Chapter 8: Why She Cut

Hayes's POV

I came home that night to a pot of cold onion soup on my stove and a drawer in the bedroom that had been emptied.

I did not eat the soup.

I poured it down the sink, scrubbed the pot, and stood there with the water running until it ran cold.

The next morning I drove to the motel on the highway where Amos Tillman had taken a room.

It was the kind with doors that opened to the parking lot.

He answered the second knock in his shirtsleeves, a pair of reading glasses on his nose and a small screwdriver in his hand.

On the table behind him lay a travel alarm clock with its back off.

"You brought money," he said.

"Not yet. I'm working on it."

"Then you brought something else."

"I brought the watch back." I held up the box. "I thought it should be here. Not in my office."

He studied the box and then me.

"Come in."

The room smelled of machine oil and burnt coffee.

He sat on the edge of the bed, and I took the one chair.

I had not planned what to say.

I had driven forty minutes rehearsing a speech, and it was gone.

"Clara was pregnant," I said. "Eleven weeks. She lost the baby the night I was in Vienna, and she never told me."

Amos put the screwdriver on the table.

He did it carefully.

"I found out last week," I said. "From a hospital form. She called me five times that night from the operating room. I didn't pick up."

For a long moment the only sound was the air conditioner under the window.

Then Amos took off his glasses.

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