Every Man a King

36

“So what did you do, Daddy?” Aja asked me months after the Quiller Case was closed.

“I gave the Ten Thousand Things file to someone I could trust and asked them to hide it... somewhere. Then I went on with my life.”

“I mean about Mr. Ferris’s son.”

She was seated behind her reception desk while I sat in the same chair as when I talked to Roger’s daughter.

“I retrieved the confession that Sola Prendergast wrote and the documentation that came with it,” I said. “Then I turned it all over to Henri Tourneau.”

“That’s that nice police detective, right?”

“Uh-huh. Yeah.”

“What’d he say?”

“That he’d call New Haven PD and see.”

“And what’d they do?”

“Nothing.”

The smile my daughter affected was filled with a kind of sympathetic pain. Aja-Denise is a beautiful young woman. I know that, but when I look at her, all I see is my child.

“Did you tell Grandma B?”

“I wanted to, but hey, you know, she deserves a little happiness.”

Aja smiled at me.

“What?” I asked her.

“How come you’re tellin’ me ’bout it?”

That was the right question. Aja almost always asked the hardest ones.

“Maybe two months after,” I said, “after I thought it was through, I started waking up in the middle of the night.”

“You were worried about it?”

“No, not worried. You know, honey, for a dozen years after I was in prison, I’d wake up in cold sweats.”

“Yeah?”

“But I don’t anymore. Ever since I saw Quiller in there, the fear is gone.”

“That’s good, right?”

“Yeah. It’s good. But now those files have kind of like taken its place.”

“You could give them to me,” she offered.

“No. It’s good enough that I share what I know with you. Now and then maybe I could think about it, and if there’s something I need to talk out, I can call on you.”

“Like I was your partner?”

“Maybe.”