Chapter 15: Thirty-Six Envelopes

The man with the cane lived in a narrow brick house two miles from Route 9.

He opened the door himself, and he looked at Caleb for a long moment before he stepped back.

"Come in," he said. "Your lawyer can wait on the porch."

Bernard bowed his head and stayed outside.

The kitchen was small and clean, with one chair pulled out from the table.

The man lowered himself into the other with a grunt and set the cane across his knees.

"I watched the trial on my couch," he said.

"They showed your face on the news, and I thought, that's not who I saw."

Caleb's throat closed.

"You saw the driver?"

"I saw a woman's face for one second in the headlights. Then I was in the road." He rubbed his bad leg.

"I told the police that. I told them twice."

"What did they say?"

"That I was confused. That I'd hit my head." He reached for a shoebox on the counter and set it between them.

"Then a man in a good suit came to my hospital bed."

He lifted the lid.

Inside were envelopes, thirty-six of them, each one fat and sealed with a gold sticker.

Caleb picked one up.

The sticker said The Ashburton Grand.

"Three thousand dollars on the first of every month," the man said.

"A courier brings it in a white van. No note and no name. The suit said, this is for your trouble, and your trouble will stay quiet."

"You took it."

"I couldn't stand on this leg, and my wife was gone. I had a mortgage." His jaw worked.

"I took it for three years, and I hated myself every first of the month."

"That's not your shame."

"It's some of it."

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