Chapter 9: The Lakeshore Lot

Bram's POV

I was parked two blocks from the brick house with the engine off when Hazel came down the drive.

She had told me she didn't need a ride.

She had also told me the address, and I had learned a long time ago what that kind of sentence meant.

She walked with her back straight and her phone in her fist.

Halfway down the block her knees went, and she grabbed a mailbox post.

I was out of the truck before I'd decided to be.

"I'm fine," she said.

"I know."

I put my jacket around her shoulders, and she let me.

She was shaking so hard that her teeth clicked, and she was furious about it, which I liked.

I opened the passenger door and she climbed in.

For a while she said nothing.

Then she held up the phone with the screen lit.

"Who is The Floor?"

I kept my eyes on the windshield.

"A name on a phone," I said.

It was true, and it was not the truth.

The man behind that name ran the floor at the Lakeshore Room on Route 9.

He had run it for twenty years.

He had once leaned on my father in a back booth.

The week after the funeral, he sent a man to my kitchen door to ask politely about a marker.