"Dwyer," Neal said. "I'm family."
Sandoval ran a thick finger down a clipboard. "Nine-thirty. They'll come out and get you. There's coffee." He tipped his head toward a small table in the corner with an urn on it and a sleeve of paper cups and a basket of creamers. "I wouldn't, but there's coffee."
Neal said thanks. He did not want coffee. He went to the corkboard instead, because it was there, and read the page behind the plexiglass. It was headed LIFE SENTENCE HEARINGS and the date, and under that there were two names, one for the morning and one for the afternoon. The morning one said DWYER, SEAN M., W-104377, and after it, in parentheses, MCI-NORFOLK.
He had seen his son's name typed a great many times. He had seen it on the indictment and on the docket sheet and on the verdict slip, and on the sentencing order, and on the envelopes that came from the prison every week with the inmate number written under the return address in Sean's careful block capitals, the capitals he had learned to make in the third grade at St. Edith's from a nun who rapped your knuckles if the letters leaned. He had seen it on the screen in the visitors' processing room at Norfolk every other Sunday for fifteen years. He had thought he was past being stopped by it. He stood there and was stopped by it.
He was still standing there when he became aware of the woman.
She had come in behind him; he had heard the outer doors and not looked. She was a Black woman somewhere in her forties, not tall, in a long camel-colored coat open over a navy dress, with a canvas tote bag on one shoulder heavy enough to pull the coat down on that side, and a large manila envelope held flat against her chest with both arms, the way a schoolgirl carries books. She had a pair of reading glasses hanging on a chain of small beads around her neck, red and yellow and blue beads, bright, the kind of chain a child makes at a kitchen table. She had gone through the detector after him and said good morning to Sandoval by name, and Sandoval had said, "Morning, Ms. R.," and then she had come over to the corkboard and stood a little to Neal's left and lifted her phone and taken a picture of the typed page.
Then she lowered the phone and looked at him. Not long. Two seconds, maybe three. It was a look he knew from the other side, the look of somebody checking a face against a description.
Then she went and sat in the chrome-armed chair nearest the inner door, the one that led back to wherever the hearing room was, and set the tote bag between her feet, and opened the manila envelope, and began to read something inside it, moving her lips.
Neal stayed at the corkboard. He did not turn around. He looked at the plexiglass, where he could see her in the reflection over his son's name, a blurred camel shape in a chair.
There had been a letter. It had come in August, to the house, not to the station, a plain white envelope with no return address and a Brockton postmark, and inside it a single sheet of lined paper torn from a spiral notebook, so that the left edge was a row of little paper teeth. It said, in blue ballpoint, YOUR SON SHOULD DIE IN THERE LIKE ELIJAH DIED ON THAT LAWN. WE WILL BE AT THE HEARING. It was not signed. He had not shown it to Maureen. He had shown it to a lieutenant he trusted, who had held it up to the window and said, "Probably nothing, Neal. Probably some cousin. You want me to send it out for prints?" and Neal had said no, because he knew what it would look like, a police sergeant running prints on the family of the boy his son had killed. He had put it in the glove compartment of the truck, under the registration, and it was still there.