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Arthur looked across the desk at Eleanor Miller.
He looked at her worn hands, looked at her chapped knuckles, and remembered the four dollars and twenty cents she had placed on the diner counter while her child ate cold pancakes.
“Eleanor,” Arthur whispered, his voice shaking with an ancient, righteous fury that seemed to rattle the heavy glass in the windows.
“Thomas didn’t die because of an accident.”
He spun the blue legal folder around and slid it across the mahogany desk until it rested against her hands.
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“Thomas died because my nephew was stealing twelve thousand dollars of aggregate to pay for his yacht slip in Cape May.”
***
The temperature across Lancaster County dropped to ten below zero on the morning of December twenty-sixth, freezing the snow on the fields into an impenetrable crust of iron and diamond dust.
At 8:45 AM, three vehicles pulled into the circular cobblestone driveway of Hawthorn Ridge, their tires crunching over the freshly salted limestone.
