Chapter 24: The Second Wedding

"Saturday the fourteenth," I said.

Emerson went still against my chest.

"Why that one?"

"It's two weeks. That's long enough for Ottilie to hold a grudge and my mother to plan a menu."

She laughed into my shoulder, on the carpet of her own office, with the dark warehouse lying under the glass.

At noon on the fourteenth, the dock doors of Building One rolled up on their chains.

November light came in flat and white across the concrete.

Three hundred and eighty people stood in their good clothes, ties over work shirts and clean boots under pressed trousers.

A grey runner ran down the middle of the dock plate to the side door, which stood open to the street.

At the front, beside the chaplain, sat an old office chair with a gavel on its seat.

Nobody had been told to leave it empty, and nobody sat in it.

My mother sat next to it in a navy dress.

The foreman sat on her other side, holding her pocketbook.

Emerson stood at the end of the runner in a plain white suit and her flat-heeled boots.

The old pawnshop ring was on her left hand, and the steel dive watch was on her wrist.

I waited at the back, at the loading bay, where the street met the floor.

Ottilie stood at my shoulder in a champagne cardigan, with her thermos in one hand and a ring box in the other.

"You look like a man about to be hanged," she said.

"I feel like it."

"The nerves are a good sign. Sullivan never had any."

"Where is he?"

"In a cell, asking his lawyer about a plea."

She sipped her tea.

"Ms. Crane is cooperating with the agents, and she'll pay what she owes in every way they'll let her."

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