Chapter 5: The Copper Room

I picked up the page.

I read it one more time, slowly, so Duane could watch me read it.

Then I tore it in half down the middle, right through "impaired."

Then in quarters.

I dropped the pieces into my mother's coffee.

"I was sober," I said, loud enough for the next table. "Two Cokes. Ask your camera."

One of the six women laughed out loud and turned it into a cough.

My mother's spoon stopped.

I walked out past the hostess, past the valet stand, past the white Range Rover in my name.

My hands didn't start shaking until I was in my car.

I sat there with the engine running and the air on high.

Then I drove to Old Town.

The Copper Room was an old brick bank on a corner, three floors, green awnings, a brass door with no sign on it.

I'd driven past it a hundred times.

I'd never once gone in.

Stepdaughters didn't get invited to their stepfather's club. I'd never asked.

The bartender buzzed me in before I knocked.

"Miss Renner," he said, like he'd been told to expect me some day. "They're in the back."

The ground floor was dark wood and copper lamps and Sunday quiet.

Breck and Rand were in the last booth with a pot of coffee and a legal pad between them.

Breck saw me and stood up so fast he hit his head on the lamp.

"Sparky. You okay? You look like you bit a wire."

"Duane offered to pay off my debts," I said, "if I sign a paper saying Abram assaulted me."

Breck sat back down very slowly.

Rand capped his pen.

"Did you sign anything?"

"I put it in my mother's coffee."

"Good." He wrote something on the pad. "Who saw?"

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