Chapter 8: The Dawn Taxi

Arthur's POV

I had never ordered a taxi in my life.

My family has a driver, and before that my family had a different driver.

The only phone in the Cottage not sitting in the silver basket was the landline in the library.

I stood over it for five minutes before I picked it up.

"Litchfield Cab," a woman said. "Where are you?"

"I'm at, ah." I opened the desk drawer and read the address off a sheet of stationery. "I've never had to say it before."

"You've never said your own address?" the woman asked.

"Someone usually says it for me," I said.

"And where to, sir?" she asked.

"Scranton, Pennsylvania. Or wherever she says," I said.

"Who's she?" the woman asked.

"The passenger. The car would wait at the gate from five tomorrow morning, in case she wants to leave," I said.

"Wait how long?" she asked.

"Until she comes out. Or until I'm dead," I said.

"I can do until noon, sir," the woman said. "It's nine hundred and eighty dollars to Scranton, payable on arrival. Waiting is extra."

I had one thousand three hundred and six dollars and fourteen cents.

"That's fine," I said. "Thank you. Put it under Endicott."

"Oh, honey," the dispatcher said, kindly. "Is that the Endicotts on the hill?"

I hung up before she could say anything else that was true.

Then I turned around and looked at the glass case in the middle of the room.

It stood on a walnut pedestal under a small lamp.

Inside it lay a single sheet of cream paper and a fountain pen on a velvet cushion.

The pen cost twelve hundred dollars and had never been filled with ink.

Nobody in ninety years had needed it.

THE RELEASE, the card said, in my great-grandfather's capitals.

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