Chapter 35: The Lodge

The deputies tore the Wainright house apart in an hour, and Hazel was not in it.

The night nurse was gone.

Greta's car was gone.

The steel crib stood bolted to the floor with a yellow blanket on the mattress, and Molly picked it up and held it against her face.

It smelled of baby shampoo.

Judith had been taken out through a side door of the courthouse in handcuffs, still smiling.

She had given the police her lawyer's name and nothing else.

Troy stood at the nursery window with his back to the room.

He had not said a word since the deputy spoke.

His hands were open at his sides.

Molly could see the tendons standing out in both forearms.

"Troy," she said.

"If I go down there and ask her..."

"You can't."

"I know I can't."

"Then let me think."

She set the blanket on the crib and went into the hall.

Her father's voice had come back to her on the stairs.

She had pushed it down for three days.

In the corridor of the courthouse he had bent his head and whispered to her, so low that Troy could not hear.

"She paid me twenty thousand, Nelly," he had said. "She'll pay you forty to sit down."

She had answered, "Keep it."

Now she thought about the other thing he had said, in the recording Judith played over tea.

They want me to say a few words about the old debt.

And on the stand: I think that's what that was.

He knew where he had slept for the last two weeks.

He knew where Judith's people had taken him to practice his words.

Molly took out her phone and called the number she had deleted in a rage on Friday.

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