Chapter 18: Brooke's Price

I opened the door on the chain.

"Show me your hands."

Brooke held them up.

They were empty and shaking, and her nails were bitten to the quick.

I'd never seen Brooke's nails anything but red.

I let her in.

She took two steps into my hall and saw Abe by the window.

She stopped.

"The driver," she said.

Then she looked at his face properly.

"Oh my God."

"Sit down," I said.

She sat at my kitchen table, in the chair Finn used, with her raincoat still on and water running off the hem.

Abe didn't sit.

He stood behind her where she couldn't see him.

"Talk," I said.

"He said..."

"Not what he said. What you did."

She looked at me.

Something in her face wanted to argue, out of thirty years of habit.

It gave up.

"Russell paid me back for the investigator," she said. "Every dollar, in cash, in a cereal box."

"Which cereal?" Abe asked behind her.

She twisted around. "What?"

"Answer him," I said.

"Bran flakes," she said. "From his kitchen in Lake Forest. The box is still in my freezer."

Abe nodded once, like a man filing a receipt.

"Go on."

"He gave me the truck to send." She swallowed. "I knew it wasn't a toy. I sent it anyway."

"Go on."

"At the club." Her voice cracked. "He said if you resigned before the wedding, the seat was mine. He said a scared mother signs anything."

"He said that?"

"He says a lot of things in bed."

The kettle was cold.

Nobody moved to touch it.

"And tonight?" I said.

Brooke reached into her raincoat pocket and put a phone on my table.

It was cheap and black, the kind you buy at a gas station.

"He keeps it in my nightstand," she said. "He doesn't think I know."

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