Bloodsworth Read Online Free Page A

raping and murdering Dawn Venice Hamilton. He signed each and every one “Kirk Bloodsworth—A.I.M.—An Innocent Man.” He set a sheet of paper on the table and started writing a letter, this one to Lou Ferrigno, the Incredible Hulk. Kirk tried to write to everyone he admired. He began eachletter with a description of who he was and where he’d come from. Halfway through this letter he stopped and set the pen down. Writing about his past made him think of his mother, Jeanette. Kirk had lost her to a massive heart attack three months earlier, the day of President Clinton’s first inauguration. Kirk had been taken—in handcuffs, a waist chain, and leg irons—to view her body for five minutes alone in a closed room, though he had been refused permission to attend her funeral. He’d convinced himself that she’d died of a broken heart over what had happened to her son, over what he’d gotten himself into. He thought of her as his angel and knew if spirits ever helped people, she would help him. Since her death, he’d thought of her constantly, missing her with a physical ache. He could see her there, in their home in the small town of Cambridge, Maryland, where he grew up. He shut his eyes to picture her more clearly. And then without meaning to, he drifted off.
    Kirk would remember later that he dreamed that day of himself as a boy, free on the marsh, running his skiff on a silver river, a dream that was both momentarily peaceful yet troubling. In the dream he was at first small, just five or so, wearing the snowsuit his mother had sewn for him and helping his father tong for oysters on the broad Choptank River. The near shore was pocked with ice and foam, the gray green waves chased by the wind, and his father smiling as the boy culled the oysters, his father strong and the white workboat safe and sturdy. Then he was maybe ten and was in cutoff waders, sloughing through the gum thickets off Blackwater Marsh, setting his muskrat traps in the predawn quiet, the air expectant, the horizon glowing lilac in the flat oval of his water-bound world, the waves lapping the marsh grass, the first sound of the birds. And then he was nearly full size, the year he first started crabbing. He saw his silhouette in the mist, rowing a boat on water that was flat and smoky. His mother was there standing on a dock. She waved to him, then beckoned. His dream was interrupted by atug on his arm. A prison guard, Sergeant Cooley Hall, stood over him.
    Sergeant Hall, a dark Trinidadian with a wide grin and a penchant for whistling, had always been friendly to Kirk. Hall had a message for him written on a piece of scrap paper. He waited for Kirk to wake fully and adjust himself and then he handed it to him. It was from Kirk’s lawyer, and it was marked urgent. Kirk focused more closely. He read the word
urgent
again and read that Bob Morin wanted him to call immediately. Kirk’s eyes opened wide and he sat up straight. He looked at Hall, then back at the message. Then he placed a hand over his face to hide his emotion, to keep himself from shaking.
    Kirk Bloodsworth was thirty-two years old and would ever after remember the date and the time he got that message. The offspring of generations of Chesapeake Bay watermen, he’d grown up crabbing and fishing the rivers and creeks on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and trapping the Dorchester marshes, as befit the descendant of an independent, free, and proud breed. His ancestors had emigrated to Maryland from Great Britain and Ireland in the 1600s and an island in the Chesapeake Bay just below Cambridge, Maryland—Bloodsworth Island—had been named for his forbearers. A high school graduate, he’d been a marine and a champion discus thrower. But for the past nine years he had lived a nightmare that he could not understand, account for, or articulate.
    For nine years of his life he’d been locked up in prison, most of it in the hellhole