Read Online All the Flowers Are Dying by Lawrence Block - Free Book Online Page A

of the world goes on, the same as it does when anybody else dies. Subjectively, I think it’s a resumption of the same nonexistence one had before birth. Or before conception, if you prefer. It’s hard at first to accept the notion that you’re not going to exist anymore, but it gets a little easier when you think of all the centuries, all the millennia, when you hadn’t yet been born and the world got along just fine without you.”
    “One hears of near-death experiences…”
    “
The tunnel, the white light? Some sort of hallucination, very likely with a physiological basis to it, and one that medical science will no doubt be able to explain to us at some future date. I won’t get to hear the explanation, but I guess I can live without it. Or die without it, come to think of it
.”
    “Gallows humor.”
    “There’s a phrase due for an update. Hard to find a proper gallows in our enlightened age. Well, better the needle than the rope. But now it’s your turn. What do you think happens when we die?”
    He doesn’t hesitate. “I think we go out like a light, Preston. I think it’s like going to sleep, but with no dreams and no awakening. And why should that be so hard to believe? Do we think cattle go from the abattoir straight to cow heaven? What’s so special about our consciousness that it should be permitted to survive?” The rueful half-smile. “Although I expect I’ll be drawn down the tunnel to the white light. But when I pop through at the end of the tunnel I’ll cease to be. I’ll become part of that light, perhaps, or I won’t, and what possible difference will it make either way?”
     
     
    “I’d like to come again tomorrow, Preston.”
    “I’ll be grateful if you do. Do you think they’ll let you?”
    “I don’t anticipate any problem. The warden thinks I might accomplish something.”
    “Help me resign myself to my fate?”
    He shakes his head. “It’s his hope that you’ll tell me where the Willis boy’s body is buried.”
    “But—”
    “But if I truly believe in your innocence, how can I possibly attempt that? Is that what you were going to say?”
    A nod.
    “
I’m afraid I may have dissimulated some with Warden Humphries. I may have led him to think that I believe
you
believe in your innocence
.”
    Briefly, he sketches what he’d postulated for the warden, explained how the wish could be father to the thought, how a man, in the course of denying his crimes, could genuinely convince himself that he had not in fact committed them.
    “Is that what you think?”
    “Do I think it ever happens that way? I know for a fact that it does. Do I think that’s what’s operating in your case? Absolutely not.”
    Applewhite ponders this. “But how could you be sure?” he wonders. “Even if you’ve got some kind of built-in lie detector, all that would tell you is that I’m speaking what I believe to be the truth. But if I’ve sold myself a bill of goods—”
    “You haven’t.”
    “You sound so certain.”
    “I’ve never been more certain of anything.”
     
     
    On the way out, he gets the guard to take him to the warden’s office. “I think I’m making progress,” he tells Humphries. “I think it’s just a matter of time.”
     
     
    It’s raining when he leaves the prison, a light rain that’s not much more than a mist. He has difficulty finding the right setting for the windshield wiper, and it makes driving less of a pleasure and more of a chore than it has been.
    It’s midafternoon when he gets to the Days Inn, and the parking lot is virtually empty. He parks in back and goes to his room. It’s a little early for a drink, he decides, but not too early for a phone call.
    It turns out there’s a message on his voice mail. He listens to it, deletes it. He makes three calls, all to numbers on his speed dial. The third is to a woman, and now his voice is different, the tone deeper, the phrasing more deliberate.
    “I’ve been thinking of you,” he says.