If you had told Beaufort that a tough guy like him would hesitate at the front of a library, afraid to walk through the door, he would have laughed at you. Yet here he was, conscious of his brain sending the signals to pick up one resisting foot after another, up the front steps of the Pascagoula City Library.

There was information to be had in there, free and anonymous. He had heard from other inmates about the development of what they called the digital age. He didn’t have much to do with it himself. Being a lifer meant being in a bad place. Not a bad place the way people spoke of in this modern psychology, but literally a bad place locked up with scum suckers. You didn’t get nice perks like computer time. This computer business made him feel like a time traveler from the past. The kid walking down the steps, nearly bumping into him before swerving with an apology, was looking at what they called his “device.” Little computers you held in your hand that did everything, add up numbers, look at movies, even act as a telephone or a camera.

Email. Beaufort turned and watched the kid walk down the sidewalk. If that punk could get the hang of this, so could he.

Then somehow he was inside, going to the front desk and asking for help from a woman who held her hair up with a stick. He played humble, old, and ignorant with the librarian whom he could tell liked him even though she must have been a good twenty years younger. It looked like he still had a way with the ladies. Certain kinds of ladies, anyway—the lonely ones who hadn’t had a man in a while. With the way he’d kept his body fit in prison he probably looked a little younger than his age when he wanted to.

At his request for computer instruction she showed him to one of the computers that sat in a row along the wall. She pulled up a chair and spent quite a bit of time with him on a slow morning, telling him about search engines and which sources were reliable.

He understood little and grew impatient. “Show me how to set up an email account,” he said, and then added, “Please.”

The woman cocked her head and for one moment fixed him with one eye like a bird, but if she found anything odd about him she gave no further indication. She accessed her own email and showed him the way the address was constructed. “See, I use my name, [email protected].”

“Got it,” Beaufort said.

“Good!” Patricia Butts said. Beaufort wondered if she was a teacher. She acted like a teacher with a student. When he questioned her about getting information from the internet, she showed him how to, as she put it, “google.”