Deadly Reckoning by Marian Jensen

Author:Marian Jensen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: family, revenge, free, plane crash, american west, journalist main character, newspapers fiction, series mysteries
Publisher: Marian Jensen

Chapter 13

Daniel Swoboda recalled with vivid detail his journey to Butte with Lowell Austin on the previous Thursday evening. They had met at the bus station in Drummond, fifty miles west, and driven back along the interstate, probably the only vehicle doing the speed limit.

When they reached the outskirts of Butte, Lowell had asked about Our Lady of the Rockies. The ridgeline was indistinguishable from the night sky, and the statue on the horizon seemed to hover like an angel.

“What is that up there in the sky?” he had asked.

Daniel smiled broadly. “That’s Our Lady of the Rockies, patron saint of Butte, Montana. Looks like she’s floating, doesn’t it?”

Lowell’s interest in the statue had surprised Daniel. According to the Interfaith Prison Ministry staff at Orofino, during Lowell’s years in prison, he had developed a reputation as a hard case. He boxed a bit and learned horsehair hitching—mastering intricate, colorful, geometric designs good for hatbands and bracelets. Mostly he just kept to himself. All of which Daniel thought made him a good match for Butte.

Prisoners about to be released always talked to the associate warden about the transition into a new life after their decades in prison. Daniel knew that from his own training as an interfaith lay minister. He wondered if the warden could possibly have done justice to the experience.

Daniel had tried to use the story of how the ninety-foot statue built in honor of women, especially mothers, had been welded of sheet metal by unemployed miners as a metaphor for overcoming difficult obstacles, a lesson he thought Lowell might appreciate. The description of how a helicopter had hauled the statue in sections to the top of the East Ridge on a windy day in the dead of winter usually impressed even the most cynical. Lowell seemed to listen with one ear.

When Daniel asked Lowell about what prompted his decision to come to Butte, the convict had been straightforward. “No other particular place to go. My mother is in a nursing home back east. My brother doesn’t want much to do with me. I can respect that. Most of my friends, aside from my attorney, stopped writing a long time ago. Can’t blame them. I don’t have much in common with any of them anymore.”

Then he had patted his shirt pocket and said, “I got one invitation though.” He talked about the many women who had written to him while he was in prison. At first, the country song about him had inspired fan mail, and then the television movie spawned even more. He had heard or seen neither and had no desire to. “I didn’t answer most of the letters.”

But two years before his release, Lowell had added his name to a list of prisoners who wanted someone to write to them. It would be a good way for him to begin the reentry into society, the interfaith staff had said.

He matter-of-factly described the kinds of letters he had received. The women had their own miseries and wrote a lot about the power of faith and redemption.

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