Chapter 13: The Ledger

The interview room at the federal detention center had a steel table bolted to the floor and a mirror that was not really a mirror.

Finnegan stood behind it with a recorder running.

He had promised me that, in the truck, and he had kept it.

Two guards brought Eldon Dray in wearing an orange jumpsuit under his cardigan.

He still had the round wire glasses.

He sat down across from me, and the chain on his ankles clinked against the table leg.

"Ledger," he said, pleased.

"My name is Willa."

"Of course it is." He folded his hands. "You look better. You have colour."

"I have a machine that does my kidneys three days a week."

"That is a shame. I always said the damp would get into you."

I put my hands under the table so he could not watch them shake.

"You asked for me," I said. "Say it."

"I want a lighter sentence. You know this. Your agent knows it."

He tipped his head toward the mirror.

"I am offering a book he does not have."

"He has every book. I kept them."

"You kept the books I wanted kept." Dray smiled. "I kept another."

He slid a photograph across the steel.

It was a page in a green cloth ledger, ruled in his small square hand.

Down the left side ran dates, the first of every month, going back and back.

Down the right ran a sum, and beside each sum a letter Y.

Between them, on every line, was a small curl with a dot.

I knew that curl.

I had drawn it for Finnegan from memory, and neither of us had known what it meant.

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