Chapter 5 - The Closing of the Book
The car did not smell of the marsh; it smelled of old wool, peppermint drops, and the leather cleaner I used on the seats every November.
We were driving south on Route 41, the headlights of the sedan cutting through the grey mist in two long, yellow cones that struck the old willow trees along the drainage ditch like rows of ghosts.
Sienna sat in the passenger seat, her head resting against the small down pillow I kept for my lower back. Her right arm was supported by her left hand, her fingers locked around her wrist to keep the bone from moving whenever the tires hit the expansion joints on the river bridge.
"Arthur’s going to be at the office until midnight, isn't he?" she asked, her voice clearer now that the heat of the Ashford dining room was thirty miles behind us.
"He’s been at the office since forty-four, Sienna," I said, my hands steady on the steering wheel. "He likes the midnight work. It’s the only time the phones don't ring from the bank."
"Garrick’s mother... she’s going to call the lawyers in Delaware," she murmured, her eyes fixed on the green lights of the toll plaza ahead.
"Let her call them," I said. "The Delaware firm was dissolved three years ago during the federal restructuring of the gravel cooperative. The only thing left in their vault is three old ledger books and a stamp that doesn't have any ink on the pad."
The phone on my dashboard lit up.
It wasn't Garrick. It was the private number for Dr. David Chen at Northwestern Memorial.
"Evelyn," his voice came through the speaker, crisp, dry, and carrying the faint, rhythmic click of a surgical monitor in the background. "We have the pavilion ready on Superior Street. The radiologist is already down from the third floor. Have you got the girl?"
"We're ten minutes out, David," I said. "Make sure the legal kit has the three-part carbon sheets. I want the state’s attorney's seal on the envelope before the morning shift comes on at the district office."
"It’s already on the table, Evelyn," he said, and the line went dead with a clean, electronic pop.
I looked at my daughter through the green light of the dashboard. The bruise on her neck was darkening now, turning that deep, uniform indigo that means the blood has settled into the muscle fiber. She wasn't looking at her arm; she was looking at her ring finger, where the three-carat diamond Garrick had bought her from the boutique on Michigan Avenue was catching the reflection of the green toll lamps.
Slowly, using only the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, she twisted the gold band until it cleared the knuckle.
She didn't drop it out the window. She didn't throw it into the drainage ditch. She laid it in the small plastic ash-tray between our seats—the place where her father used to keep his extra gate-keys and the small zinc screws he saved from the old boat on the river.
"He always said I was clumsy, Mom," she said, her voice dropping into that low, flat resonance that belonged to our family before she ever met an Ashford.
"You're not clumsy, Sienna," I said, my foot pressing down on the accelerator as the truck cleared the toll bar, the engine growling beneath the floorboards as we hit the clean, wide concrete of the state highway. "You just took a bad step on some old limestone. The ground is level from here on out."
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The grandfather clock in the house on the marsh was probably striking seven now, its heavy brass weights dropping another inch into the dark of the parlor while Miriam looked at her ruined carpet and Garrick waited for the morning sun to show him what his father had signed away thirty years ago.
But down on Wacker Drive, the lights in the thirty-eighth floor windows were already being turned on by the cleaning women, and the large mahogany table in the boardroom was entirely empty, waiting for the only hand that had the right to turn the page.
