The World Never Ended novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: The Club Dinner

My father holds a dinner at the Harbor Yacht Club on the first Thursday of every month, and he has done it for twenty years.

I knew that Thursday was the first.

I had not been sure of anything else in two days.

The green ribbon key was in my fist, and the note was in my other pocket.

Friday, 6 p.m., the side door.

Shane had wanted to bin the key as a trap.

I had told him I would decide after tonight, and I had not told him I already knew.

I would go through that door, and I would take my father down first.

Shane drove me there at seven, in my mother's cream coat, with a recorder in the pocket and a second phone taped under my sleeve.

"You go in, you sit down, you ask him one question," he said. "I'll be at the bar."

"You are not going to the bar."

"Cora."

"I'll want you at the door."

He parked and said nothing else.

The club had a long dining room with white linen and brass lamps, and thirty men and women in good jackets sat down the length of one table.

My father sat at the head with a glass of whiskey and his steel watch on his wrist.

I knew half the faces.

Bankers, a retired judge, two owners of boatyards, and their wives.

I had grown up under that table.

The maître d' came at me with his hand out.

"Miss, this is a private function."

"I'm a member's daughter," I said. "Cora Sandstrom."

I had never been so glad to say it.

He looked at my face, then toward the head of the table, and I saw him recognize a name he had been told never to say.

I walked past him down the room.

Conversations stopped one chair at a time.

A woman in pearls put down her fork.

My father looked up and his face went gray and then smoothed over.

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