Chapter 9: The Motel on Brookpark Road

Zane's POV

Bernard Appleton survived the night.

The doctor said it was his lungs and his heart together, and that he should not have stood up on that stage.

Hallie sat beside the bed with her father's hand in both of hers and did not look up when I said I was going down to the lobby.

"Get something to eat," she said.

I did not tell her I was going to find her husband.

A man like Dalton Fenn does not go home after a day like that.

He goes somewhere cheap, and he talks.

I had watched the Fenns walk out of Appleton Hall with their coats over their faces and a flock of reporters on their heels.

My driver had been told to follow whatever car they took.

By eleven o'clock I was in a parking lot outside a motel on Brookpark Road, with the engine off and the window cracked.

Two rooms down from the office, a curtain was pulled almost closed.

The light behind it was yellow, and I could hear them through the thin glass.

I thought of the laundromat window in Tulsa, and of what I had never told her.

The curtain moved.

"You were in that room," Dalton was saying. "You were at the end of the hall. You had your phone out."

"I was nineteen and I was following you," Cora said.

"Why?"

"Because I liked you. Why does anyone follow anyone?"

"You filmed it."

"I filmed her taking you into a room. That's not a crime."

"I woke up in that bed, Cora. I woke up and everyone told me what Hallie did, and I believed it. I married her. I hated her for seven years."

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