The Night He Left the Syndicate, I Took His Chair novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Garage

With Zeke at the wheel, Nerissa digs her ten-year notebook out of the old garage and works the three old men one by one, until Orson walks into the Table meeting with Emmeline on his arm.

"Go home, Zeke," I said. "I don't need a babysitter."

"Not a babysitter. A driver."

"I don't have anywhere to go."

"Then I'll drive you there slowly."

I shut the door on him.

He went back to leaning on the car.

At noon Mavis took him a coffee. At three she took him a grilled cheese.

At six she came back inside.

"He says thank you, ma'am," she said. "Nobody's called me ma'am since 1991. Let him in before he drowns."

"He's Hesketh's man."

"Everybody on this island is somebody's man. That one says ma'am."

The storm blew itself out two days later.

On the third morning I came out with my hair up in a pencil.

Zeke opened the back door of the sedan.

I got in the front.

He shut the back door and walked around.

"Where to?"

"The old cannery."

After five minutes I said, "Do you talk?"

"When it's worth it."

"What did they tell you about me?"

"That you can count."

"That's all?"

"And that if you get on the ferry, I call Mr. Hesketh before it leaves the slip."

At least he was honest about the leash.

The garage under the old cannery was concrete and puddles and pigeons.

I told Zeke to wait in the car.

He waited in the car.

The two figures sitting on the ramp in the gloom weren't pigeons.

"Ris?"

The twins.

Twenty-one now, broad as doors, in deckhand boots. The last time they'd slept down here they'd been eleven years old and I was the girl with the diner leftovers.

They both hugged me at once and lifted me off the ground.

"Mavis called us," one said.

"She said you finally dumped the gorilla," said the other.

"He dumped me."

"Nah," said the first. "You left the watch. That's dumping."

I laughed for the second time in three days.

Third pillar from the ramp. Bottom row. The block with the chipped corner.

The fireproof box was behind it, dusty and dry.

I opened it with the little key on my father's Zippo chain.

Eight black notebooks.

Every order Orson gave me. Every date. Every amount. Every name an envelope went to.

I'd started in our second year, after the first time he told me to move money and didn't say why.

I had never once told him.

I sat down on the cold concrete and read until the twins started shivering.

Then I knew how I was going to do it.

The Table had five chairs.

Hesketh held the chairman's seat. Orson held operations. Three old men held the rest. The fuel dock. The ice house. And the ferry.

The ferry chair belonged to Emmeline's father.

I didn't bother with him.

I started with the fuel dock.

He was eighty. He met me over the fuel pumps and didn't offer me a seat.

I sat anyway.

"Orson's been short-paying your share of the dock fees for two years," I said. "Four percent a month. Here's the number."

I slid a page across his desk.

"Why are you telling me?"

"Because I was the one who did the shorting. On his orders. And I'm done doing that to people."

"You'd pay it back?"

"I'd stop it. Paying it back is what you'd get for voting."

The ice house man was younger, seventy, and frightened of everything.

I told him the state had been asking questions about his freezer contracts, which was true, and that I knew which three invoices they'd want, which was also true.

"Orson would've let them find those," I said.

"And you wouldn't?"

"I'd fix them before Friday."

I went back to each of them twice. I brought numbers, never threats.

Zeke drove me everywhere and waited in the car every time.

He never asked what I was doing.

On the tenth day I came out of the ice house with my hands shaking.

He handed me a paper cup of coffee without a word.

It was exactly how I take it. Black with one sugar.

"How did you know that?"

"Mavis."

"You asked her?"

"She told me. Loudly. With instructions on what she'd do to me if I got it wrong."

I drank it.

"Do you ever get bored," I said, "sitting out here?"

"I grew up on a fishing boat," he said. "You learn to wait for things."

"What things?"

"Fish."

"And?"

"Mostly fish."

I almost smiled.

He saw it and looked away fast.

The night before the meeting I sat in Mavis's back room with the notebooks spread on the cot.

Mavis leaned in the doorway.

"You've got two votes?" she said.

"I think I have two."

"And the ferry man?"

"Goes with Orson. He's about to be his father-in-law."

"So it's two and two."

"And then Hesketh breaks it."

"And which way does that old vulture break?"

"Whichever way he thinks he can own."

Friday the twenty-third, I wore my father's sweater and my diner jeans.

The Table met in the back room of the yacht club, behind the bar, through a door with no sign.

Hesketh sat at the head with his cane against the wood. The three old men sat along one side.

Orson's chair was empty.

I didn't sit in it.

I stood behind it.

At seven o'clock exactly the double doors opened.

Orson walked in, black overcoat, a fresh cigar unlit in his fingers.

On his arm, in a cream cardigan and a single strand of pearls, was Emmeline Weatherby.

He smiled at the room.

"I just came," he said, "to say goodbye."

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