Page 49 of The Beast
"You don't know Dominion Hall," she said.
"No."
"The Dane brothers. The private army. The pier. The thing this whole city whispers about like the boogeyman under the bed—the family nobody crosses, the one the careful people won't even name at a dinner party." She was staring at me like I'd grown a second head. "And you want me to believe you're not one of them and you've neverheardof it."
"I want you to believe it because it's true." My voice came out rougher than I meant. "I grew up on a horse ranch in West Texas, Mary Catherine. Seven brothers, dirt and cattle and a father who up and vanished. I went into the Army and I went—other places after. I did not know my family was anything but scattered, and I damn sure did not know there was a mansion in Charleston with our name running it." I shook my head. "Whatever this city thinks it knows about the Danes, I'm hearing half of it for the first time, same as you."
"Why should I believe you?" Quiet now. Worse than the laugh. "I don't—I have a federal agent threatening my family in my own studio and a man I metyesterdaywho travels under afake name, and I don't know which one of you is lying to me. I don't know who to believe."
"Me," I said. "Believe me. I have not lied to you once, not about anything that counts, and I'm not starting now." I took a step toward her and stopped, because she didn't want me closer yet and I could feel it. "I swear it to you. And I'll prove it. You wanna be gone from all this? Say the word and we go. Tonight. I'll take you anywhere on this earth you point at and we stay gone a month, six months, a year, however long it takes for Dominion Hall and the FBI to chew each other up. Let them. I don't give one good goddamn which of them wins. The only thing in this whole mess I care about is standing in front of me."
That landed somewhere. I watched it land. But it didn't fix anything, because there was too much loose in the room and neither of us knew yet what was true.
So, we just stood there.
Both of us breathing. Both of us turning it over—her trying to decide if I was the boogeyman or the one good thing, me trying to square the woman I'd held last night with the stranger looking at me now like she'd wandered into a trap with my face on it. The morning light came gold and useless through the east window across all those canvases of hers, and the quiet stretched out long and brittle. I didn't have the next words and neither did she.
It was the phone that broke it.
Hers, this time. It went off on the counter beside the half-unpacked groceries and we both flinched at it. She looked at the screen and her whole face changed—went smooth and blank, the curated calm slamming down over everything. She picked it up and answered.
"Daddy?"
I watched her listen. Watched the color drain out of her by degrees, top down, the way water goes out of a glass. Whateverwas coming through that phone, it was bad, and it was getting worse the longer it ran.
"Okay," she said. "Okay, Daddy, I—no. No, don't. Don't say anything to anyone, don't sign anything, just—" Her hand had come up to her mouth. "I'll take care of it. I will. I promise you. I promise. Let me make some calls."
She lowered the phone. Stood there with it in her hand a second, staring at nothing.
Then, she turned to me, and her eyes had gone hard and bright and wet and full of accusation. The soft thing that had been growing between us for a day was nowhere in them at all.
"The FBI," she said, "just raided my father's business. Agents, a warrant, boxes, the whole street watching." Her voice shook and held. "He was on his way to Mass when he got the call. Twenty-three years, he built that, and they walked in and tore it apart. Because ofyou. Because of your family and your name and whatever you've all done that I don't even know about." She lifted her chin, and the tears didn't fall, because she wouldn't let them. "So. You came here to prove you're not the one lying to me."
She stared me down.
"What do you have to say aboutthat?"
21
MARY CATHERINE
Ileft him standing in the studio.
He didn't want me to go. That was the thing I felt most clearly through the anger and the fear and the devastation of hearing my father's voice break on the phone—Brock didn't want me to leave.
He'd put himself between me and the door in the way of a man who had decided something and was having difficulty with the revision. I’d had to look him in the eye and saymovein a voice I hadn't known I owned until that moment.
He'd moved.
I took my keys and my bag and I walked down the stairs of the studio and out onto Wentworth Street. I got in my car and I sat there for sixty seconds with both hands on the wheel and the engine off and let the thing move through me—the fear and the anger and underneath both of them something I couldn't afford to look at yet, something that felt like loss.
Then, I started the car and drove to my parents' house.
The gray Mercedes was in the driveway. Daddy's car, back from wherever he'd been when the call came—not Mass, becauseMass hadn't started yet when the agents arrived. The thought of that landed in me like a stone in water. He'd been on his way. Sunday morning, years of the same routine, and instead of the nine o'clock pew, he'd gotten a phone call and a warrant and federal agents taking boxes out of the building his name was on.
Because of me.
Because I had run out of a church and run straight into the wrong man and let him into my studio and my life and, apparently, handed the FBI a thread to pull.
