Chapter 10: Ask Him

I got into the front seat and locked the doors with Preston still in the back.

"Talk," I said. "You have until I reach the exit ramp."

"I can't tell you everything."

"Then tell me one true thing."

He leaned forward between the seats, close enough that I smelled his cologne and the sour edge under it.

"Mother isn't who you think she is," he said. "The gala wasn't about you. It was about getting you out before anyone looked at us."

"Looked at what?"

"I can't."

"Preston."

"Ask Kerrigan." His voice cracked.

"He was there because he wanted to see her say it."

"He's been waiting for her to say something like that for twenty years."

"That makes no sense."

"It will."

He opened the door and slid out into the concrete shadows.

"I'm sorry about the ring," he said over his shoulder, and ran.

I sat there until my pulse slowed.

Then I drove to my father's bank.

On Friday, at two minutes to noon, my father stood in the marble lobby of Hartfield Bank.

He wore his best gray suit, with his lawyer on one side and me on the other.

The branch manager came out of his glass office to greet us.

He had been smiling for thirty years, and today he was sweating.

"Mr. Lockridge. We, ah, understand there's a note."

"Twenty million dollars, due today," my father said pleasantly. "I thought I'd bring it myself."

He handed the manager a single sheet of paper.

It was a wire confirmation from Lockridge Holdings' operating account.

The manager read it once, then again.

He read it a third time, and the color went out of his face.

"This is the full amount."

"It is."

"With interest."

"To the penny," my father said.

"I'd also like a copy of every call your bank made to my house in the last five weeks. And a receipt."

Two tellers had stopped counting.

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