The file room held the essence of the men, but not the body odor or bad teeth. Not the hopes and dreams. Some of the despair was there, though, and some of the heartbreak, so when she located Tomás’s file in a dark recess of the room, she experienced a blast of tenderness. It was only when she opened it and saw the fuzzy mug shot and fingerprints that she remembered his fawning and guile.
It was silly to think anyone knew what she was doing, but as she read, she couldn’t help sensing eyes on her — on her neck, on her back side, peering up under her skirt from beneath the ladder she had climbed to access the file or down from the dingy egg crate fixtures, as if someone had put hidden cameras in the room or opened a folder containing intimate facts about her — facts and vital statistics, but also photographs and things she didn’t want anyone to know.
But the feeling of being watched didn’t stop her from poring over Tomás’s record with the idea that she might find something that would tell her whether he was guilty or not, which in turn might tell her what her attitude toward him should be. Only when she came upon a list of the things that had been in his pockets when he was arrested (a book of matches, a dollar coin, a picture of his girl) did she think, I don’t want to know anything about Tomás. I know quite enough already! Just as she was closing the folder to return it to its slot, a sheet of paper fell to the floor. It must have been tucked up between the pages, not affixed by the two-prong binding but stuck in casually, almost as an afterthought.
The page was dated two years after Tomás had been convicted, and a penciled note was scrawled across the upper right-hand corner: Witness recants. The rest of the page contained only a short paragraph purporting to be the words of John Gill, who now claimed that he had testified against Tomás in order to reduce his own sentence, that he had no knowledge of the crime Tomás was supposed to have committed, and that he had never met Tomás or even heard of him until he was being interrogated by detectives who offered to go easy on him if he could provide information that would help them get a conviction in the murder of the gas station attendant. Gill did his best to help them, but then he had found Jesus, and Jesus would want him to tell the truth.
The file also contained the notes from the arrest. Tomás had been apprehended miles away from the scene of the crime. When the police approached, he had started to run. Two officers had chased him down and arrested him. At the time, the only thing they had charged him with was resisting an arrest that, as far as Maggie could make out, shouldn’t have happened in the first place.
Maggie glanced up at the two high windows as if they would shed light on the mystery. Then she took the file upstairs, and when Valerie went to lunch, she copied it. But she didn’t know how to get it out of the prison past Hugo and the army of guards who were entitled to pat her down or feel her up, which, according to the other female employees, often amounted to the same thing. For two days, she kept the papers in her desk, but they weren’t safe there either. The duties of the secretaries were apt to change unexpectedly, and on any given day, one or the other of them might sit at someone else’s desk. Nothing in the prison was private. It made her miss the days at the munitions plant, where she had her own locker and where one of the desk drawers came with a tiny key. While she pondered how to remove her new evidence from the prison, she made a file for a fake prisoner, whom she named Max Gray, filled it with the copies she had made, and slipped it into the “G” section in the basement room. Hide in plain sight, she told herself.
Maggie left Tomás’s name out of it when she said to Valerie, “I learned about a prisoner who is only here because he ran from the police. Does that seem right to you or not?”
“Why was he running?” asked Valerie in her weary here-we-go-again tone.
“He had every reason to run!” cried Maggie. “Look what happened to him!”
“Good lord,” said Valerie. “It makes no sense to say he was running from a thing that hadn’t even happened yet!”
“But he knew it would happen.”
“Now he’s not only innocent, but he’s some kind of a genius. Good lord, Maggie. I’m beginning to see what Misty was talking about.”
Soon after Maggie started working at the prison, Valerie had said, “You have quite a reputation. Misty Mills told me all about you.” At the time, Maggie had made a self-deprecating gesture and said, “Whatever it was, I hope it was good.” But now competing thoughts about what Misty might have said about her wrestled in her brain. Too much time had passed for her to bring it up again and ask Valerie for specifics. Besides, Maggie didn’t want to let on that there was anything to tell, which could prompt Valerie to talk to Misty and Misty to put two and two together if Winslow had let on that he was missing a document.
Instead, she approached Misty at church the next Sunday. “What did you tell Valerie about me?” she asked.
“I told her to keep an eye on you.”
Again, there were multiple interpretations. Was it a friendly gesture, or was something a little more sinister being implied?
True was standing nearby and must have sensed her hesitation, for she came over with her plate of donuts and linked her arm through Maggie’s. “Everybody knows you have a good heart,” she said.
“No doubt I do,” said Maggie. “But what does having a good heart really mean? Having a good heart is meaningless if you don’t do good things.”
“You’re kind, for one thing, and you don’t do anything bad, do you?”
“Thank you, True, but everyone does bad things. I always thought the key was for the good to outweigh the bad, but now I wonder if that’s even possible. And just try putting those people with good hearts in a difficult situation and see what they do then. What if it’s the circumstances and not the people that are bad?”
“I don’t see how circumstances can be bad,” said True. “That’s like blaming a road for having potholes.”
“But people could fix the potholes,” said Maggie. “Instead of worrying so much about whether people are good or bad, maybe we should pay more attention to changing their circumstances.”
“I thought you were against changing circumstances,” said Misty. “Don’t go to war against a dictator. Don’t try to free an oppressed people. Don’t make an omelet because you might break a few eggs.”
“Maggie doesn’t believe in eggs,” said True with a giggle. “Not if it means upsetting the chickens.”
“I’m just saying that there are plenty of people to free right here — people who have done less wrong in their lives than I have,” said Maggie a little recklessly, given the documents hidden in her drawer.
“Just so you know, this is what I warned Valerie about,” said Misty. “This is a perfect example right here.”
3.7 Lyle
Lyle started taking an interest in what other people had to say on various subjects, and without Maggie with him night and day, it was as if he had an open socket that was now free for other connections. Sometimes Jimmy sat in Maggie’s old chair in the lunchroom, and for the first time since high school, Lyle was reminded of the term “best friend.” He made ball-and-chain jokes with Jimmy, and just talking about how a wife tied you down made Lyle feel kind of liberated.
In early March, Lyle towed Jimmy’s car to the shop when it broke down. A few weeks later, Jimmy used his chain saw to clear a branch that had fallen on the shed during a winter ice storm, after which Jimmy asked Lyle and Will to go fishing with him up at the lake the next day.
“They can’t,” said Maggie. “Will is taking the SAT next weekend, so he needs to study.”