Chapter 17: The Second Copy

Jude's father had left a cassette player in the Keller Run kitchen, a battered gray thing with a sticky lid.

Nicolette's tape was the small kind, and it fit an adapter in the junk drawer.

Jude bolted the kitchen door behind us.

Corsair was home in the back paddock with two grooms sitting up on the fence.

I set the tape on the table, and my hand shook so hard that it took two tries.

"I can leave the room," Jude said.

"Stay."

He stood beside me with one hand flat between my shoulder blades.

I pressed the button.

The first minute was the one we all knew.

My mother, my father, the crack, the fall, and that thin wet voice saying he hadn't meant to.

I had heard it once already in front of four hundred strangers, and my stomach still turned over.

Then the tape kept going.

A door opened somewhere.

A woman's heels crossed the boards, unhurried.

"Stop crying, Warrick."

It was Renata, as calm as a woman reading out a grocery order.

"She's gone.

"Get up and go to the house."

"Ren, I..." my father said.

"You will go up to the house, and you will wash, and you will go to bed.

"I'll see to the ladder."

"The ladder?"

"A rung gives way and a woman falls.

"That's all anyone will ever need to hear.

"Do you understand me?"

"Yes."

"And from tonight, you will do exactly what I tell you.

"For the rest of your life, Warrick."

There was a long, ragged breath.

"Yes," my father said again.

The tape hissed on, and under the hiss came the slow rasp of a saw drawing through oak.

I pressed stop with a finger that did not feel like mine.

For a long time, the kitchen was silent.

"She was fighting for me," I said.

"All these years, I thought she went up there looking for me, because I was a careless girl.

"She wasn't looking for anyone.

"She was fighting for me."

My voice broke on it.

"And he took that away, and then she took the rest.

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