That Makes Two of Us novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: The Ledger

Gordy was waiting for me in the office with the lights off.

"Kid," he said. "Sit."

I sat.

He didn't turn on the lamp.

He sat across from me in the dark with his bad knee up and a gas-station coffee going cold at his elbow.

"The wife from the hotel bar called," he said. "She wants us for the custody."

"Good."

"I told her yes. And I told her we'd be busy for a few weeks."

"Gordy."

"You've been lying to me since the Thayne meeting," he said. "I'm sixty-one and I was a cop for twenty-nine years. How long were you going to wait?"

My throat closed.

"I don't know," I said.

"It's you."

"How..."

"The second night. You went white when he said 'Finlay.' You never go white."

I put my head in my hands.

"I'm the wife," I said. "I'm the one he hired me to find."

Gordy let out a long breath.

"Okay."

"That's it? Okay?"

"Kid, I've known you since you were twenty-four and you came in here looking for a job with a coat two sizes too big. I figure you had a reason."

I told him all of it.

The chapel, the veil, the ring on its chain, my grandfather's hand on the witness line.

Valerie's photographer and the three hundred thousand dollars.

Gordy listened with his eyes closed.

When I finished, he reached under the desk and slid a thick folder across to me.

"Then you'll want this."

"What is it?"

"I traced the Cobb Family Fund. I got into the books through a friend at the state's charity bureau."

"That's illegal."

"It's a friend," he said, "and I didn't ask."

I flipped it open.

Two months of payments, in neat rows.

Forty thousand to an actors' booking agent in Towson.

Eight thousand to a hotel on Charles Street.

And one line, three weeks old, for fifteen hundred dollars to a woman named in the memo as "records liaison, St. Brigid's Hospice."

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