Chapter 16: Bail

The deputy was polite about it, which made it worse.

He read Orin the charge in Skye's kitchen: fraud and impersonation, on a complaint signed by Bernadette Lindmark.

He didn't say her son's name, because nobody had one for him on paper.

Orin put his hands behind his back without being asked.

"Don't give them the phone," he said to me in the doorway. "Skye has the copies. Don't give anyone the originals."

"I won't."

"Marlo."

"I said I won't."

He let the deputy walk him out to the cruiser.

I stood on Skye's porch and watched the back of his head through the glass until it turned the corner.

The bail hearing was at two.

I sat in the third row of a county courtroom that smelled of floor polish, and Bernadette sat in the first, in black, with a new lawyer at her elbow.

She did not turn around.

The judge set bail at twenty-five thousand dollars, because the man had no address, no name on paper and no past in the county.

I stood up.

"He has an address," I said. "He lives with me."

A murmur went around the room.

I paid it from the account where I kept my father's savings bonds, which I had never touched, and the clerk counted the money twice.

Bernadette's new lawyer leaned toward her and whispered.

She smiled at the back of the judge's head.

When they brought Orin out through the side door, he had no belt, no cap and no laces, and he was blinking in the light.

"You shouldn't have done that," he said in the parking lot.

"I know."

"That's your father's money."

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