Reversible Errors by Scott Turow Read Free Book Online

place, but she remembered the instructions every skilled lawyer offered in preparing a witness: Answer the question you are asked. Briefly, if possible. Do not volunteer.
    "No, not at that time." She tossed her cigarettes into her sued e s houlder bag, and snapped it authoritatively. She was ready to go, and asked if Raven was finished. Instead, he took a second to run a thick finger around the rim of his coffee cup.
    "I have a personal question," he said at last, "if you don't mind."
    He was probably going to ask what everyone wondered. Why? Why had she allowed a life of limitless promise to subside into dependency and, in short order, crime? Raven was too socially awkward to hesitate where courtesy kept others from going, and she felt the familiar iron hand of resentment. Why didn't people understand that it was unfathomable to her? Could anyone who was not, even now, such a thoroughgoing mystery to herself ever have fallen so low? But Raven's concerns were more pedestrian.
    "I keep wondering why you came back here. I mean, you're like me, right? Single? No kids?"
    Were he uncaged, Raven apparently would have flown away. Yet she felt an impulsive reluctance to compare herself to Arthur. She had been alone, but by choice, and always took it as a temporary condition. She'd been thirty-nine years old the night the federal agents arrived at her door, but a marriage, a family, remained solid figures in the portrait she'd drawn of her future.
    "My mother was dying. And the Bureau of Prisons was willing to give me credit for helping take care of her. It was the Bureau's choice, frankly." Like other answers she'd offered Raven, this one, too, was comfortably incomplete. She'd left prison broke -the government and her lawyers had taken everything. And Duffy Muldawer, her 'sponsor' in the parlance of twelve-step programs, had been willing to offer her a place to stay. Even at that, she sometimes shared Raven's puzzlement about why she'd returned to what was, in all senses, the scene of the crime. "Once my community release time is over, I'll probably ask to move."
    "She's gone? Your mother?"
    "Four months ago."
    I m sorry.
    Gillian shrugged. She had not yet sorted out how she felt about the death of either of her parents-although it had long seemed one of her few strengths that she did not dwell 011 this sort of thing. She had had a home and a childhood that were worse than many, better than some. There were six kids and two alcoholic parents and a continuing state of rivalry and warfare among all of them. To Gillian, the whole significance of her upbringing was that it had inspired her to go on. It was like coming from Pompeii-the smoldering ruins and poisoned atmosphere could only be fled. Civilization would have to be reinvented elsewhere. She had put her entire faith in two things: intelligence and beaut)'. She was beautiful and she was smart, and with such assets she had seen no reason to be dragged down by what was behind her. The Jill Sullivan born in that house emerged as the Gillian she had willed into existence. And then destroyed.
    "My father died three months ago and I'm still a wreck," Arthur said. His short brow was briefly molded by pain. "He never stopped making me crazy. He was probably the most nervous human being ever to walk the earth. Anxiety should have killed him years ago. But, you know, all that hovering and clucking-I always felt how much he cared." Ravens eyes, stilled by recollection, rose to her, confessing in a darkly plaintive look how rare such persons were in his life. Arthur was like some puppy always sticking his wet nose in your hand. In an instant, even he appeared embarrassed, either by how much he'd revealed or by her evident discomfort. "Why am I telling you this?" he asked.
    "Probably because you think someone like me has nothing better to do," she answered.
    Her tone was purely conversational, and she thought at first the words must have meant something other than what they seemed to. But they