Chapter 13: Nine Tarts, Nine Chairs

I came home from Lisbon with a laminated card, a jet-lag headache and nine custard tarts in a pink box.

I could not leave a bakery where twenty people had copied me and be the only one in the line without a box.

The card rode in my coat pocket, and I had read its first line half a dozen times since the airport.

The leg. Cordelia had written it down as the first thing it cost her.

I had spent twenty years proud of that leg, and I had not decided yet whether I was allowed to be angry about it.

Tiernan met me at the elevator on the fourteenth floor, on Tuesday, at 11:40.

He held out a brown paper bag with a rock in it.

"Shaft three," he said. "The foreman cut the seal on Saturday and took a sample off the face."

"Is it empty?"

"The foreman cried. He says he'll deny it."

"Don't tell me yet," I said. "I'll want to look surprised."

He looked at the pink box, then at the ring on my hand.

His eyes stayed on the ring a half second too long.

"Nine tarts," he said.

"There are nine chairs."

"Gwendolyn, you're suspended. You can sit in the gallery."

"I own thirty percent of this company. I'll sit in the chair I sit in."

I walked into the boardroom with the box held in front of me.

The walnut table had nine chairs and eight board members, and Sabine Thorsby was at the foot of it with a man in a gray suit and a loupe on a cord.

Ambrose stood at the head.

He looked at the pink box and then at me.

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