Bury Me(52)

Nolan tries to take my hand again, but I yank it away, moving farther ahead of him and straight to the check-in counter, where a grandmotherly woman sits with a notebook and pen in front of her.

She turns the notebook around, pushing it across the counter toward me with a smile on her face. “Just print your name and the name of the prisoner you’ll be visiting today.”

Grabbing the pen from the top of the book, I neatly print my information at the bottom of the other list of sign-ins. When I’m finished, she turns the book around, glances quickly at what I wrote and begins to get up from her chair. She pauses halfway out of her seat, her head whipping back down to the book. She lifts it from the counter and pulls it closer to her face, her eyes widening as she looks back and forth between me and the book.

“Tobias Duskin? You’re here to visit Tobias Duskin?” she asks in a quiet, shocked voice.

“Yes, is that a problem?”

I start to worry that maybe we made the trip out here for no reason. Maybe he’s not allowed to have visitors. Considering the extent of his crimes, I probably should have thought about that before jumping into the car and racing over here, but the only thing on my mind was getting answers that only he could provide.

“No, no problem,” she replies, the smile again on her face as she places the book back on top of the counter. “Just a little surprising is all. I’ve worked here since before Mr. Duskin was transferred here and in all that time I believe he’s only had one other visitor.”

Nolan and I share a look, and he jumps into the conversation.

“You wouldn’t by chance remember who his visitor was, would you, ma’am?” he asks politely.

“Oh, heavens no!” she replies with a chuckle. “It was so long ago that the log books for that time have already been sent down to storage, otherwise I’d look it up for you. The only reason I remember is because we keep reports on which inmates receive the largest or the least number of personal visits, and every month for eighteen years, Mr. Duskin is always at the bottom of the list with just that one visitor in all this time.”

She moves away from the counter, busying herself with getting our visitor badges in between answering the phone when it rings. After a few minutes, she hands us the badges and quickly runs down the list of rules we’ll need to follow when they call us, such as remaining only in the designated visiting area, no talk of the prisoner’s treatment or questions about his daily habits in the facility, no conversations that will anger or upset the prisoner in any way, and when our thirty minutes are up, we must end our visit immediately without any trouble or we will never be permitted back.

I’m sure we’ll have no trouble following the rules, but even if we can’t, it’s not like I plan on coming back here to visit Tobias again anyway.

Nolan and I pin the visitor badges to our clothing and then take a seat in the hard plastic chairs pushed against the wall until our names are called.

“Do you know what you’re going to say to him?” Nolan asks softly as we watch a few more people enter the building and go up to the counter to check in.

“I guess I’ll just get right to the point and ask him if he knows he’s my father,” I reply. “That’s the only question I care about getting an answer to right now.”

If I had more than thirty minutes with him and if Nolan wasn’t here with me, I might ask him why he killed his parents and a handful of strangers. I’d ask him if he thought about it beforehand, dreamed about it, craved it, and it just became too much, and he had to do it before the thoughts in his head drove him crazy. Basically, I’d ask him if that was something I had to look forward to, since we share the same bloodline.

“Visitors for Duskin?”

Nolan and I stand up from the chairs when a guard holding a clipboard announces our name. We follow him through a door leading away from the waiting area and down a long hallway, stopping in another small room. We’re asked to remove any items we might have in our pockets so they can be inspected. Nolan removes his wallet and keys, placing them on the table, and we wait while another guard quickly checks them over, passing Nolan’s wallet back to him and informing him he can pick up his keys after the visit.

Moving out of the room, we continue on down the hallway, coming to a closed door. The guard unlocks it and then holds it open for us. In the middle of the stark white room is a long wooden counter that runs from wall to wall. There are booths separated by wooden walls attached to the counter, two metal chairs inside each booth and a glass partition running right down the middle.