King of War Tech novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: Clyde's Room

Friday morning, the Merrick house, 7:20.

The burn on my thigh was wrapped in a gauze square under my work pants.

I was carrying the breakfast tray up the back stairs when the housekeeper stopped me on the landing.

"Mrs. Merrick wants you in Mr. Clyde's room."

"Now?"

"Now."

I had never been invited into that room.

Not once, in three years.

It sat at the end of the second-floor hall behind a white door, and Marjorie Merrick kept the key on a chain at her neck.

I set the tray down and knocked.

"Come in."

The room smelled of old cedar and Clyde's cologne.

Somebody had kept it exactly the way he left it.

A flight jacket over the desk chair.

Model aircraft on the shelf.

A photograph of Clyde at twelve on a dock, beside a skinny girl of eight with dark hair and a missing front tooth.

Marjorie sat in a rocking chair by the window, in a black dress, with her cane across her knees.

She did not look like the woman at the head of the table.

She looked like somebody's grandmother, small and gray and very tired.

"Close the door," she said.

I closed it.

"You burned your leg last night."

"It's nothing, ma'am."

"My daughter burned it."

I said nothing.

"I've watched her do it for three years," Marjorie said.

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