend of mine called and told me about a really good deal on an apartment that just came up. It was too good to pass up, so I decided to take it. But I had to move on it right away.”

  “That’s great,” Davis said heartily. “Great luck. Sometimes it can take forever to find something decent. I had a friend who looked for months before he found anything that was even livable.”

  Jude suspected that what Davis’s friend considered livable was substantially different from his own requirements.

  Lizzie ignored Davis’s response, as if he hadn’t spoken. “And you decided all this without me? How could you, Jude? I thought we were a team—and what about the project? Are you just going to abandon that?”

  “I’ve kept you working on this too long. I’ll continue on myself, and if I find anything, I’ll let you know.”

  “You’d better,” Davis said.

  “But do you have any furniture?” Lizzie asked. “What will you sleep on? Do you even have blankets? Surely you’ll stay here one last night? You’re not going to go running out on us?”

  “It’s furnished,” Jude lied. “And I’d love to stay, but all my things are already there, and I’m anxious to spend my first night in my own place.”

  “But where is it?” Lizzie asked.

  “Over in South End.”

  “Where?” Lizzie persisted.

  “I don’t remember the building number,” he put her off. “It’s on Maple Avenue.” Maple Avenue was at least two miles long.

  “But you’ll call us to give us your number?” Lizzie asked anxiously.

  “When I get a phone hooked up,” he said.

  The dinner was subdued. The spell had been broken, and suddenly no one knew exactly what to say. When dinner was over, Jude said, “I’d better catch my bus.”

  “When will we see you again?” Lizzie called after him.

  “I’ll call,” he said. But he didn’t say when.

  41

  DESPITE SIX WEEKS of living in Davis and Lizzie’s huge house, Jude found that he settled easily into his little room. After all, he had spent five years of his life in a cell not much larger than his bathroom. Compared with that, his new apartment was a palace.

  He threw himself into fixing up his new place. He bought a mattress and, in a spurt of indulgence, an expensive set of sheets. He found a nice old kitchen table with a set of four chairs in a secondhand shop, but he delayed delivery until after the next weekend so that he could repaint the apartment. He spent a while lingering over samples at the store and finally chose a color they called Deep Ocean.

  As the clerk was ringing it up, he asked Jude what he wanted the paint for, and Jude told him that it was for his apartment. The clerk looked dubious. “I don’t know about this for an apartment. It’s a little unusual.”

  “I know. If I hate it, I’ll just paint over it.” But he didn’t hate it. He loved it. It wasn’t like any other room he’d ever seen. During the day, when the sunlight shone through the newly cleaned windows, the color looked crisp, and at night it darkened along with the sky.

  He bought a bright van Gogh print and tacked it up above his mattress. Then he put up Lizzie’s poster board on the opposite wall. He looked at it, almost took it down, but in the end left it.

  One afternoon he noticed a plant that someone had left for dead on the sidewalk, and brought it back up to the apartment. When he cleared away the brown fronds, he found it wasn’t as bad as it had appeared. He set it on the sill, and under the bright spring light the plant slowly came back to life. He liked the look of it, and he went out and bought several others—a tall, spiky cactus and a long, trailing ivy.

  About a week and a half after moving in Jude returned to his room, opened the door, and knew that it had become a home. But he found himself unable to enjoy it because as soon as his apartment project ended, his mind naturally turned to wondering, What next?

  It wasn’t that life was so awful. Work had gotten better. Somewhere in the last month the other employees in the kitchen had accepted him, and they included him in their conversations now. They joked with him about his gringo Spanish, which he took as a compliment. If it had been truly awful, he knew they wouldn’t have kidded him about it. They even invited him out with them to a club in Frog Hollow, though they couldn’t get him to dance—even with the incredibly pretty sister of one of the busboys.

  But most days he went straight home from work. He spent a lot of his time reading, stretched out on his mattress in a beam of sunlight, the breeze from the open windows carrying the smell of fresh bread from the bakery two buildings over. Nights he had a harder time concentrating on the words, and then he usually ended up listening to the murmur of the televisions in the apartments on either side. The noise around him seemed only to intensify his solitude. That’s when he missed Davis and Lizzie most. Or rather, he tried to convince himself that he missed Davis and Lizzie, but it was usually only one name that he thought of. He spent too much of his time sleepless and staring at the wall opposite—at Lizzie’s poster of dates.

  One night almost three weeks after he moved in, Jude lay on the mattress willing sleep to come, but as the night turned into early morning he remained stubbornly alert. He stared absently at the poster, almost without seeing it.

  And then it came to him.

  Maybe it was the apartment, similar to the dozens he had lived in with his father, maybe it was having the poster always in front of him, but suddenly he knew what those dates meant.

  He knew what the money had been for.

  JUDE THOUGHT ABOUT calling Davis and Lizzie right away, but in the end he decided that he would sit on the discovery for a few days and see if he could find some proof to back it up before he called.

