Chapter 6: Litchfield

I stood in the hall a second too long after she said his name.

"Aldous gave you a getaway car."

"Aldous gave me a way out." Kitty touched her sapphire. "You'll see. When Lucas starts locking doors on you, you'll see."

Then she went back to our mother.

In the car I told Lucas the Fabergé egg had been pulled.

I didn't tell him about the Audi.

I didn't know yet what I was holding.

That Friday he drove us to Litchfield himself.

My guard followed in his own car with a paperback on the dash.

The Thackeray house sat at the end of a long gravel drive behind an iron gate with a keypad.

White clapboard. Black shutters. Two hundred years of old money and a porch swing.

Lucas punched in the code without looking.

His knuckles were white on the wheel the whole way up the drive.

His grandmother met us on the porch with a cane she clearly didn't need.

She was eighty-four, tiny, in pearls and a fleece vest.

She looked me up and down.

"You're the cop."

"I'm the cop."

"Do you play gin?"

"Badly."

"Wonderful. A dollar a point."

【GRANDMA. She was barely in the book. Kitty said she was cold.】

【She's not cold. She's hustling.】

By nine that night I owed her forty-three dollars.

She was dealing from the bottom of the deck.

I'd watched her do it four times.

"You're cheating," I said.

"I'm eighty-four. It's called experience."

Lucas was in the armchair by the fire with a whiskey, watching us.

He looked almost relaxed.

"She did this to me when I was eight," he said. "I had to mow the lawn all summer to pay her back."

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