Page 54 of Havoc

And at the far end, in the corner where the light doesn't reach, there's a lean man in black with a cross inked high on his cheekbone who has not moved at all.

He's the only one in this room looking at my face.

Everyone else is looking at Havoc.

Storm goes around the table to the far seat and stands behind it with his hand on the back of it and does not sit down either.

"Say it," he says to me.

And every one of my ten sentences goes out of my head at once.

* * *

They're gone. All of them. Nine days of building and I stand in a room with eleven people in it and there is nothing in my head at all, and what comes out is not the speech.

"My mother died in April," I say.

Nobody moves.

"She was sick for four years, and I sat with her for all of them. In June I cleaned out a storage locker on Airline Highway in Baton Rouge, and under a bag of curtains there was a shoebox with two hundred and sixty-four check stubs in it, rubber-banded in bundles of twelve, going back to November of two thousand four."

I hear my own voice doing this. It's level. It's completely level and it does not sound like a person.

"Every one of them is from a bank on the corner of Main and Third in this town."

The heavyset one takes his hands off the table.

"So I went to New Orleans," I say, "and I took something out of a house on Prytania Street that belonged to my father, and I brought it here, because I have spent twenty-two years being told he was nobody and I found out in June that somebody in Rosalie, Louisiana has been writing checks about it since I was eleven years old."

"Girl," says the heavyset one. "What's your name?"

"Lennox."

"Lennox what?"

And I turn and look at the wall behind Storm's chair.

There it is.

Twenty-two years and a photograph I found on a message board at one in the morning, and there it actually is, four feet of bad cypress with a chip out of the corner of the glass and the paper gone the color of weak tea, and seven signatures in seven different hands.

The sixth one is bigger than the rest.

He always wrote too big. He wrote his name on the back of my school photographs and it never fit and he never once made it smaller.

"Doucet," I say.

I get my arm up and I point at it, and my hand is not steady anymore, and I don't care.

"Lennox Doucet. That's my father. Sixth name on your wall, in a frame somebody built badly with his own hands, and every one of you says it out loud once a year and not one of you knows who you're talking about."

Nobody says anything.

The young one with the phone lowers it slowly and looks at the paper on the wall like he's never seen it in his life. The blond one's mouth is open. Warden has turned all the way around to face the frame with his back to the room.

The redheaded one opens his book to a page near the front and reads it and doesn't close it.

And Storm stands behind his chair with his hand on the top of it and looks at me.