Chapter 27: The Trustees

Sam's POV

I left Tillie asleep in my bed at four in the morning with the pebble from Posy on the nightstand.

I kissed her hair, and I put a note under the pebble.

Then I drove to Providence with the assistant in my passenger seat and a leather folder on her lap.

She had asked to come.

"I've done the wrong things in that woman's name for thirty years," she said. "I'd like to do one right thing in it."

The Huntington Foundation kept its offices on the eleventh floor of a glass building on the harbor.

At eight o'clock the boardroom held nine trustees around a long table, a pot of coffee and two lawyers.

The lawyers were Odile's.

They stood when I came in, and one of them said, "Dr. Burdick, this is a closed session."

"I'm told it's an emergency session," I said. "I have an emergency."

The oldest trustee was a stooped man in a bow tie who had chaired the hospital's board for twenty years.

He looked at me over his glasses.

"Let him speak," he said. "Odile is not here yet, and I'd like to know why I was woken at six."

I put my phone on the table and pressed play.

The speaker was small, and the room was silent, so every word carried.

Nobody moved while it played.

When it ended, a woman at the far end of the table put down her pen and took off her glasses.

"That was a bribe," she said. "To a physician. About a patient's chart."

"It was," I said. "The patient is carrying her fifth pregnancy, and the chart she was bribed over said something that was not true."

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