Outside the kitchen door I took a quick, reflexive look around for Dolan, saw nothing to alarm me, and hurried across the croquet course and putting green, gnawing on one of my pieces of toast as I went. I slowed a little as I entered the shelter of the woods, and as I walked down the path, I found my mind turning to the day after Eduard Delacroix's terrible execution.

I had spoken to Hal Moores that morning, and he had told me that Melinda's brain tumor had caused her to lapse into bouts of cursing and foul language... what my wife had later labelled (rather tentatively; she wasn't sure it was really the same thing) as Tourette's Syndrome. The quavering in his voice, coupled with the memory of how John Coffey had healed both my urinary infection and the broken back of Delacroix's pet mouse, had finally pushed me over the line that runs between just thinking about a thing and actually doing a thing.

And there was something else. Something that had to do with John Coffey's hands, and my shoe.

So I had called the men I worked with, the men I had trusted my life to over the years—Dean Stanton, Harry Terwilliger, Brutus Howell. They came to lunch at my house on the day after Delacroix's execution, and they at least listened to me when I outlined my plan. Of course, they all knew that Coffey had healed the mouse; Brutal had actually seen it. So when I suggested that another miracle might result if we took John Coffey to Melinda Moores, they didn't outright laugh. It was Dean Stanton who raised the most troubling question: What if John Coffey escaped while we had him out on his field-trip?

'Suppose he killed someone else?' Dean asked. 'I'd hate losing my job, and I'd hate going to jail—I got a wife and kids depending on me to put bread in their mouths—but I don't think I'd hate either of those things near as much as having another little dead girl on my conscience.'

There was silence, then, all of them looking at me, waiting to see how I'd respond. I knew everything would change if I said what was on the tip of my tongue; we had reached a point beyond which retreat would likely become impossible.

Except retreat, for me, at least, was already impossible. I opened my mouth and said

2

'That won't happen.'

'How in God's name can you be so sure?' Dean asked.

I didn't answer. I didn't know just how to begin. I had known this would come up, of course I had, but I still didn't know how to start telling them what was in my head and heart. Brutal helped.

'You don't think he did it, do you, Paul?' He looked incredulous. 'You think that big lug is innocent.'

'I'm positive he's innocent,' I said.

'How can you be?'

'There are two things,' I said. 'One of them is my shoe.'

'Your shoe?' Brutal exclaimed. 'What has your shoe got to do with whether or not John Coffey killed those two little girls?'

'I took off one of my shoes and gave it to him last night,' I said. 'After the execution, this was, when things had settled back down a little. I pushed it through the bars, and he picked it up in those big hands of his. I told him to tie it. I had to make sure, you see, because all our problem children normally wear is slippers—a man who really wants to commit suicide can do it with shoelaces, if he's dedicated. That's something all of us know.'

They were nodding.

'He put it on his lap and got the ends of the laces crossed over all right, but then he was stuck. He said he was pretty sure someone had showed him how to do it when he was a lad—maybe his father or maybe one of the boyfriends his mother had after the father was gone—but he'd forgot the knack.'

'I'm with Brutal—I still don't see what your shoe has to do with whether or not Coffey killed the Detterick twins,' Dean said.

So I went over the story of the abduction and murder again—what I'd read that hot day in the prison library with my groin sizzling and Gibbons snoring in the comer, and all that the reporter, Hammersmith, told me later.

'The Dettericks' dog wasn't much of a biter, but it was a world-class barker,' I said. 'The man who took the girls kept it quiet by feeding it sausages. He crept a little closer every time he gave it one, I imagine, and while the mutt was eating the last one, he reached out, grabbed it by the head, and twisted. Broke its neck.

'Later, when they caught up with Coffey, the deputy in charge of the posse—Rob McGee, his name was-spotted a bulge in the chest pocket of the biballs Coffey was wearing. McGee thought at first it might be a gun. Coffey said it was a lunch, and that's what it turned out to be—a couple of sandwiches and a pickle, wrapped up in newspaper and tied with butcher's string. Coffey couldn't remember who gave it to him, only that it was a woman wearing an apron.'

'Sandwiches and a pickle but no sausages,' Brutal said.

'No sausages,' I agreed.

'Course not,' Dean said. 'He fed those to the dog.'

'Well, that's what the prosecutor said at the trial,' I agreed, 'but if Coffey opened his lunch and fed the sausages to the dog, how'd he tie the newspaper back up again with that butcher's twine? I don't know when he even would have had the chance, but leave that out of it, for the time being. This man can't even tie a simple granny knot.'

There was a long moment of thunderstruck silence, broken at last by Brutus. 'Holy shit,' he said in a low voice. 'How come no one brought that up at the trial?'

'Nobody thought of it,' I said, and found myself again thinking of Hammersmith, the reporter—Hammersmith who had been to college in Bowling Green, Hammersmith who liked to think of himself as enlightened, Hammersmith who had told me that mongrel dogs and Negroes were about the same, that either might take a chomp out of you suddenly, and for no reason. Except he kept calling them your Negroes, as if they were still property... but not his property. No, not his. Never his. And at that time, the South was full of Hammersmiths. Nobody was really equipped to think of it, Coffey's own attorney included.'

'But you did,' Harry said. 'Goddam, boys, we're sittin here with Mr. Sherlock Holmes.' He sounded simultaneously joshing and awed.

'Oh, put a cork in it,' I said. 'I wouldn't have thought of it either, if I hadn't put together what he told Deputy McGee that day with what he said after he cured my infection, and what he said after he healed the mouse.'

'What?' Dean asked.

'When I went into his cell, it was like I was hypnotized. I didn't feel like I could have stopped doing what he wanted, even if I'd tried.'

'I don't like the sound of that,' Harry said, and shifted uneasily in his seat.

'I asked him what he wanted, and he said "Just to help." I remember that very clearly. And when it was over and I was better, he knew. "I helped it," he said. "I helped it, didn't I?" '

Brutal was nodding. 'Just like with the mouse. You said "You helped it," and Coffey said it back to you like he was a parrot. "I helped Del's mouse." Is that when you knew? It was, wasn't it?.'

'Yeah, I guess so. I remembered what he said to McGee when McGee asked him what had happened. It was in every story about the murders, just about. "I couldn't help it. I tried to take it back, but it was too late." A man saying a thing like that with two little dead girls in his arms, them white and blonde, him as big as a house, no wonder they got it wrong. They heard what he was saying in a way that would agree with what they were seeing, and what they were seeing was black. They thought he was confessing, that he was saying he'd had a compulsion to take those girls, rape them, and kill them. That he'd come to his senses and tried to stop.

'But by then it was too late,' Brutal murmured

'Yes. Except what he was really trying to tell them was that he'd found them, tried to heal them—to bring them back—and had no success. They were too far gone in death.'