Chapter 20: Room Four

Colter's POV

The old Second Chance office had a padlock on the basement door, and Sheldon owned the building.

I called him at seven the next morning, and he met me on the sidewalk at eight with a key and no questions.

"I don't want to know what you're looking for," he said. "I'll wait up here."

"You're sure?"

"I've lost the right to look at any of it first."

The basement smelled of wet cardboard.

The ledgers were stacked on metal shelves, labeled by year, and I took down the oldest.

It was a green cloth book, with columns in a careful young hand.

Every entry was balanced to the penny.

The handwriting changed in the last six pages.

The new hand was round, and pretty, and it wrote the same sentence in the margin three times.

Shortfall to be reviewed with the bookkeeper.

I turned the book over.

A snapshot was taped inside the back cover.

It showed Dennis in a whistle and a younger, smiling Carol.

Between them stood a girl of about seventeen, thin and serious, with a long braid over her shoulder and a green ledger held against her chest.

I knew her eyes.

I had seen them across a kitchen every morning for three years.

I closed the book very gently.

"Mr. Isherwood?" Sheldon called from the stairs. "Did you find it?"

"I found her," I said.

I drove back to Denver without the radio on.

The woman from room four was alone in the kitchen, peeling potatoes into a bowl for the house's dinner.

She looked at the book in my hand and put down the peeler.

"You went to the basement," she said.

"Dennis Hanley came to the gate with a recipe tin. He said to look for a girl with a braid."

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