Three Hybrid Brothers Locked Me in Their Tower, and the Man Who Sent Me There Is the Real Monster novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: The Town Meeting

The church hall held more people on the nineteenth than it had in November.

I stood in the vestry doorway at five to seven and counted them, because I could not stop myself.

Two hundred and sixty, give or take the children.

They had come for a girl held against her will in a tower.

They had brought their coats and their casseroles and their sorrow, and every one of them was looking at the front of the room.

Cyrus Hemenway sat at the selectmen's table under the lamp.

He wore the camel coat and the gold pin.

His hands lay folded on the blotter, perfectly still.

Beside him the old clerk sat with the town book open, thin and gray, and he did not look up when I came in.

I had my account book under my arm.

In it were my mother's letters, the yellow leaf and my father's signed page.

My father walked at my shoulder in a clean flannel jacket with his cap in his hands.

I had told him he would walk in at my side or not at all.

Three tall men in black coats came in behind us and stood against the rear wall, where they had stood in November.

I did not look at them.

I could feel exactly where each one was, like three lamps lit behind me.

"Miss Dally," Cyrus said, rising, with enormous warmth.

"Thank God.

"The town has been sick with worry."

He came round the table with his hands held out.

I stopped well back in the center aisle, and he stopped too.

"Mr. Hemenway," I said.

"My dear, you look tired," said Cyrus.

"You've been terribly used.

"I want the room to know that nobody blames you for the foolishness of that road, or for whatever was said to you in that tower."

A murmur of sympathy ran through the hall.

The Grange women bent their heads.

I thought of the pie tin on the gravel.

"Thank you," I said.

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