Read Online The Execution of Noa P. Singleton by Elizabeth L. Silver - Free Book Online Page A

couldn’t shake the Van Pelt Incident. But good job there reminding me of the biggest failure of my life. My flight lesson was in a rickety old biplane in La Jolla when I was too young to even see over the dashboard of a car, which is why I
did
take driver’s ed. My grandmother died on the day of my
conviction
—not my arrest. And I’m farsighted.”
    This was actually quite fun.
    “You’re not inhuman and fearless,” he said to me, after a long pause. A strand of hair dropped between his eyes. “I know you think you are, but you’re not.”
    Across the room, I noticed that Patsmith was getting seated in her telephone booth, awaiting another visitor for the umpteenth time this week. She wasn’t looking at me, though. She was staring at Ollie, as if he was another Pat Jeremiah of the ephemeral Pat’s Pub.
    “We have five months to put together a narrative that might spare your life,” Ollie finally said. “If you don’t open up to me about who you are, about why you’re here, I can’t help you. And I want to help you, Noa. I really do.”
    Beyond Ollie, beyond the multiplying layers of glass, chairs, linoleum, visitors, guards, space, Patsmith was turning away to someone new. I couldn’t help myself from watching her, but throughout it, Ollie’s gaze never left mine.
    “Don’t get all serious on me now, Ollie. Come on,” I teased. “It’s the least you can do for me. It’s not like you’re actually my real lawyer.We both know it’s Marlene. You and I are just another one of her little projects.”
    He shook his head no with a smile—the universal sign that he knew his place but wasn’t about to challenge the one person who could alter it. Maybe he didn’t believe me. Maybe he did, and that’s why he grew reticent.
    “Tell me this, Ollie, did you always want to come to Filthadelphia, America, to work for one of the last remaining Queen Bees of the women’s lib generation so that she could make you feel guilty about everything you’ve ever done? Is that why you hopped over?”
    A nervous grin bled through his face. “She’s not that bad.”
    “You’ll see.”
    “And, yes, I did want to come back here.”
    “Back?” I said, lifting my legs to the chair. “Now I’m listening.”
    He smiled downwardly again, signaling to everyone around him that he was approaching distinguished-hood prematurely but hadn’t quite realized it.
    “Noa, please focus.”
    “I am,” I said.
    He looked behind to Patsmith and Nancy Rae and the surplus of empty chairs before slumping into his chair like a derailed child.
    “I spent a summer traveling cross-country on a bus before university, and I loved it here.” He smiled, his cheeks spackled with dark-red spots. “I always knew I wanted to come back.”
    I laughed. “You spent your summer on a bus?”
    “A Greyhound bus,” he said proudly, as if reliving the vile memory.
    “You’re kidding, right?”
    “What?”
    “What do you mean … what?” I asked. “Nobody takes the bus cross-country in America. You do realize that.”
    He sat up. “I hate flying—that’s why I took the bus. That’s all.”
    “Oh, Jesus Christ,” I sighed. “You’re one of them. You’re afraid to fly.”
    “No I’m not,” he said.
    “Come on.”
    “I’m not. Really,” he said lowering his voice. “I was actually conceived on a plane.”
    I folded my arms, one on top of the other. “I’m listening,” I said, though in hindsight, I don’t think I really was.
    My eyes were drifting slightly beyond him to Patsmith, who was now glaring over at us from behind her visitor (a priest? a grandfather?). But Ollie’s lips were moving in animation, his eyes jumping about his face. Somewhere between Ollie’s throat-clearing anxiety and nail-biting interrogation, he had slipped into the role of enchanting storyteller, far better than Madison McCall, who never told me so much as his wife’s name, or Stewart Harris, who claimed he lived in Philadelphia, but I knew