Chapter 22: The Marker Burns

I was kneeling on the stone beside Lowell before I decided to.

"Don't move," I said. "Don't try to get up."

"Get away from me."

"You've broken your hip. If you roll, it gets worse."

I put two fingers on his neck and counted, and his pulse was rapid and thready.

He stared up at me with his silver hair spread on the white marble.

"Odette," he said. "Make her go."

"Save him!" Odette cried, and dropped to her knees on the other side. "Kathleen, please. Save him."

"That's what I'm doing."

I told the guard to call the ambulance and to keep the crowd back, and he went at a run.

I held Lowell's head still between my hands until the paramedics came.

He looked at me the entire time, and I looked back.

"Why?" he said at last. "After all of it."

"Because it's my job," I said. "It was never yours."

They lifted him onto the stretcher, and he did not say another word.

On Sunday evening the Rask Grand ballroom was lit end to end.

It was the first time I walked into that ballroom by the front doors.

I wheeled my father in myself.

He wore a dark suit that hung off him, and an oxygen tube ran from his collar to a small tank behind the chair.

The house's members came in behind us, forty men and a few women in black, who had never once been seen in daylight.

They filled the tables along the walls and said nothing.

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