Doomsday Rebirth novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: The Kitchen Door

The cooks had not let the guards lock Ezra back in the cold room.

They had taken a cot into the dry store instead.

Six of them sat in front of the door with ladles across their knees.

Ezra was asleep inside it, in his cardigan, with Tuck on the floor beside him and a bandage on Tuck's shoulder.

I stood at the bottom of the kitchen stairs and looked at Lacey.

She had a cardboard box in her arms.

Her red curls were flat from the night, and her county lanyard hung crooked at her chest.

"Gill," she said again. "Please. I need to show you."

"Show me here."

"It isn't safe to say it out loud."

"Here, Lacey. In front of everybody."

She looked at the six cooks, and the cook with bad shoulders looked back at her.

Lacey swallowed.

She set the box on the steel table.

She took out a clipboard, a ledger and a thick folder held shut with a rubber band.

"I came to give you these," she said. "I'm done. I can't do it anymore."

"Do what?"

"Any of it."

Her eyes had filled up, and I watched them do it.

They were real tears.

They always were.

"Who called the inspector on my building?" I asked.

She flinched.

"Lacey. Look at me. Who told the county there was an unpermitted cistern under the shop?"

"I saw the drag marks on the floor," she whispered. "The day I brought the wine."

"I thought it was a hiding place."

"And you called it in."

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