Chapter 17: The Window

Anson's POV

I had heard every word through a phone speaker the size of a coin.

When Jo came down the lane, she walked.

I did not touch her.

She got in the car, played me the recording in a whisper, and held out the phone with both hands.

"You never made a sound."

I listened to it three times.

"She knows," Jo said. "She saw the light."

"She also knows she can't take it back."

"It's a forty-second clip of my mother talking about a hospital. She'll say I cut it together."

"Then we give her no time to say anything," I said.

"We play it where three hundred people hear it at once."

So we told no one but Dot, and we kept the recording on three phones.

On the sixth day, I went to see my father.

He lived in the big house on the hill, behind a stone wall.

His study smelled of cigar and old paper.

I walked in without knocking, and he looked up from his desk with his reading glasses on his nose.

"You haven't packed the last of your things," he said.

"I didn't come for my things."

"Then say what you came for. I have a call at noon."

I took the small black recorder from my breast pocket and set it on the blotter.

The red light was on.

"I came to ask you again," I said. "Who was the buyer?"

My father looked at the recorder.

He took off his glasses, folded them, and set them down very neatly.

"You've come to wire me. Like a policeman."

"Like a son."

"You were never a good liar, Anson. It's why you were never any use to me."

He picked up the recorder, and for a second I thought he would throw it.

Instead he set it back on the blotter, still recording, and leaned back in his chair.

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Blessed Her Wedding With My Life from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.