Chapter 14: The Second Account

Finnegan's POV

I did not sleep that night, and the couch was not the reason.

Willa had gone into the bedroom without a word and shut the door, which she had never done.

I lay on my back with my feet hanging over the arm and listened for her through the wall.

At two I gave up, took my laptop out to the screened porch and put on headphones.

The task force had pulled Dray's locker that afternoon.

Eighty-four calls were waiting on the drive, one for every first of the month.

I played the first.

A line rang twice, and a woman answered in a calm, pleasant voice.

"Yes?"

"Renew?" Dray said. "She has not apologised."

There was a pause long enough to hear a kettle somewhere behind her.

"Yes," Loretta Lowry said. "Renew. And Eldon, don't let her have any paper."

I took the headphones off and sat looking at the lake.

Then I put them back on and played the fortieth call.

It was the same voice, the same kettle, and the same word.

I played the eightieth.

She sounded bored.

I had sat across from a lot of people who had done terrible things to someone else.

Most of them shook, or lied badly, or wept when I shut the door.

Loretta did none of it.

She said yes between sips of tea, eighty-four times.

My sister had been gone twelve years, and I had told myself for all of them that no mother could tire of a daughter.

I had been wrong about that.

Around three I opened the money.

Dray's account was a mess of shell companies, but the one marked LL ran through a client trust at Maddox and Pell.

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