He stood up.
He wasn't as tall as I was. But the man knew how to stand. Shoulders back, weight even, chin level—the posture of a Southern gentleman who'd been raised by parents who had opinions about how a man entered a room and left it.
He buttoned his jacket.
The cool smile slipped. Just a little. What replaced it on his face was not pleasure. It was the expression of a man who was about to deliver a piece of bad news and was, for whatever reason of his own, not enjoying the delivery.
"The second thing, Mr. Dane, is a question you should be asking."
"What question?"
He looked at me for a long moment.
"Ask Dominion Hall," he said, "about your father."
I went still.
"Ask them," he said, "where he's been hiding."
He walked past me toward the door.
He stopped with his hand on the knob.
"I'm sorry to be the one to put that in your head," he said, and to his credit he sounded like he meant it. "But you needed to know."
He opened the door.
He went out.
The door closed softly behind him.
I stood in the small paneled room with the fire that wasn't lit and the coffee pot that was still steaming and the half-used cup he'd left on the table, and I did not move for a long count.
The world was not spinning.
That wasn't quite right.
I was spinning, inside the world, which was holding still.
My father.
Hiding.
The man who'd walked out the door of our house in Valentine, Texas and never come back. The man whose name had shaped every meal at our kitchen table afterward and every conversation between my mother and any of her seven sons. The man we'd been told, by every adult in our life, by the sheriff of Jeff Davis County, by the church elders, by my mother herself, wasgone.Unfound. Maybe-dead. Probably-dead, by the time I'd hit fifteen. Definitely-dead, by the time I'd put on a uniform.
Hidingwas a different word.
Hidingmeant alive.
Hidingmeant somebody knew where he was.
Andask Dominion Hallmeant the somebody was the men who'd just sat me down in a parlor with a glass of bourbon and called mefamily.
I took one breath.
I took another.
I uncrossed my arms.
