The Twin They Erased novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: The Wire

Eamon's POV

I told myself I wasn't waiting at the gate.

I was in Harriet Ansel's office at ten at night, with a county deputy in the doorway and the school's ring of keys in my fist.

Ansel sat behind her desk in a grey dressing gown, with her bun coming down.

Without her belt of keys she kept touching her hip.

"This is a school," she said. "You cannot come into my office at night, Mr. Bannon."

"You signed a marker that says I can."

"The marker belongs to that girl now."

"It does," I said. "And I'm here for her, not for me."

The deputy shifted on his feet.

He was the plain man from my card table, the one who kept his badge in his pocket, and he had not said a word since we crossed the lawn.

"Mrs. Astley wired you eight thousand dollars a month," I said. "Where are the slips?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"Falsely imprisoning an adult is three years in this state," the deputy said, in his flat voice. "Taking money to do it is worse."

Ansel looked at him.

She looked at the empty place where her keys had been.

Then she opened the bottom drawer of her desk, felt along the back of it and pressed something.

A false board came up.

Under it lay a flat tin with a picture of the school on the lid.

She pushed it across the blotter with two fingers.

"I kept everything," she said. "I always keep everything."

"Of course you do."

I opened it.

There were bank slips, bundled by year, each one stamped with the name of a bank in Burlington.

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