Disappearing Body

Chapter 1 Early one frigid Thursday morning in mid-January 193-, sometime between the hours of four and five, a tired-looking prison guard holding a set of leg irons and handcuffs appeared outside Victor Ribe's cell. The guard, a burly man whose gray wool uniform tightly hugged at his shoulders and thighs, knocked his baton on the foot of Victor's bed and ordered him to get dressed. Victor, who didn't undress during the winter months, rolled back his tattered blanket and put on his boots and longcoat. The guard motioned with the baton to the cell operator, and Victor stepped up to the bars, his hands at his sides, palms extended outward. The roll and clank of the door echoed through the cell block; when the violent sound quieted, the guard motioned the baton at Victor as if he were tracing the shape of infinity in the air. "Out," he said, dropping the shackles and chains on the floor. With his hands in plain sight, Victor took one large step out from his cell and with a practiced hand quickly arranged the cuffs and chains around his ankles and wrists; once they were set in place, the guard bent down and fastened the locks. He then stood before Victor, close to his face, so close that Victor couldn't look away from him. "Is there any one thing in there you don't want to live without?" the guard asked quietly, almost intimately. "Why?" Victor asked. "Is there any one thing in there you wouldn't want to live without?" the guard repeated, this time with a sense of urgency. The guard continued to trace long figure-eights with the point of his baton. "Underneath the mattress," Victor said reluctantly, as quietly as the guard spoke to him. "Beneath the pillow, under the mattress." The guard walked into Victor's cell and from underneath the mattress at the head of the bed, he removed an old photograph, whose paper had turned yellow and thin from touch. It was a picture taken in front of a cheap backdrop of a carousel, a picture of Victor, looking much younger and vital, and a young slender woman on his arm. They looked carefree, happy, unhindered. The guard respectfully placed the photo in the pocket of Victor's coat, and then circled around him. "Walk," the guard ordered. Victor Ribe, who was serving the fifteenth year of his twenty-five-year sentence, walked with the guard through the cell block, through damp rusting corridors. They walked outside, over a long narrow stretch of the yard's stiff frozen grass, which led them to the prison's gates, where waiting was a somber-looking sheriff's deputy and a paddy wagon with its engine running. Victor turned his head over his shoulder. "What's happening?" he asked. "Eyes front," the guard ordered. The sheriff's deputy opened the back of the paddy wagon and pulled out a crate. "Inside," he said to Victor. Victor stepped onto the wooden crate and then inside the windowless metal casing of the wagon. The guard said something to the deputy privately and then he looked up to Victor, raised his arm, and tipped his hat. Not knowing what to make of it, Victor squeezed his jaw tight and nodded his head, then took a seat on a bench that was bolted to the floor. The deputy slid the crate in by Victor's feet and then slammed the doors closed. The padlock banged shut, the compartment turned black, and then, with Victor's chains rattling all along the way, the sheriff's deputy drove him down bumpy roads for the better part of three hours. When the sun had risen above the horizon, and the spectrum of color had dissipated white, through a small opening in a metal slat separating the driver's compartment from the back of the wagon, a thin stream of light crept down the arm of Victor's coat. As quietly as he could, Victor shuffled to the opening in the slat, cupped his large hands around his face, and squeezed his eye into the light. He could see through the small hole well enough to reaGrand, David is the author of 'Disappearing Body' with ISBN 9780385500340 and ISBN 0385500343.