  He had pored over Harry’s files for months, but now that he knew what he was searching for, the proof took only two days to find. On the evening of the second he found it—in the phone records, a number that he recognized. It appeared only once, but that once was enough.

  When Jude finally called Davis and Lizzie’s house, Davis answered, which was a relief. At least, he told himself it was a relief.

  “Jude,” Davis said, surprised. Lizzie must have been in the room, because he heard Davis say a second later, “Yes, it’s Jude. Hold on and let me talk to him first.” Then, “Sorry, I’m back. How are you? I’ve been wondering why you haven’t called us.”

  Lizzie’s voice broke in, “Yes, I’ve been wondering that too.” She must have picked up another phone.

  “Lizzie, I was talking to Jude.”

  “I called to talk to both of you,” Jude headed off the argument. “I wanted to know if you would have time to meet up with me.”

  “You can come over tonight if you want,” Lizzie said. “We’re not doing anything, and it would be great to see you.”

  “Not tonight. I was thinking the day after tomorrow.”

  “I’m free,” Lizzie said.

  “Yes, I can make that,” Davis agreed. “So we’ll see you over here at eight?”


  “Since you both work downtown, I thought somewhere around there. It’s closer for me.”

  There was a pause, then Davis said, “Yes, great idea. I know a place—”

  “I have a place that I’ve come to like,” Jude interrupted. “It’s not fancy, but the food is good and it’s within my price range. If that’s all right with you.”

  “Sure, sure,” Davis said.

  “It’s called Tosca. What time works for you guys?”

  They decided on seven thirty.

  “See you then,” Jude said, and hung up before either could ask anything more.

  JUDE HADN’T HAD the courage to take Davis and Lizzie to this restaurant before. The places Davis took him all had linen tablecloths and linen napkins and soft jazz music playing in the background. Tosca had plastic red-and-white-checked tablecloths and paper napkins and cheap, rickety wooden chairs, but Tosca wasn’t about the decor; it was about the food, and the people who knew about it kept it booked solid seven days a week.

  Jude went early, at seven fifteen, intending to be the first, but when he arrived, he found both Davis and Lizzie already there. They stood when he entered, but neither of them knew exactly what to do when he reached the table. Jude solved the problem by nodding and sitting down, and they followed his example.

  “I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” he said.

  “No,” and, “Not at all,” Davis and Lizzie said at once.

  “Have you gotten a chance to look at the menu?”

  “Just tell me what’s good,” Davis replied.

  “Anything,” Lizzie agreed.

  So Jude beckoned the waiter over and ordered for all three.

  “How’s your new place?” Davis asked awkwardly. “Settling in?”

  “It feels like home,” Jude said.

  “Great. Great. Though the house feels empty without you. It took a while to get used to it, didn’t it, Lizzie?”

  “Yes. It did.”

  Jude glanced at her, then quickly away. “But you must enjoy getting your lives back,” Jude said. “I took up too much of your time.”

  “It was the most fun I’ve had in years,” Lizzie replied. “I wasn’t ready to give up just yet. I think about it a lot, and I still say that we could have gotten somewhere with it.”

  “We did the best we could,” Davis said, as if it were a conversation they’d had before.

  “I just can’t get it out of my head,” Lizzie admitted. “I wish you’d left a few of the files so I could at least work on them on my own. I can’t stand the idea that we’ll never know.”

  It was as good an opening as any. “You don’t have to,” Jude told her. “I figured out what the money was for.”

  They stared at him.

  Then Davis erupted with a whoop.

  “I’m dying,” Lizzie said. “Don’t torture me.”

  He had forgotten how good it had been. Their spontaneous, jubilant reaction brought it all back, but his joy in it was missing. His discovery seemed to have drained all the happiness from him. It felt like only one thing would make him happy now.

  “I pinned the grid up on my wall in the apartment, and I spent a lot of time looking at it,” he explained. “One day it just came to me. I was coming at it from the wrong direction. Remember in the first place we were looking for extra money that Harry might have had around, when we should have been looking for anything out of the ordinary? The same thing happened with the dates. I was looking for things in Harry’s life to connect to the dates, but it wasn’t anything in his life that triggered those checks.”

  “What was it?” Davis asked.

  “My life. Not Harry’s life. My life.” This time he couldn’t keep the emotion from his voice. He heard it, sharp with fury. “Harry wrote the first check three weeks before my father took me. That’s just about when I was born. That must be when my father really decided to go through with his plan of taking me. All the other dates coincide pretty much with every time we moved. Harry was sending that money to my father.

  “I might have noticed it a long time ago if the checks had stopped when my father was killed, but they stopped two years before. Our last move.”

  “So if he was sending money to your father, that means … you’re saying that Harry knew where you were the whole time?” Lizzie whispered.

  “Not only that, he knew what my father was planning beforehand, and he helped him,” Jude said.

  “And now he’s married to your mother,” she continued, unraveling the implications of the news. “He helped your father steal you, consoled her, and volunteered to head up the investigation, while all the time he knew exactly where you both were. That’s … that’s horrific. I mean, if he had wanted to, he could have gotten you back for her at any time.”

