Chapter 24: The Oatmeal

Our daughter was three months old when I carried the Lie Book out to the garden.

It was a cold Saturday morning at the end of winter, and the grass was white.

Dorinda had come over at seven with a thermos of coffee and a bag of kindling.

She sat on the stone bench by the fire pit, with the baby asleep in the crook of her arm.

"Are you sure?" she said.

"Yes."

"It's evidence. The prosecutor might want it."

"She has Wesley's photographs of every page," I said. "She has the trial. She doesn't need the original."

Dorinda nodded and handed me the matches.

I did not light them.

I turned and looked at the back door.

Winslow stood on the step in his coat, with a small pot in one hand and a spoon in the other.

He had been in the kitchen since five.

He did not come down onto the grass until I nodded.

"May I?" he said.

I held out the book.

He came down the steps and took it in both hands.

He looked at it a long time, the soft black cover, the rubber band, the swollen edges.

I took the torn first page from my coat pocket and gave it to him.

He read his own note on it once, and laid it in the pit on the kindling.

Then he tore out the second page and the third.

He did it slowly, one at a time, every entry I had told him and every pencil tick he had made, all ninety-nine.

The hundredth he held a little longer.

I could see his square capitals on it, and the line that said Said by Winslow Holloway.

"I'd like to keep this one," he said. "Not the book. This page."

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