Dead Before the Truth Revealed novel · Chapter 24 of 24

Chapter 24: Chair Six

The first Ellingwood Fund dinner was held in the Lakeshore ballroom a year to the week after the memorial, and the seating chart put me at table nineteen.

I had asked for it.

The table stood beside the kitchen door, and every time a server pushed through, the door bumped the back of chair six.

"We can move you," said the event coordinator, a cheerful young woman with a headset. "The front tables are much nicer."

"Leave it," I said.

She shrugged and went to find the microphone.

The fund paid for nursing school for the children of people who worked nights.

It also paid for a rescue course at every county high school with a lake.

Four hundred and ten people had paid for a seat.

Edmund sat at table four in his tweed jacket.

He had a plate of salmon he was not eating, because he was watching me.

Beside him the retired paramedic had brought his cane and a dress shirt buttoned to the throat.

He saw me look and lifted two fingers from the cloth.

Anthony came across the floor in a dark suit, a little thinner than a year ago, with his reading glasses in his hand.

He worked now for the county hospital's board, in an office with a window onto a parking lot.

He said it was the best job he had ever had.

"You're early," I said.

"They need me to turn a page on the screen. I'm a man of one skill."

"Two."

"Three," he said, "if you count what happened on the dock."

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