“Everybody deserves to be forgiven,” he finally said, and then looked back at the map.
While Sara was showering, Fiske went into a room off the kitchen. She obviously used it as a home office of sorts, since it had a desk, computer, bookshelf full of law books and a printer. He spread the map out on the desk. He found the scale at the bottom, converting inches into miles, and rummaged around in the desk drawer until he found a ruler. Using Washington as the epicenter, he drew lines outward in north, west and southerly directions and then drew a line attaching the end points. He ignored the east, since four hundred miles out would put him well into the Atlantic. He made a list of the various states within this rough circumference, picked up the phone and called directory assistance. Within a minute he was on the phone with someone from the Federal Bureau of Prisons. He gave the name Harms to the person on the other end, along with the geographic radius he might be within. It had occurred to Fiske that his brother may have gone to visit Harms in prison. The call his brother had made to him seeking some advice would then make sense. John Fiske knew a lot more about prisons than his younger brother did.
When the bureau representative came back on the line with the results, Fiske’s face sagged. “You sure there’s no prisoner with that last name in any federal prison in the geographic area I gave you?”
“I even went out an extra couple hundred miles.”
“Well, how about state prisons, then?”
“I can give you the phone numbers for each state. You’ll have to contact them separately. Do you know which ones are in that area?”
Fiske looked at the map and rattled them off. There were over a dozen. Fiske wrote down the telephone numbers he was given and hung up.
He thought for a moment and then decided to check messages at his home and office. One was from an insurance agent. Fiske returned the call to the agent, who was located in the D.C. metropolitan area.
“I was very sorry to read about your brother’s death, Mr. Fiske,” the woman said.
“I didn’t know my brother had any life insurance.”
“Sometimes the beneficiaries aren’t aware. In fact, it’s not the insurance company’s obligation to notify the beneficiaries even if we’re aware of the insured’s death. Bluntly speaking, insurers don’t go out of their way to pay out claims.”
“So why did you call me?”
“Because I was horrified by Michael’s death.”
“When did he take the policy out?”
“About six months ago.”
“He had no wife or kids. Why did he need insurance?”
“Well, it’s why I called you. He said he wanted you to have the money in case anything happened to him.”
Fiske felt a catch in his throat and he held the phone away for a moment. “Our parents could use the money a lot more than me,” he finally managed to say.
“He told me you’d probably give the money to them, but he wanted you to use some of it for yourself. And he thought you’d know better than your parents how to deal with it.”
“I see. Well, how much money are we talking about?”
“A half million dollars.” She read his address to him to confirm that it was still accurate. “For what it’s worth, I write a lot of policies for people, for a lot of different reasons, not all of them good, but in case you didn’t realize it, your brother loved you very much. I wished I was as close to my brother.”
As Fiske hung up the phone, he realized that he was not on the verge of tears. He was on the verge of putting his fist through a wall.
He got up, put the list in his pocket and went outside, down the stairway, past the vertical rise of cattail on one side, the sprawl of fern on the other, his feet taking him to the small dock. The sky was deep blue, with dabs of cloud, the breeze encouraging, the humidity vanished for now. He looked to the north, to the four-story reach of the million-dollar town houses on the outer ring of the Old Town Alexandria area, and then at the long, serpentine shape of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. Across the water he made out the Maryland shore, a tree-lined mirror image of the Virginia side. A jet powered by, its landing gear down as it headed into National Airport a few miles distant. The fuselage was so close to the earth that Fiske almost could have hit it with a rock.