Chapter 11: What She Held Against Him

I went to Red Hook that evening alone, with the gray folder inside my coat.

Max was at Patricia's again, in her sunroom with the atlas.

Patricia had told me to go and do the thing I had been avoiding.

"Which thing?" I'd asked.

"The one you're thinking about," she'd said.

She had looked at me over her glasses.

"I raised a son, Joanna. I know a woman's face when she's decided to be rude to a man she likes."

The Mercer Marine office was the third floor of a brick warehouse at the end of a long pier.

Every window faced the water.

A ferry slid by with its deck lights on as I came up the stairs.

I thought of Max pressed to the glass with his hands flat.

Caleb was alone at a big wooden desk with his sleeves rolled up and a chart pinned under a mug.

He stood up when I came in.

"I didn't know you were coming. I'd have cleaned."

"Does Mercer Marine ship for Reed Freight?"

He blinked.

"You know it does. I told you the first day."

"How much of your business is it?"

"Thirty-one percent." He did not ask why.

"Thirty-one percent of your revenue is my husband's company."

"Yes."

"And it's been that way for years."

"Since his father was alive," Caleb said. "He was a friend of mine. Not a close one, but a fair one."

I put the folder on his desk, still shut.

"Do you know what Landon spends that money on?"

His eyes went to the folder, then back to my face.

"I have a guess."

"Say it."

"Not his company." Caleb sat on the corner of the desk, slowly.

"I've watched Reed Freight's invoices to me for two years. They get paid late, then paid fast, in big lump sums."

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