Chapter 8 - WHAT THE MAN WITH THE CANE REMEMBERED
Alexander stared at the photograph long enough that I became afraid to interrupt him. In the bright entrance hall, with rain tapping against the glass and Rosa waiting discreetly beside the table, the man who commanded an international company looked suddenly as if he'd been transported into a memory he hadn't visited willingly in years. His hand closed around the silver handle of his cane until his knuckles whitened.
"That's the night of the fire," he said. "Graham told me he was in New York."
"Are you certain?"
"I was supposed to meet your mother there. I arrived late. By then the building was full of smoke, and Graham called me from New York to say our insurance company had been notified. I never questioned the timing."
He asked Rosa to bring Evelyn, then looked at me. "I need you to know something before this gets worse. The cane isn't a prop. I was injured trying to get a night watchman out of that building after the electrical fire started. The man survived. I spent almost a year learning to walk without expecting every step to hurt."
I glanced down, then back at him, embarrassed by the impulse to ask whether he was in pain now. He answered the question I hadn't spoken. "Some days. More when it rains. I've learned to live with it."
We moved into the library where Alexander kept the few things he hadn't delegated to a storage company. He opened a box marked with the year of the fire and laid out photographs, insurance correspondence, and a newspaper clipping praising him for risking his life. He looked sick when he saw the photograph of himself on a stretcher. "They made me a hero," he said. "Miriam was supposed to be there. Instead, the story became about me, and everyone stopped asking what she'd intended to reveal."
"You said she died in a traffic accident," I reminded him.
"Three weeks later. Police investigated it as a collision caused by a driver who crossed the center line. I have never seen credible evidence connecting it to the fire. I need you to understand that. If I let guilt invent a conspiracy, I'll be no different from the people who turned her real work into a rumor."
I appreciated the distinction even as it hurt. I had spent eight years imagining alternate versions of my mother's last days. There was a limit to what answers could repair. "Then we focus on the records we can prove," I said. "And we don't use her death to sell a story."
Alexander looked at me with a tenderness that made me lower my eyes. "That's what she'd have wanted."
Evelyn arrived with a laptop and an expression that suggested she had not enjoyed being called at midnight. We compared the anonymous photograph to the police report and the time-stamped fire-service notes Alexander possessed. The picture appeared to show a dark sedan with a partially visible registration sticker. It might identify who had visited the premises before the fire, but by itself it did not place Graham inside or establish arson. Evelyn arranged for an independent digital analyst to examine the image's provenance before anybody forwarded it beyond counsel.
"I can call Graham," Alexander offered.
"Don't," Evelyn said. "Not until we know whether he's involved. If he's innocent, we owe him a fair inquiry. If he's not, we don't want to warn him to destroy records."
I watched Alexander accept advice he plainly hated. Richard would have fired Evelyn for contradicting him. The difference mattered. It was one of the reasons I had begun lingering in the kitchen when Alexander came downstairs at night and catching myself wondering what he looked like when he wasn't worried about business or somebody else's safety.
After Evelyn left, Alexander asked whether I wanted to walk through the conservatory. The estate had a glass room filled with citrus trees and white jasmine, warm even when the weather outside turned vicious. Rosa had placed a padded chair near the entrance because she knew my ankles were swelling. Alexander paused by a little lemon tree and confessed that he had purchased it years earlier in the hope that his mother would visit and stop criticizing the food grown on his property.
"Did she?" I asked.
"Once. She said the lemons tasted of expense and no sunshine."
I laughed so abruptly that my daughter kicked. Alexander's face changed as he looked at my stomach, and I saw him make a conscious decision not to ask to touch me. "Would you like to feel her?" I asked.
He hesitated. "Only if you want."
I guided his hand to the place beneath my ribs where she liked to announce herself. At first there was nothing. Then a firm kick pressed against his palm. His expression softened into an astonishment so unguarded that I nearly cried. For a moment there was no divorce, no forged signatures, no armored convoy. There was only a little person insisting that the world was still capable of surprise.
"Does she have a name?" he asked.
"Iris. My mother grew them in chipped pots behind our apartment."
"Iris," he repeated, as though trying to memorize a promise he'd never been asked to make.
I should have stepped back. I was exhausted, pregnant, newly divorced, and engaged in a legal fight with a man who had taught me to distrust affection. Yet I didn't regret the quiet moment. We stood beneath the glass while rain ran down the panes, and I told Alexander about the purple flowers my mother used to give to neighbors when they were sick. He told me he hadn't planted anything himself since the accident. I offered to teach him badly. He accepted.
May you like
A phone rang inside the library. We might have ignored it if Rosa hadn't appeared almost immediately with a guarded expression. The digital analyst had traced the anonymous photograph to an older image stored in an archive owned by Palisade. More importantly, the archive showed a request to delete that image the morning after Evelyn served Richard with the preservation notice. The request had come from a Vanguard Global administrator account.
Alexander's personal administrator account.
