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Deborah bristled once more. “My father used to tell me never to shame someone for finding joy. It’s so goddamned rare in this world.”
Mason’s face looked long in the yellow glow of the kitchen. His beard glistened, flecked with gray. A wise, patient face. “He found more than joy, Deborah. He found trouble he couldn’t handle.”
She looked at him, her gaze unrelenting. He held it. There wasn’t enmity between them, only a raw kind of contradiction in their pain. He was like a container for her emotion and she for his.
Ruby said, softly, “Guys.”
A discomfort moved through Evan, and he had an abrupt urge to distract himself with something—anything—else: to wipe down the greasy silver platter, to put together the incomplete jigsaw puzzle, to align the edges of Deborah’s magazines, which were infuriatingly stacked with no regard for right angles. He’d come here to get information on Luke Devine. Not to witness a family processing their grief. It felt like he’d been shanghaied into participating in an ancient ritual he didn’t understand.
Deborah pushed back from the table, rising to fill her mug once more. “You know, Evan, I used to hate coffee, but I needed caffeine to get going in the morning.” Her tone was different, performative. “Then I got hooked on the taste. But after Johnny the anxiety was too much. So. I started hating caffeine. Now I drink decaf day and night. Go figure. Would you like a cup?”
“No, thank you.”
She flipped through one of the magazines stacked on the counter without looking down at it. “I’d imagine if you’re protecting Ruby, we should log you into our security system. It’s one of those modern ones with cameras one can view on one’s cell phone.”
“I’m already in,” Evan said.
Ruby shot her father a look across the table, eyebrows raised in delighted astonishment.
“Oh.” Deborah took a moment to regain her composure. “Well, don’t you dare turn up the thermostat. Women of a certain age require a cool sleeping temperature.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mason said, “I can make up the couch in my office out back for him.”
“No.” Ruby grabbed for Evan’s forearm, caught herself, and, released it. She suppressed her fear beneath a peacock display of sass. “I want him to sleep upstairs next door to me. Like a guard dog.” She made a frame with thumbs and forefingers, pretendingto take the measure of Evan’s neck. One eye closed, teeth pinching her lower lip, a full Kubrickian focus. “If he behaves, I won’t even need a collar and leash.”
“Guard dogs mistreated by their owners tend to turn on them,” Evan said. “And then CSI has to clean the blood spatter off the ceiling.”
A moment of stunned silence. And then the Seabrooks all laughed.
29
Family Fill Up
The corporate jet put Rath and Gordo down on a private runway on Hanscom Field, fifteen miles from Boston.
The nearest Home Depot was thirteen minutes away in Waltham.
They arrived comfortably before the nine-o’clock closing.
Gordo waited in the Town Car and dusted off a Family Fill Up meal from KFC.
Rath went in and walked to Aisle 10, Bay 4, his favorite.
He bought a five-roll multipack of industrial-strength duct tape.
30
Looking into the Sun
The guest room looked like a sophisticated boudoir. Floral wallpaper and elaborate drapes. A spray of silver-dollar eucalyptus branches rising from a Murano vase atop a Tiffany-blue nightstand. The mattress, elevated to a pharaonic summit atop a formidable box spring, nearly required a running board to mount and was princessified by a dust ruffle and a puffy duvet weighted for a Siberian winter. A reed diffuser breathed a suffocating blend of holly berry and spruce, the aroma thick enough to glaze a doughnut.
Tassels abounded.
Evan sat on the floor. Fully dressed. Leaning against the rucksack he’d retrieved from the car.
It had been roughly twenty-four hours since he’d dispatched Folgore in a Manhattan alley. Forty-eight since his ankle had been ensconced in an explosive device at the behest of the federal government.
