Chapter 13 - When Monsters Fall
Justice in the legal world was complete, but in my world, loose ends did not remain untied.
Two weeks after the court decree, I walked through the heavy steel security doors of the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. The warden himself escorted me down the maximum-security tier, clearing the central visitation corridor of guards and inmates alike.
Sitting behind the scratched, bulletproof partition was Gregory Vance.
He looked hollowed out. His face was gaunt, his prison jumpsuit hung loosely over his frail frame, and his left arm was wrapped in a crude medical sling—a reminder of the welcome he had received from inmates who had learned why he was serving twenty years for aggravated child neglect and systematic fraud.
When he saw me sit down across from him, he flinched, clutching the sling to his chest.
I picked up the black plastic telephone receiver. After a long hesitation, Vance picked up his.
"You... you came to kill me?" Vance croaked, his voice broken and defeated.
"No, Gregory," I said, leaning back in my metal stool. "Death is too fast for what you did. You left a starving six-year-old girl in the rain so you could gamble away fourteen hundred dollars a month."
"I was desperate!" he wept, pressuring his forehead against the glass. "I didn't think she'd survive! I thought someone would call the state!"
"She did survive," I said, each word cold and steady. "And yesterday, she celebrated her seventh birthday in a garden overlooking the entire city. She had a cake with seven pink candles. She blew them all out in one breath. And do you know what she wished for?"
Vance swallowed hard, tears tracing dirty lines down his unshaven cheeks. "What?"
"She wished that every lost dog in the city finds a warm bed," I told him. "Even after what you did to her, her heart has more grace than you will ever comprehend."
Vance began to sob uncontrollably, his shoulders shaking with genuine, agonizing remorse.
"You will serve every single day of your twenty-year sentence, Gregory," I said, rising from my seat. "I have made sure your appeals will be denied, and your commissary will remain empty. You will sit in this cell, day after day, year after year, and you will remember the little girl who sang in the rain while you played cards."
May you like
I hung up the receiver, turned my back on his muffled screams, and walked out into the sunlight.
The past was buried. The debt was paid.
