Chapter 65: Sixty-Eight Words
I wrote it out clean on the sixth of April, at the desk, at 6:40 in the evening.
One sheet. Both margins even.
No crossings-out, because a crossed-out word in a letter to that man would look like something being hidden.
I am going to put the whole thing here, because it is sixty-eight words and it is the most careful writing I have ever done.
“Theo.
I read your six letters on the fourteenth of March. I had not opened them before that, and that was cowardice, not respect.
I am not going to explain myself in a letter, and I am not asking you for anything.
There is a fact in the police file about the night your mother died that I do not think anybody has told you.
I work at 1130 Charter Street and I am there until six.
Cass Mercer”
Now I will say what each line is for.
I built it the way you build a filing. Every line has a job.
Line one is a date and an admission, in that order, and the order matters.
The date is there because he asked for exactly one thing in the first letter, which was that I not get to forget what day it is.
He gets a date from me, in the first sentence, in writing.
The admission is there because he already knows I did not open them.
He has watched six letters go into a hole for six years.
If I do not say it, the whole letter is a lie by omission in the first line.
Cowardice, not respect. Both words are load-bearing.
If I had written only cowardice it would be self-punishment, which is a bid for sympathy.
Naming the flattering version and refusing it is the only way to say it without asking for anything.
Line two closes two doors. It is the shortest line and it took the longest.
No explanation, because an explanation in an envelope is a document he cannot cross-examine.
No request, because he has been asked for things by lawyers and insurers and reporters for six years and I am not going to be the ninth.
Line three is the only thing in the letter with any weight in it, and it is deliberately not about me.
Read it again.
It does not say I am innocent. It does not say the file is wrong.
It does not say anything about the eleventh of March, or the ninth of March, or a signature.
It says there is a fact about the night his mother died, in the police file, that I do not think he has been given.
That is true. I have checked it.
And it belongs to him, not to me.
Line four is an address and an hour and nothing else.
Not a phone number, because a phone call happens on somebody's schedule and he would be the one dialing.
Not a request to meet.
An address and a time, stated flatly, the way you would say where the office is.
He can come or not come.
If he comes, he chooses the day, and he chooses whether to sit down.
He can leave whenever he wants. It is a public office with a door on a street.
That was the whole design.
Give him the location of a fact and let him decide what to do about it.
Then my name.
I signed it Cass Mercer and not Cassandra.
Cassandra A. Mercer is the name on the confession, and I was not going to put the court version of myself in front of him.
Under my name I wrote the date.
The sixth of April.
Then I did what I do, which is look at it.
I looked at the date, and then I looked at it again, and then a third time.
I sat there with the pen in my hand for a while, because there is a thing my mother used to say, and I had already used it once that year, and I was not going to wear it out.
The date was right.
It is the only date in this entire story that I chose, wrote, and checked myself.
I folded the sheet in three, which is one fold more than it needed.
Then I put it in the envelope.
I did not seal it that night.
I left it open on the desk under the lamp and turned the lamp off.
In the morning I read it once more, cold, standing up, with my coat on.
I did not change a single word.
I sealed it at 8:11 with the sponge Marisol keeps for the bond files.
I did not want my mouth on it.
Then I put it in my inside coat pocket and scanned four hundred and six pages without thinking about it once.