My Marionette Lover novel · Chapter 24 of 24

Chapter 24: My Marionette Lover

He stopped in front of me, close enough to touch.

He didn't touch me.

"I walked," Arlen said, in a cracked voice.

"I saw."

"Nothing moved me. I want you to know that."

"I know."

"I'd have come anyway." He laughed, and tears ran down his face. "I'd have come across the quad in the dark."

I took his hand, and he held on.

Down in the hall, thirty people had made a ring around Augusta.

They did not touch her.

They stood in silence, in evening clothes, with the candles guttering behind them.

The young woman in the waiter's jacket stepped to the front.

She was eighteen, and she had not seen her mother since she was nine.

"You told me my mother stopped looking," she said.

Augusta opened her mouth.

Nothing came out.

"Say it was a lie," said the young woman. "Say it where they can hear."

The old woman's eyes went across the faces.

The senator.

The banker.

The woman from the sixth row, with her husband's arm around her shoulders.

Three hundred phones were pointed at her, and every one of them had a red light on.

"It was a lie," Augusta said.

It was barely a whisper.

It was enough.

The senator took out his phone and stepped aside.

"I would like to report a kidnapping," he said, quite calmly. "And a number of other things."

The clock above the fireplace began to strike twelve.

The board of the Redfern Foundation voted in the great hall, standing, in front of three hundred witnesses.

They voted on the matter of Mr. Redfern's fitness, as the invitation said, and all seven hands went up.

The chair read Augusta's name from the roll, and then read it again, and then crossed it out with a pen.

The state police came at one in the morning and took her out through the side door.

She walked between them with her hands empty.

She did not look back.

On Monday the dean wrote to me before I woke.

My scholarship was restored, and the puppetry program was funded for ten years.

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