After a fifteen-minute wait, a new guard entered the visiting room and spoke to the officer on the platform. A few moments later, he took Ashley across the hallway to another visiting section, where the only furniture was the hard metal bridge chairs that stood opposite windows of thick glass. Behind these windows, in narrow concrete rooms sat prisoners deemed too dangerous or too much of an escape risk to be allowed into the main visiting area. The guard led Ashley to two doors at the far end of the room. He opened one of them and Ashley found herself in a tiny cubicle. The only furniture was a bridge chair that faced a glass window. A small metal shelf protruded from the bottom of the window. There was a narrow slot at the bottom of the glass through which sheets of paper could be passed. Above the slit was an equally narrow metal grate that permitted people on either side of the glass to speak to each other.
“They’re bringing Maxfield down, now. He’ll sit in there,” the guard said, pointing at an identical cubicle on the other side of the glass. “This is the only place where visitors are permitted to talk to the inmates on death row. When you’re ready to leave, go back to the desk and we’ll have someone come down from reception and get you.”
The guard left Ashley alone in the room. The air was close and she started to feel claustrophobic. Delilah had told her that it would be impossible for Maxfield to get at her, but she had been afraid of him for so long that she had to convince herself that he did not have supernatural powers that would enable him to break through the thick glass and concrete that separated them.
The door to the other cubicle snapped open with a metallic click, and a guard prodded Joshua Maxfield into the narrow space. His hair had turned partially gray and his skin was pasty from lack of exposure to the sun. Ashley remembered how fit he’d looked on the day they’d met outside the gym. Now his skin looked slack. The only thing that had not changed was his eyes, which never left her while the guard unlocked his hand and leg irons.
“What a pleasant surprise,” Maxfield said as soon as the door closed behind the guard, but he did not look pleased.
“Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Maxfield.”
“Credit my appearance to curiosity. Except for my lawyer, I haven’t had a visitor since I was sentenced. And I would never have guessed that you would be my first.”
“Are you being treated okay?” Ashley asked, trying hard to hide her anxiety. As soon as the words were out, she realized how inane the question sounded, but Maxfield took it seriously.
“Death row isn’t quite the Ritz, but I suspect I’m treated as well as one can be in my circumstances. The guards actually give me paper and pen and let me write. They probably assume that I’ll be more docile if I’m occupied.”
He smiled, but his face was tight. “You might be interested to know that I’m working on a novel about an innocent man who is unjustly sentenced to prison. I sent some sample chapters to my former editor in New York. He’s very interested but he doesn’t want to ink a contract if I’m going to be executed. The publishers are afraid that I won’t be alive long enough to finish the book. But enough about me. Why are you here?”
“I wanted to ask you some questions. If you answer truthfully I may be able to help you.”
“Help me what?”
“Get out of here.”
Maxfield cocked his head to one side and studied Ashley with renewed interest. “Why would you of all people want to help me?” he asked.
“I…I have some doubts about the verdict.”
“It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?” Maxfield laughed bitterly. “Thanks to you and Casey I’m a dead man.”
“You left out someone else who bears part of the blame.”
“Oh, and who is that?”
“You, Mr. Maxfield. You lied about key evidence. Your case might have turned out differently if you’d told the truth.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked warily.
“You lied about what happened in the boathouse. That’s the first thing. I don’t know why you did that but you did. And you lied about your novel.”
Maxfield colored and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “My novel?” he repeated.
Ashley steeled herself and looked Maxfield in the eye. “You didn’t write it. You plagiarized the serial killer novel.”
“Who told you that?” Maxfield asked angrily.
“No one. I figured it out. One thing always nagged at me. You’re smart. Everyone says so. You had to be, to write so well. My mother went on and on about your books. That’s why she took your course. And I couldn’t figure out how someone so smart would do something as dumb as read the part of your book where the killer eats the pie to one of the few people in the world who would understand its significance. But once I considered the possibility that you didn’t write the scene it all made sense. You had no idea that the person who murdered my father ate that snack.”
Ashley paused for Maxfield’s reaction, but he held himself rigid and gave her none.
“I read the two drafts, Mr. Maxfield, and I’ve read your books. You wrote the manuscript with your name on it. That manuscript has the same style as A Tourist in Babylon and The Wishing Well. The man who killed my father and Tanya Jones wrote the other manuscript. The first draft is so different that it had to be the work of someone else.”
Maxfield still said nothing, but he didn’t stop her either.
“I was in court when Delilah Wallace played the tape of the interview Detective Birch conducted at the jail in Omaha. You sounded shocked when he told you that the scene you read to my mother was just like what happened in my house. You didn’t know. You could have told Birch that the book wasn’t yours then, but, as bizarre as it seems, I think you’d rather die than admit you can’t write anymore.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it? You failed at everything you tried until you wrote Tourist. Your whole identity was wrapped up in the success of that book. Instead of being a screwup, you were suddenly revered, respected, rich, and world-famous. Then The Wishing Well flopped, and you came up empty when you tried to write another novel. You had your moment of fame and you wanted it back. You saw the serial killer novel as your way to return to the top. Who wrote the first draft, Mr. Maxfield?”
“You think I can’t write anymore? You’re accusing me of…of stealing someone else’s work?”
“I know you did, and I think your pride kept you quiet. We all thought that you were this superintelligent genius writer, but I think you’re really a one-book wonder who would rather die than admit you stole someone else’s idea for a book because you couldn’t think up an idea of your own.”
Maxfield’s eyes dropped. He looked utterly destroyed.
“The reviews, those first reviews. They said I was the new Hemingway, the new Salinger, the voice of my generation. Everyone said it. The money came so fast, everything came so fast.” Maxfield’s face fell. “And it went so quickly. When The Wishing Well flopped, my editor told me it was the sophomore jinx; that I’d tried too hard. He told me to take my time with the next book and that I’d be back on top in no time. Only there was no next book. I couldn’t come up with a single idea. Every time I tried I came up dry. Then the money ran out and they sued me. After I was forced out of Eton College I couldn’t get a respectable job. Everyone knew about my drinking and the falsified résumé and what happened with that student. I had to teach high school, for God’s sake. My only way back was with a new book.”