  “Any time,” Jude agreed.

  “It’s hard to believe. I’m still not sure I do,” Davis admitted. “We need more than a random coincidence of dates.”

  “I know,” Jude said. “That’s why I went back through the phone records. There’s only one there, but one’s enough.”

  “One what?” Lizzie demanded.

  “Phone number. My father’s phone number, to be exact. It was the one we had just before we moved back here. I wouldn’t have recognized it unless I was looking, but … I was looking. Harry called us. That proves he knew where we were.”

  Davis blinked. “Yes. That proves it. Oh my God,” he said, getting excited, “that proves it. You’ve got him.”

  Jude smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I’ve got him.”

  “So are we sticking to the same plan? We threaten to publish the story if he doesn’t tell Anna what he did, right? I don’t see how he could possibly say no. It’s bound to work.”

  “That’s the plan,” Jude said.

  “I wonder how your mother is going to react,” Lizzie said.

  “She going to get down on the ground and kiss Jude’s feet,” Davis declared.

  “I wonder,” Lizzie said again, thoughtfully. “I hope it’s everything you ever dreamed of,” she said to Jude. “I really do.” But she sounded doubtful.

  The food came then, and they all dug in. Lizzie and Davis claimed that it was the best meal they’d had in ages. “It’s so much better than the stuffy restaurants that I always go to,” Davis said.

  They lingered late over coffee, but finally Davis looked at his watch and said, “God, I had no idea how late it was. I’m going to need some sleep if I want to be at my best when I make that call tomorrow. We’d better get the check.”

  “Already taken care of,” Jude said. He had excused himself to visit the bathroom and picked up the check at the same time.

  “No way. You have to let us give you something toward dinner,” Davis protested.

  “Tonight I don’t have to do anything. Tonight is mine.”

  Davis hadn’t heard that tone from Jude before. He was used to having the comfortable upper hand.

  “What happened to you in the last three weeks?” Davis tried to say it jokingly, but there was too much truth in the words for it to slip by. “I’ll tell you one thing. I’m glad I’m not Harry right now. He doesn’t have any idea what he’s in for. So what do you want to do now?”

  “I want an appointment with Harry.”

  “Do you think he’ll agree to it?” Davis asked.

  “Yes, I’m sure of it,” Jude said, smiling. “Because you’re going to make the appointment. You’ll say you want to do a piece on him for the paper. Harry never could resist good publicity.”

  42

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON when Jude finished work, he found Davis waiting for him outside the diner. Jude took a deep breath and crossed to Davis’s car. He bent to the passenger window.

  “Guess what?” Davis said. “I got the appointment with Harry.”

  Jude’s stomach dived and jumped as if it were on its own roller coaster. “When?”

  “This afternoon. You coming?”

  “Now? You mean right now?”

  “I got him
on the phone this morning,” Davis explained. “Turned out he had some time free this afternoon, and I figured, the sooner the better.”

  Jude opened the door and got in without another word.

  It didn’t take long to reach the house. They got out of the car and walked up the path together, but it was Davis who pressed the doorbell. A moment later they heard the sound of footsteps approaching, the door opened, and Harry stood in front of them on the stoop. He looked first at Davis, and he started to smile. Then his gaze slid past to Jude.

  Their eyes met, and Jude felt suddenly breathless with hate. The power of it almost scared him, but he merely said, “Hello, Harry.”

  Jude caught a flicker of emotion cross Harry’s face before it was replaced with a bland smile. “If you wanted to see me, Jude, all you had to do was call,” Harry said. “There was no need for this subterfuge about an article in the paper.”

  “Oh, that part’s true enough,” Jude said. “Aren’t you going to invite us in?” He brushed past Harry without waiting for an answer, and Davis followed close on his heels. “You have somewhere we can talk?”

  “Of course.” Harry closed the front door, then gestured for them to follow. He led them down the hall and into the room where they had spent hours scanning his files. Jude and Davis sat in the two chairs. Harry moved around the desk and settled himself into the high-backed leather chair.

  The last time Jude had faced Harry across a table was in the prison. Jude knew that he was barely recognizable from the child he had been, but Harry had hardly changed at all. He still had the same powerful build, the same easy self-importance. There were probably a few more wrinkles, maybe a little more white in the salt-and-pepper hair, but Jude could almost have believed that it was only weeks that had passed and not years.

  Harry must have been thinking along the same lines. He said, “It’s funny, you used to be the spitting image of your father, but you don’t look much like him anymore.”

  “I do, actually. I look more like him,” Jude corrected him. “This is what he looked like when I knew him. After he spent a lot of years indoors. Just like me.” Jude’s smile was more like a baring of teeth. The men at North Central Penitentiary would have recognized it from Jude’s early days. They would have known that smile meant trouble. Even Harry looked a bit uneasy for a moment before he covered it with his usual confident bluster. “And who’s your friend?”