The handwriting on the letters belonged to my older brother, Daniel. I knew it at once, the way you know the sound of your own name. The tall looping D, the backward slant, the way he crossed every T with a long tail. I had last seen that hand on the birthday card he sent me in 1979, the summer he turned eighteen. After that, the family said Daniel had gone to live with an uncle in Oregon, and had stopped writing. My father, Sheriff Walter Dillard, forbade us to speak of him at the supper table. And the return address on the first letter in my hands read, Inmate No. 36104, Kansas State Penitentiary, Lansing.
I sat down on the cot in the old cell, in the cold light of the flashlight, and read all fifty seven letters in order. They ran from 1980 to 2001, and they were addressed to Mama, Louise Dillard, the quiet woman who had never raised her voice in my entire childhood. In the first, Daniel wrote that he had not robbed the Fourth Street Pharmacy, as the prosecutor said, and that he had been seventeen and walking home from a ball game when the clerk was struck. He asked her to tell the truth. In the third, he wrote that the real man was Deputy Wayne Hollister, the best friend of Dad. He said, I saw him leave the alley.
There was one more thing in the stack, at the very bottom, a school notebook with a marbled cover. It was the diary of my mother. She had kept it in the cell for twenty two years, writing in pencil by the light of the bare bulb. She wrote that on the night of the robbery, she had overheard the sheriff and Wayne Hollister in her own kitchen, speaking in low voices. She wrote that my father said, “The boy will take it, and it will be over.” She wrote that she could not forgive him, and she could not leave, with a younger son at home. And so she had sat in this cell, with her letters, and she had told no one.
A key worn around a neck for forty years gave one son the weekend to bring his brother home to the courthouse in Dodge City.
I sat on that cot until the flashlight dimmed. I thought of the woman who had cooked our breakfast, ironed our shirts, and smiled at the church picnics, and who had kept a key around her neck for forty years. She had not been hiding a cell. She had been carrying a prisoner. In the shadows, I could almost see her, a thin woman in a gray cardigan, reading a letter from a boy in a cage. I took off my cap. I said it out loud, to the empty room. “Mama, I am sorry. I did not know. I will fix it.”
I found Daniel in Wichita. He had been released in 2001 on parole, after serving twenty two years, and he worked as a mechanic in a tire shop on Broadway. He was sixty six, bald, with huge scarred hands and quiet blue eyes. When I walked into the shop, he was bent over a wheel. He straightened and wiped his hands on a rag, and he looked at me for a long time. “Russell,” he said finally. “You have the jaw of Dad.” I held up the bundle of letters, and he put down the rag. “She kept them,” he said.
Brent Hollister, the undersheriff of Ford County, came to the courthouse basement two days after I brought the letters to a lawyer. He is the son of Wayne, a heavy man in his fifties with a chin like his father. He stood at the top of the iron stairs with two deputies behind him and said that the contents of the cell were county property, and that he was there to collect them. When I refused, he started down the steps with his hand out. I held the diary against my chest. “Brent, you will have to go through me,” I said. “And I have already scanned every page and sent it to a woman in Topeka.”
Brent stopped on the third step. He studied me for a long while. Then, slowly, Brent lowered his hand. “My father passed in 2003,” he said, in a stiff, unwilling voice. “He told me once, on his sick bed, that he had done something he could not undo.” His jaw worked. “I always thought it was about a woman.” He turned, and climbed back up the stairs, and said to the deputies, “We are leaving.” His boots rang on the iron. At the door, he paused. “Tell your brother I am sorry,” he said, without turning around.
The Kansas Innocence Project took the case in October. It had the letters, the diary and a signed statement from Brent Hollister, who confessed that his father had kept a box of trophies from the robbery in his barn. In March, a judge in Dodge City vacated the conviction of Daniel Dillard after forty four years. Under the law of Kansas, a man wrongly imprisoned receives sixty five thousand dollars for each year he served. Twenty two years came to one million four hundred and thirty thousand dollars. Daniel stood before the bench in a borrowed suit, and when the judge said the word, innocent, he put his hand over his eyes.
In the name of my mother, Louise, who passed in March and who kept a cell and a key for forty years, I started the Cell Key Fund. It pays for legal help, record searches and family counseling for wrongly convicted men and women and their relatives in Ford, Gray and Finney counties. In the first year, we helped sixteen families. A woman of seventy, in a church dress, laid a bundle of letters on the desk and said, “My son has been in there for thirty years.” I told her I knew how to read them, and I opened the first.
On a Sunday in May, Daniel and I stood together in the basement of the old courthouse. The cell door was open. The cot was gone, and in its place we had set a little table with a lamp and a vase of lilacs. On the wall hung a framed photograph of Mama at twenty, in a flowered dress, smiling at the camera. Beside it, in a plain frame, hung the first letter, in his hand. Daniel put one big scarred palm on the iron bars and did not speak. Then he said, in a husky voice, “She read them, Russ. She read every one.” I nodded. “She wrote back,” I said. “In her head.”
