Chapter 4: On the Porch

The paper Courtney gave me was a check stub.

Rowan Tile & Floor, forty thousand dollars, dated the week before Thanksgiving.

In the memo line, in Lorraine's neat deaconess hand, it said: Fenn, Christmas.

I laid it on Bev's kitchen table beside the lab report, and the three of us looked at it.

Courtney sat in the fourth chair with her coat still on.

She did not want to go back to Lorraine's house, and she did not want to go to a hotel alone, and she did not know what she wanted.

"I'll drive her to the Motor Lodge on Route 9," Callum said. "It's two towns over. Nobody there goes to Grace Church."

Courtney looked at him with red eyes. "Why would you help me?"

"Because I know what my mother pays for," he said, and went to get his keys.

That was the second time in two days he had said something and stopped.

I put the stub in the folder, put the folder in my bag, and hung my bag on Bev's coat hook.

I scan everything.

It's the habit of working in an office where one lost chart costs a license, and every page in that folder was already in a file on my phone.

I thought about that and felt, for the first time since Christmas Eve, almost safe.

At four o'clock the doorbell rang.

Bev looked out through the curtain and said, "Well, there's your husband."

He stood on her porch with snow in his hair and no hat.

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