Chapter One
Nathaniel Mulbury could smell something in the air. Something that indicated a change was coming.
A big change.
He stepped up to the window of the door of his dormitory and looked both ways down the hall. He’d been stationed in the wing on the far end of the hall, with only a few feet between his door and the one that led to the yard. And beyond that, the baseball fields. The track. The fresh Texas air.
He liked this dorm, because he didn’t hear any of the scuffles from the indoor area, which sat to his left and down the hall about a hundred yards.
No one roamed the halls right now, as it wasn’t the appropriate time. A count had just been called, and it wasn’t even one of the normal times. The men at River Bay endured five daily counts, three of them between midnight and five a.m.
A count meant all prisoners had to be in their dormitory, and when one was called at an off-time, it was a standing count. So Nate stepped back and held very still at attention. He’d never been disciplined in the fifty-two months he’d been at the River Bay FCI. He was within six months of his release date, and that remained fluid due to his exemplary behavior in prison.
“You hear anything?” Ted asked.
Nate didn’t even flick his eyes toward his friend. “Not a word.”
“Because you’re in that office a whole lot,” he drawled.
Nate’s teeth ground together, and he knew Ted would see the way his jaw jutted out. But he said nothing.
True, he worked in the office with the Unit leaders. Didn’t make him privy to what they knew, and it certainly didn’t give him insight as to why they’d called a stand-up count at two-fifteen in the afternoon.
He’d been up most of the night, as usual. He assisted with the suicide watch, and one of their newboots had struggled mightily last night.
Nate could remember the day he’d come to River Bay as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. His brother, Ward, had dropped him off at the facility, after he’d gotten permission to self-surrender at the low security prison camp only two hundred and forty miles from White Lake, where his parents and both of his siblings lived.
Ward was the oldest of the three Mulbury children, and Nate had appreciated him more than anything the day he’d driven him to the FCI. He hadn’t had to box up his clothes and mail them back to his mother. Ward had taken them.
I’ll keep them for you, okay? he’d said.
Nate had just nodded, because he didn’t want to do anything to upset Ward. Anything more than what he’d already done, that was. Nate was the only Mulbury to be convicted of a federal crime, and his heartbeat skipped when he thought about getting out of River Bay. What would be waiting for him out there?
The hair on the back of his neck stood at attention too, and Nate looked to his left. A pair of Unit Officers came down the hall, and Nate hoped this standing count would end in a moment. His unit was usually one of the last to be counted, and he focused back on his brother’s words from the day he’d dropped Nate off.
We’ll see if these clothes fit when you get out. Ward had smiled then, but all Nate could think about was the many things he’d missed while he’d been in prison. Ward’s wife had been pregnant when they’d come to River Bay.
He’d missed the birth of his first nephew. He’d missed Ward and Jane’s divorce. He’d missed his sister’s wedding, and the birth of her two children. He’d missed birthday parties and Christmases and picnics and days out on the boat in the Gulf of Mexico.
The PA crackled. “Count complete. We’re clear.”
Nate sighed as his muscles relaxed. He climbed back onto his bunk, exhaustion pulling through him. He stared at the bottom of the bunk above his, the towheaded boy Connor had grown into forming in his mind’s eyes.
Ward’s son.
Ward came to visit Nate every week, even after all these months. These years. Every week. Most holidays, he brought several people with him. Friends of his who knew Nate, and at least once a month, Nate’s parents.
His parents had gotten old while Nate had been in prison, and he’d missed that too.
“You’re up to shower,” someone said, tapping his foot against the frame of Nate’s bed. He heaved himself off the mattress that wasn’t comfortable anyway and headed out the now-open door.
He’d learned to be vigilant when simply walking down the hall. He was housed in a low security prison camp, which meant he could come and go almost anywhere anytime he wanted. There were rules and limitations, which he’d learned quickly, and he didn’t want to be caught going one direction while the other twelve hundred men at the camp were going the other.
He’d gotten a seven-year sentence for his role in investment fraud, but there were guys in here who’d used weapons during robbery, broken into homes, committed crimes against children, and more. Anything could happen if he didn’t watch what was going on around him, all the time.
The only time he didn’t need to do that was during the ten-minute shower he got each day. Which was why he’d heaved himself off the bed and down the hall to the bathroom he shared with the other forty-seven men in his wing of Unit NF.
He soaped and shaved, then dressed in his standard prison clothes and reported to the unit office. He had a special pass to work there, and he’d been helping with files and doing simple data entry for a couple of months now. The work wasn’t stimulating, but it was work.
Everyone in prison had to work, and most of the men needed the money. Nate hadn’t told a single soul that he did not. Ward deposited money in his prison bank account every month, though he couldn’t spend more than three hundred and ten dollars a month.
Nate, in all the months he’d been in River Bay, had not spent that much. He saw no need to call attention to himself. In fact, everything Nate had done over the last fifty-two months was to keep the spotlight off of him.
Head down. Mouth closed. That was how he’d avoided the fights, the disagreements, and the overload of tickets that seemed to fly from the Unit Officer’s fingertips.
No one spoke to him, which suited Nate just fine. He knew all the men and women in the unit office, and he felt very lucky to have been assigned to this unit.
“How’s Charles?” he finally asked when he and the unit secretary seemed to be the only ones still working.
She looked up from her computer, her eyes slightly glazed over. Nate wondered what that would be like, to feel so comfortable that he wasn’t constantly scanning the windows just beyond the office for any sign of a threat.
“Oh, uh, he’s okay,” she said, her mind clearly somewhere else. Ellen had thin, wispy hair the shade of rich soil. She tucked it away, but it just spilled out again, because it was so fine.
“Think I’ll get a full night’s sleep tonight?” Nate asked, looking back to his own computer. His was at least five years older than the one Ellen pecked on, and it didn’t connect to the Internet. Nate got thirty minutes each day to download and upload his emails, and just by communicating with his mother and then Ward, it wasn’t enough time to stay caught up on everything.
“Probably,” Ellen said. “We’ve got two more on call. You took your turn last night.”
Nate thought of the three a.m. count, and though he didn’t have to stand at attention for that one, he woke up every night when the Unit Officers came through the rooms, their flashlights as bright as spotlights.