Chapter 15: Thank You

The lab called at eight on Monday morning, and I took it standing in my father's kitchen.

"Miss Pellam, we ran the tea twice," the chemist said. "There's a compound in it that doesn't belong in anything people drink."

"What does it do?"

"Taken in small doses over months, it damages the nerves that run to the legs. First weakness, then numbness, then the person can't stand."

I looked at the chair my father had sat in on Thanksgiving.

"Is it legal?"

"It's sold for research. You'd have to order it on purpose."

I wrote the name on the back of my hand, thanked him, and hung up.

Then I called Elias for the first time in two days.

He answered before it rang twice.

"It was in the tea," I said. "It's what took my legs."

"I know."

"I need you to pick me up. You owe someone a conversation."

He was at the curb in twenty minutes in a black car, with a driver and a man I'd never seen in the front seat.

He hadn't shaved.

He looked at me through the open door, waiting to be told where to go.

I gave the driver an address I had spent Sunday finding.

It was a gray apartment block on the north side, with a bicycle chained to the stairs.

"The bookkeeper," Elias said, when he saw the address.

"You told me he lost his job over gambling debts. What did he do in the first life?"

"He backdated Bryson's signatures for the foundation."

"And in this one?"

"He gambled."

"That was true?"

"It was true," Elias said. "I put it in a letter to your father."

"So he was fired for something real."

"For something real, a year early, and for a reason that was mine."

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