Chương 2
“Where did you get the compass?”
Eli hesitated.
“That’s the part you’re not going to believe.”
“I’m already sitting under a flooded highway with an eleven-year-old who says my dead son warned him I was going to drown.”
“Yeah.”
“So my standards have changed.”
For half a second, something almost like a smile touched Eli’s mouth.
It disappeared quickly.
“Lucas gave it to someone before he died.”
Nathan shook his head.
“No.”
“He did.”
“No. I put it in his hand.”
“I know.”
Nathan leaned forward despite the pain in his ribs.
“You know what?”
“When they buried him.”
“How?”
Eli looked at the compass.
“Because Lucas knew you would.”
Nathan’s breathing slowed.
A truck passed on the highway overhead, the vibration traveling down through the pillar.
Eli waited until it was gone.
“Three days before he died, Lucas gave the compass to a man named Raymond Pike.”
Nathan’s eyes narrowed.
“I don’t know that name.”
“He worked maintenance at your family’s lake house.”
Nathan did know the name.
He stopped moving.
Ray Pike had been sixty-two when Nathan last saw him. A narrow man with a smoker’s cough who repaired docks, cleaned gutters, and complained that wealthy people expected wood to stop rotting because they owned it.
Nathan had not thought of him in nearly four years.
“You’re lying.”
Eli nodded toward the compass.
“Then how do I have it?”
Nathan did not answer.
“Lucas gave Ray the real compass,” Eli said. “Then he put another one in the box.”
“What box?”
“The blue one in his desk.”
Nathan felt cold in a way that had nothing to do with rain.
Lucas had kept a small blue lacquered box in the bottom drawer of his desk.
Nathan had found a silver compass inside it after the police returned Lucas’s belongings.
He had placed that compass in Lucas’s hand at the funeral home.
He could still remember his wife telling him not to.
Caroline had said it was sentimental nonsense.
Nathan had told her he did not care.
He had closed Lucas’s fingers around the compass himself.
“Impossible.”
“That’s what Ray said you’d say.”
“Where is Ray?”
Eli’s jaw tightened.
“Dead.”
Nathan looked at him.
“When?”
“Eleven days ago.”
The water moved around their boots.
Nathan rubbed both hands over his face, smearing mud farther across his cheek.
“What does any of this have to do with tonight?”
Eli looked again toward the SUV.
“Everything.”
Nathan reached for the compass.
Eli pulled it away.
“Stop doing that.”
“It’s mine.”
“No, it isn’t.”
Nathan almost snapped at him.
Then he looked at the boy’s wet shirt, split fingernail, and shaking knees.
“You’re freezing.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not.”
“I said I’m fine.”
Nathan knew another person who had said that exactly the same way.
He looked down.
For one dangerous moment Lucas was eighteen again, standing in the kitchen with blood on his sleeve after wrecking his bicycle, furious because Nathan had asked whether he was hurt.
I’m fine.
Lucas had hated being inspected.
Nathan closed his eyes.
When he opened them, Eli was watching him carefully.
“How old are you?”
“Eleven.”
“Where is your father?”
“Don’t have one.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means what it sounds like.”
“And your mother is in jail.”
“County.”
“For what?”
Eli’s expression hardened.
“You always ask this many questions after somebody saves you?”
Nathan almost apologized.
Instead he said, “Usually the people saving me are paramedics.”
“That must be nice.”
Nathan stared at him.
Eli looked away first.
Nathan rested his head against the pillar.
The rain had weakened, but the river continued rising. A plastic fuel container spun in the current beyond the bridge.
“What happened to Ray Pike?”
Eli’s voice was quieter.
“He fell down the stairs behind his apartment building.”
“And you think somebody killed him.”
“I know somebody killed him.”
“How?”
“Because he told me they would.”
Nathan opened his eyes.
“When?”
“The night before.”
“Why were you with him?”
“He rented the room above us.”
Nathan waited.
Eli sighed as if the explanation already exhausted him.
“My mom rented a basement apartment in Clifton. Ray lived upstairs. He fixed stuff for our landlord because the landlord never fixed anything. Our heater quit last winter and Ray kept it going with some wire and a part from an old washing machine.”
Nathan almost said that sounded unsafe.
He stopped himself.
“Your mother knew him?”
“Everybody knew Ray.”
“What did he tell you?”
Eli looked down at the compass again.
“At first, nothing.”
Nathan waited.
“Then my mom got arrested.”
“What happened?”
“She cleaned offices.”
“That doesn’t answer me.”
“She cleaned offices for your company.”
Nathan’s mouth went dry.
Vale Meridian Holdings employed almost nine thousand people through dozens of subsidiaries. The headquarters occupied three glass towers downtown. Nathan could not picture Eli’s mother.
“What’s her name?”
“Marissa Dawson.”
The name meant nothing.
“She wasn’t technically your employee,” Eli said. “She worked for Summit Facility Services.”
Nathan knew Summit.
He had signed the renewal himself six months earlier.
“What was she arrested for?”
“Stealing.”
“How much?”
“Two hundred forty thousand dollars.”
Nathan stared.
Eli gave a short, humorless laugh.
“Yeah. We had the same reaction.”
Nathan shifted against the concrete.
“That’s not petty theft.”
“She didn’t steal it.”
“You know that?”
“I know my mother.”
“That’s different.”
Eli’s eyes lifted.
Nathan regretted the sentence immediately.
It sounded like something a man in a clean office would say to a child whose life existed only in paperwork.
Still, he did not take it back.
Eli rubbed his thumb across the compass.
“They said she copied banking tokens from an executive office and used them to move money through vendor accounts.”
Nathan’s attention sharpened.
“What executive?”
“Your brother.”
Something inside Nathan went still.
“Daniel?”
Eli nodded.
Nathan almost laughed.
Not because it was funny.
Because the alternative was accepting the direction the conversation had taken.
“My brother accused your mother of stealing from him.”
“No.”
May you like
“Then what are you saying?”
“Daniel accused her of stealing from the company.”
