But Sarah raced around the corner her little bare feet spanking the pavement like meat patties being slapped on a skillet. Her face was contorted in hysterics and her nose dripped with snot as she leapt into my arms and I held her like it would be the last time I would ever get to hold her.

I heard footsteps quickly pacing from around the corner of the house so I ran to my car and opened the driver-side door and shoveled Sarah into the passenger seat. Rita was outside screaming at me while tears of rage dribbled down her face as she approached us and then pounded on the hood of my automobile. She was dressed in only a disheveled nightgown and her feet were bare.

“You give me back that child right this instant!” she screamed, her eyes red with hate.

I wondered how she could have so little faith in me as to doubt my innocence without even the courtesy of a conversation. I shook my head at her and I backed out of the driveway. Rita, who had dropped to her knees and held her hands out like angry bear claws, disappeared from view as my high-beams slid off of her.

“Put your seatbelt on baby.” I smiled down at Sarah. She looked so pathetic, her face red from crying, her blond hair mussed from the wind. She wore a Disney t-shirt with a large Mini-mouse plastered across the front that I had bought her when we were on vacation in Orlando during that summer.

Sarah buckled her seatbelt and stretched to lay her head against my leg. I stroked my fingers through her hair as I drove.

“Are you okay sweetheart?” I rubbed her back.

“Yes daddy. But grandma wouldn’t let me leave.” She said with a pout of sadness in her voice. “She said you were a bad man but I told her you weren’t.”

I drove until I reached the only hotel near our house and Sarah fell asleep nestled safely beneath my arm as I lay in bed wondering how my life could have taken such a drastic turn. I wondered if Catherine was looking down at me and watching as my life fell apart.

3

It is strange, but I don’t ever remember being alone in the dark without being scared before that time at Rita’s house while I fretted over Sarah’s confinement. I had been scared ever since I was a little boy, so much so that even though my father insisted that it was pure quackery, my mother, posing in the rare role of the fervent matriarch, forced my father, under threat of divorce, to take me to see a psychiatrist.

I remember playing with a friend down the street from my parents house and having so much fun that I did not realize that the sun was fading, and once I did realize that it was dark I abandoned my friend and ran home in a fit of hysterics. I didn’t think that there was anything wrong with me. I thought that all kids were afraid of the dark. I learned later that most of the other kids were also afraid of the dark, but not to the point of irrationality. So my mother put her foot down and made my father take me to a psychiatrist at great expense because we didn’t have health insurance.

My conversation with the quack psychiatrist, as my father called him to his face (I believe I must have been no more than eight or nine years old at the time), was followed, during our drive home, with one of the few loving and sincere conversations I ever had with my father; a conversation in which he explained to me that I must not only overcome my fear of the dark but that I also must not let on to anyone that such a fear existed within me lest I be ridiculed by my schoolmates. I gave him my word but to tell the truth I broke my vow and confided in the only person outside of my family whom I would ever let know my secret. The pressure of subduing my overt fear was too great and I had to confide in someone. It was shortly after my visit to the psychiatrist that my soon-to-be best friend Tommy Sullivan moved into my neighborhood. I disclosed my phobia to him and him alone once I realized that we were best friends and that I could trust him.

Tommy became my protector of sorts. Despite my small stature, no one dared pick on me for fear that they would have to answer to Tommy Sullivan. On the few rare occasions when they did cross the line Tommy put a thumping on them.

I stared at a watermark on the dark ceiling above my adopted bed thinking of how it would be nice to have Tommy Sullivan to talk to. But I hadn’t talked to Tommy since shortly before I got married. He was upset that I didn’t have him as my best man at my wedding, but Catherine refused even to let me invite him based solely on the basis of the stories I told her of his violent nature.

But my true thoughts were elsewhere. My stomach was still in knots now that I had time to think about the perils of my predicament. The only thing keeping me from losing complete control of my nerves was the warmth of Sarah’s little body next to mine; a reminder of my life’s purpose. She was my constant intimation that I had to fight to the end to prove my innocence; but my innocence of what? Murder? Was it true that Catherine was murdered? The thought was absurd. I was with her the entire night. She may have slipped out of bed for a glass of water but how would she have gotten back into bed and nestled me if she were dead? There was no sign of an intruder. No broken window-glass; no loud startling noise; no busted lock. Besides, who would sneak into our house and quietly kill my wife while ignoring the other lives in the house? What had they gained?

And there was no way, absolutely no way, that Amber came all the way to Cleveland Ohio, tracked me down, and killed my wife. Our connection was intimate but we shared the mutual understanding that our families were more important than our relationship was. Amber understood that our amalgamation was noncommittal; almost pretend. We never planned to actually meet. Neither of us had anything to gain by abandoning our families and uniting. Besides, Amber was not the sort of person who would take a life. We role- played and as we did we also got to know each other quite well. Amber was a nice young woman in her mid thirties stuck in a droll marriage to a man who paid little attention to her. She was a mother; a house-wife. She lived on a five acre parcel in the sticks of Kansas. She had once been a striptease dancer so her moral character could be called into question if one were a prude, but she was just a child at that time, a victim of a molesting father out on her own at the age of sixteen. She did what she had to do to survive. She was not psychotic. She was not in Cleveland. That made no sense. The detective was reaching; trying to bait me. He must have thought I was as guilty as a vice.

No, I could not be taken alive; or at least not lying down. Sarah needed me. It was bad enough that she would have to spend the rest of her life without her mother; knowing that her mother had been murdered; knowing that I was a prime suspect.

Would Sarah someday wonder if I had done it?

I had heard of and read so many newspaper stories about falsely accused and convicted individuals; innocents with the wholesome misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or who were ill-fated enough to so closely resemble the actual perpetrators of a crime that the jury was convinced of their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. I never thought that I’d be one of them.

Up to that point in time I had been a major proponent of the death penalty for all but the most accidental of murders. Fry the bastards! An eye for an eye! Only when I realized that I was in danger of being the scapegoat for a crime that I had not committed did I change my point of view. I knew that I might soon be Sparky’s next subject.

But how does one prove that one didn’t do something? I didn’t have much of an alibi. I was at the scene of the crime. But there was no contrivance. No weapon. But how was