Chapter 23: The Warehouse

Three hundred and eighty people stood on the dock floor in their work coats.

Their breath hung in the cold.

The forklifts had stopped.

The foreman stood on an upturned pallet with a megaphone he refused to use.

Emerson held my hand at the foot of it, in her charcoal suit and boots.

My mother had a folding chair in the front row and a thermos of Ottilie's tea.

Ottilie herself came through the crowd at a fast, small trot, with her tablet held against her chest.

"Boss," she said. "Nine forty this morning."

"What happened at nine forty?"

"Lavinia Crane walked into the agents' office with a laptop, a black phone and an hour's worth of facts."

Her half-moon glasses flashed.

"The phone had the account number. They froze it before the lunch hour. It's two hundred, less eleven."

"Less eleven?"

"He spent eleven on lawyers and a boat." She almost smiled. "It's yours again, and the clients' next."

Emerson squeezed my hand.

"She did it," she said. "She said all of it."

"She did."

The foreman cleared his throat into the megaphone and didn't use it.

"All right," he said, in his rasp. "Quiet. Listen to the boss."

Emerson climbed onto the pallet.

"This is my husband," she said.

Her voice carried to the freezer doors.

"He's also the man who owns the company that put an offer on yours."

"He wasn't there when it was written, and I want you to ask him whatever you want."

She stepped down and put me up there, in my overcoat, with the whole floor looking.

I had stood on a stage in front of three hundred strangers four days before and felt less afraid.

"My name is Tristan Rowe," I said.

"Is it true you wore your ex's sweater?" a dock lead called, from the back.

Three hundred and eighty people laughed.

"It's true," I said. "It was too short in the arms. It's been cremated."

The laugh turned to a roar.

A woman near the front lifted her hand.

She was a night supervisor with grey in her braid, the one who had held the elevator door for Barnaby.

"Would you have laid us off after twelve months?" she said.

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