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sitting near him at the attorney’s table, never moving, and so very pale. After the verdict, when he was back in his cell he kept reliving that moment: “Life and twenty-five years, life and twenty-five years.” He kept seeing her face, closed and still, trying to hide the pain. Kept seeing the faces of his neighbors, members of his church, his automotive customers—the hard faces of strangers. In less than four weeks from the day Falon walked into the shop asking Morgan to come look at his car, nearly the whole town had turned against them. Their lives had been blown away as thoroughly as a landing craft sunk by a destroyer.
    During the two-hour ride to Atlanta, handcuffed to the deputy marshal, he experienced every bitter emotion, desolation, helplessness, a violent rage that he had no way to act upon. He had always viewed the U.S. legal system as carefully designed to protect honest men, to confine those who threatened ordered society. How dumb was that?
    If a federal jury could do this to an innocent man, what other destruction might the courts be capable of?
    He and Becky had made their marriage vows for life; they had joined as a team not to be parted. Now Morgan himself,in one moment of bad judgment, had wrenched their family apart. In going with Falon to look at his car, he had broken all his promises to Becky and had shattered their little girl’s life. Now, if he hadn’t been chained he would have tried to grab the deputy’s weapon, would have done his best to break away and get the hell out of there. Watching the thin, scowling deputy, he grew increasingly restive. Only when the deputy’s hand edged toward his gun did Morgan try to sit easier. These men didn’t know him, they didn’t know what he might try. He was dealing with a different world now. He had no rights anymore. He would soon be surrounded by guards like these who lived by power, and by inmates just as power hungry, and he’d sure have to watch himself.
    After the trial he had suggested to Becky that she file for divorce, that she try to make a new life for herself and Sammie. Her face had gone red with anger, her eyes blazing, then she had clung to him, weeping. Not since a mortar shell had ripped through the hull of his ship in the Pacific, the water gushing in through splintered metal, had he realized how frail and precious life was. Falon’s deliberate destruction of their lives had been as brutal as any enemy attack.
    They entered the outskirts of Atlanta, passed the Fox Theater and then the hotel where he and Becky had had dinner before he left with the navy. She’d ended up crying halfway through the meal. The future then, as he went off to war, had seemed irrevocably black and empty.
    He’d come home from that one—but maybe he’d had better odds, even in war, than he had now.
    South of Atlanta the modest little houses gave way to mottled fields and then the Federal Pen loomed, tall and gray and cold, its fortress face and guard towers challenging all comers. Parking their black limo before the front door, the deputies pulled him out, forced him up the steps and inside.
    He was booked and told to strip. His clothes were taken away, and a guard searched the cavities of his body,stirring his rage. He showered as he was told. He dressed in the prison blues he was issued, then moved into the cellblock followed by a guard. The cells stood five tiers high. He climbed the narrow metal stairs to the third level, walked ahead of the guard along the steel catwalk. He was locked into a single cell, and was grateful for that. He hoped he wouldn’t be moved later into one of the bigger cells with multiple cots and with unrestrained roommates. Sitting down on his narrow bunk, he didn’t look at the men in the cells across the way, didn’t make eye contact. Some of them watched him idly; others stared directly at him, caged predators assessing new prey.

6
    T HE NIGHT BEFORE Sammie