When I Found You Read Online Free PDF Page A

… Is your daughter … A knitter?”
    She burst into a nervous little laugh.
    “That is certainly not how I expected you to finish your sentence. I’ve had quite a few questions about my daughter in the last few days. Believe me. Most I won’t even repeat. But not a single one went to her knitting abilities.”
    “So she does knit?”
    “Yes. In fact she does. Inherited it from me, I suppose. I’ll have to bring her some yarn in prison. She’ll have so much darned time on her hands.”
    “Yes, ma’am. Well, I thank you for your time.”
    Nathan turned and walked back to his car.
    •  •  •
     
    He had driven several blocks, replaying his parts of the conversation in his head, when he remembered with a start that he had forgotten his intention to express some type of condolence.
    What had become of his manners of late? Why did everything seem to be shaken?
    Nathan longed briefly for some aspect of life which had remained unchanged. But there was nothing as far as he could see.

7 October 1960   
The Day He Tried and Failed to Find Out Why
    Nathan arrived shortly before eight A.M. at the county jail. An overweight, sulky woman with two small children already sat in the lobby, avoiding his eyes. Avoiding everyone’s eyes. Other than she — them — he seemed to be the first to have shown up for visiting hours.
    He logged himself in on a worn and dog-eared sheet carried over from yesterday’s visitations. He signed his name, produced his driver’s license — which he felt the officer behind the desk scrutinized too closely and for too long — and then filled in the name of the prisoner he was hoping to see.
    Lenora Bates, he wrote in his careful script, hoping he was spelling her first name correctly.
    The officer — if indeed he was some type of officer — took the clipboard, which held the form out of Nathan’s hands, turned it around. Began to read impassively. Then a deep frown unexpectedly furrowed into his brow.
    “Have a seat,” he said. “This will take several minutes.”
    Meanwhile a female guard opened a door into the lobby, nodded at the woman with children, whom she seemed to know, and allowed them inside.
    Nathan looked back at the officer behind the counter. Hopefully. To see if he could go in, too.
    The man shook his head. “You’ll have to have a seat. As I say. This will take several minutes.”
    “It didn’t seem to take
her
several minutes,” Nathan said. Not combatively. Just in such a way as to invite explanation.
    “I’m afraid your case will be more complicated.
Much
… more complicated.”
    Nathan perched uncomfortably on the edge of the hard wooden bench the woman had just vacated. It was still warm from her bulk. Nathan had never understood how people could allow their bodies to get so large. Such a chaotic, uncontrolled existence.
    Meanwhile the officer behind the desk picked up a phone and spoke into it quietly, in an obvious effort to keep his words from being overheard. But Nathan had always enjoyed unusually keen hearing.
    “Ring up the watch commander. Tell him we need the coroner investigator over here.” A pause. Then, “Father, I think.”
    Nathan ran the single troublesome word around in his head. Coroner. No one had died in this case.
    Had they?
    With a jolt like a baseball bat to his stomach it struck him that the infant, Baby Nathan Bates, who had been doing so much better last time Nathan called to check on his status, might have died.
    He jumped immediately to his feet, and the officer looked up, surprised.
    “A payphone,” Nathan said hastily. “Do you have a payphone here?”
    “Yeah, there’s one out front.”
    He ran outside. The October air had taken on an even sharper nip. Nathan had been feeling in his bones that the first snow would fall soon.
    He dug in his pocket for a dime, and called the emergency room of the hospital. He now held the number, memorized, in his head.
    Dr. Battaglia answered.
    “This is Nathan McCann,” he said.