Chapter 19: The Mechanic

The garage on Route 9 had its roll door chained shut and a FOR LEASE sign rusting in the window.

Lucinda got there at two in the morning, with Alden in the passenger seat and the security man at the wheel.

A single lamp burned in the apartment above the shop.

"He lives upstairs," the security man said. "Alone. Seventy years old."

"Is anyone guarding him?"

"A deputy sat on the building until midnight. Then he was called away."

"Called by who?"

"The sheriff. Whose campaign Gordon Throckmorton paid for."

Lucinda was out of the car before he finished.

The side stairs creaked.

She knocked twice.

"Nobody's here," a thin voice said through the door.

"I'm not the police," she said. "I'm the founder's daughter."

Nothing moved behind the door.

"I was in the car you fixed," she said. "Hollis Hill Road. Three years ago in October."

The lock turned.

The man was small and gray, with grease still ground into his knuckles after three years of not working.

He looked at her face, and his hand went to his chest.

"You're dead," he said.

"I'm not."

"Thank God." He put his forehead against the door frame. "Thank God, thank God. I thought I'd killed a child."

"I'm twenty-eight."

"You were twenty-five. I know what you were."

He let them in.

The kitchen smelled of cold coffee.

He sat at the table with his big hands flat on the wood.

"He paid me four thousand dollars," the mechanic said. "Cash, in a bank envelope. It was your uncle himself."

"What did he say?"

"That the girl was a problem for the family, and a little accident would solve it."

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