This Dark Road to Mercy: A Novel by Wiley Cash

spending your time answering the phone when babysitters and cleaning ladies get the police called on them by accident.”
    “What should I be doing?”
    “The first thing you should do is stop feeling so damn sorry for yourself and start looking at how you can bring as much good out of this shitty situation as possible.” He stubbed his cigar out in the ashtray, and I thought that meant our meeting was over, but I was wrong. “Hear me out,” he said, leaning forward, his elbows on his desk, his fingers interlaced like he was fixing to pray. “You probably know that our guardian ad litem program is made up of attorneys and volunteers, and on the volunteer side we could use somebody who needs another chance to do the right thing, especially somebody who knows the law and who’s seen the things you’ve seen. Most of our volunteers are country-club housewives, and these kids deserve more than that.”
    “Nothing wrong with country-club housewives,” I said.
    “Not until you drop them down into the middle of a couple of these shit situations. Then they break apart like china dolls. They love the kids, but they can’t take seeing them get hurt.”
    I cleared my throat and sat up straighter in my chair. “Who’s going to want me around their kids after what happened?”
    “People who don’t have a choice,” he said. “People who have lost their rights to lay claim to their children, people who may not have deserved that claim in the first place.” He stood up from his chair and walked around to the front of the desk and leaned against it, staring down at me the whole time. “Listen, Detective; that boy is gone, it was an accident, and nothing you can do or no prayer his momma and daddy can pray is going to bring him back. You can’t live for him and you can’t speak for him; but there are a lot of kids out there who need somebody to speak for them, and I think you’re just the man to do it.”
    I said yes to Judge Shelburne mostly because it was the easiest thing to say at that time, and it took me a while to see myself as someone who could ever speak on a child’s behalf unless it was my own daughter’s. But I got used to it, and the years passed and it became easier and easier, seemed more and more natural. And then I was asked to speak for Easter and Ruby Quillby, two little girls, sisters, who didn’t have anybody else in this world to listen to them and give them a voice. And now they’d gone missing, and their voices were even harder to hear.
    Helen Crawford, the woman who managed the home where the girls lived, had already called the police before getting ahold of me, and when I got there that morning I saw a young officer filling out paperwork in a patrol car in the driveway and a couple unmarkeds sitting half in the grass out at the curb. I parked behind Sandy’s old, beat-up Taurus, the same one we’d once shared back when we were partners.
    He was coming up through the yard, carrying a cardboard evidence box with both hands, and when he saw me he raised it like he was bringing me a present and I’d gotten there too soon and ruined the surprise. At forty-three, he was three years younger than me and was just as tall and skinny as he’d ever been, and he wore the same kind of dark dress shirt and the same dark tie—loosened at the neck—he’d always worn. I climbed out of my car and watched him set the box inside his trunk and slam it shut. He turned around and stared for a second at the Safe-at-Home emblem on the breast pocket of my red golf shirt. “I hate to tell you this,” he finally said, “but if you’re here to install an alarm you’re too late for it to do any good.” He smiled and put his hands in his pockets.
    “Don’t think I haven’t already tried.” I nodded toward Miss Crawford where she stood at the front door, staring out at the road like she wanted to ask one of us what happened next. “She said she didn’t want the kids feeling like prisoners.”
    “It’s