Chapter 8: Blackout

Siri's POV

The five pages were back on my desk in the morning, in the same neat stack.

There was no note.

I found Knox downstairs in his office and held them up.

"Where were they?" I asked.

"In a folder in my stepmother's study."

"You went in and took them."

"She let me." He did not look up from the folder he was reading. "That's the only thing that worries me."

"It's not pity?"

"It's theft," he said. "Pity would have been a nicer way to do it."

I laughed, and it surprised me.

My mother had moved to the Blue Heron Motel two blocks away, because she refused to climb three flights every night with that hip.

She came every afternoon with a cooler.

Every evening she went back with her cane and a long look at us.

That Wednesday the storm came in off the lake.

By seven the windows of the Reading Desk shook in their frames.

The streetlights on the hill went black one by one.

Then the house went dark.

"Fuse," Knox said, from somewhere near the door.

"The whole street."

I had been going through my five pages at the long table in his office.

I heard him cross the room.

His phone lit, a small cold rectangle, and he set it face up on the table between us.

It lit his jaw and nothing else.

"Gala in seven days," I said, to say something. "Hearing in fifteen."

"I've written the end of chapter nine again from memory. I think I can write ten."

"You can write ten."

"You don't know that."

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