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

really lived in the Delaware Valley on the weekends, where his estranged ex had full custody of his children. Ollie, one month in, was already sharing the files from his life without my prying so much as a birth date or alma mater from him. It takes a certain amount of self-awareness to confide so much in a near stranger this early on. It takes an even greater amount of resilience to proffer it to a double murderer.
    “My dad was a pilot, my mom a flight hostess,” he continued, “and, yes, it’s terribly charming—”
    “—I was going to say cheesy, cliché, nauseating, but go on.” I smiled, looking directly at him.
    “I was conceived on a weekend flight somewhere in either Morocco, Algiers, or Gibraltar, but no one can be sure exactly where.”
    “Please tell me your father was not flying the plane that weekend.”
    Oliver laughed, briefly. “No, he was just flying with my mum that weekend as a passenger.”
    “I see.” I smiled. “Cute.”
    “He’s very important to me,” he added. “My father.”
    He clutched his hands together into a ball but didn’t elaborate. Instead, he gazed at me, looking up, sort of. He was short—I couldtell that even when he was sitting down—and blessed or cursed with a mug of babyface magnitude. But his words were so elegantly articulated—even silently—that I was getting lost in his damned gaze. It bothered me.
    “You’re not very subtle, are you, Ollie?”
    Again, the uplifted shoulders.
    “How do you know that what you’re reading in your record is actually the truth?” I asked.
    “Perjury, Noa,” he declared. “That’s how.”
    “And nobody lies on the stand? Really, Ollie. You’re foreign, but you’re not that foreign.”
    “You never took the stand.”
    “You have a point there,” I said, “but that’s not the reason I didn’t testify. Ask Marlene.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Nothing.” I sighed, looking beyond him again. Patsmith was still in her booth speaking at someone, while staring over at Ollie. Ollie was my visitor, though. Not Patsmith’s. She wasn’t about to change her name to Olliesmith days (or was it years?) prior to her execution.
    “Noa?”
    I looked back to him.
    “Nothing,” I said. “You know, you’re not going to find anything new in that record of yours. You think I haven’t read it from cover to cover?”
    “I spoke with your father yesterday on the phone.”
    From their fans of lashes, average brown eyes stared back at me with urgency and precision. It was like he wanted a medal for picking up a telephone.
    “Guard!” I called. It was instinct at this point. I stood and looked out from the divider. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Nancy Rae putting her Dr Pepper can down on a chair to walk over to me.
    “Why won’t you tell me about him?” Oliver pleaded.
    “I was really starting to like you.”
    “He was very concerned about you,” Ollie replied.
    “I haven’t heard from him in years,” I said, looking back to Nancy Rae. “I heard he was in Costa Rica.”
    “Canada.”
    “Canada,” I said, still looking for Nancy Rae. “Okay. Fine, then. Did Marlene put you two in touch?”
    “Marlene?” He laughed, shaking his head no. “No. She doesn’t know where he is.”
    “Right.” My head nodded, and I sat. “How would she?”
    “I just felt that there was something missing when I read the transcript,” he said. “So I tracked him down.”
    It was almost as if he were looking for validation. Pride in his job well done far beyond the call of pro bono law firm duty. I was about to hand him a dozen roses and a tiara when Nancy Rae arrived outside my door.
    “Noa, please,” he said, almost pleading with me. “How often have you spoken with him?”
    I said nothing.
    “Noa?”
    “Three times,” I said. “I’ve spoken with him three times since.”
    “Three times?” he echoed. “Try again.”
    God, he was relentless. I thought the English were supposed to be slightly more passive than