Chapter 8 - THE SCRAPING OF THE PEARLS
The kitchen in the Fayetteville cinderblock house smelled of fried fatback and hot biscuits. It was 0500 on a Thursday, two weeks after the committee room had emptied.
Jonah was standing at the four-burner electric stove, wearing an apron that Miles’s grandmother had sewn out of old flour sacks in nineteen-seventy-two. It had faded blue cornflowers on the pockets and was three inches too short for his long, bird-like frame, but he was flipping eggs with an old iron spatula like he had been doing it his whole life.
On the table between the salt shaker and the hot sauce was a certified legal letter from the Clerk of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond.
*IN RE: THE ESTATE OF HARRISON ARCHER (DECEASED).*
*ORDER OF RESTITUTION AND RE-CONVEYANCE.*
The court had moved faster than Reid’s lawyers could file their stays. When the United States Attorney in Alexandria unsealed the Cayman bank logs, the Virginia Attorney General had moved to seize the entire corporate shell under the state’s corrupt organizations act.
The land in Goochland—all eight thousand acres of old-growth oak and loblolly pine—was back in the name of the Archer Family Trust.
Only the trust had a new trustee.
Jonah Archer.
“They’re going to sell the house in Chevy Chase on the courthouse steps next month,” Jonah said, setting a plate of yellow-yolked eggs down in front of Miles. “The bank says the second mortgage wasn't fully satisfied by the legal retainer. Eleanor’s moved into a carriage house behind her cousin’s place in Charlottesville.”
“How is she?” I asked, leaning back against the counter with my coffee cup. My boots were already laced tight; the leather was stiff from the morning dew outside.
“She’s eighty,” Jonah said simply. He didn't sound bitter. He sounded like a man who had looked at an old, faded photograph of a house that had burned down forty years ago. “She spends four hours a day in the garden behind the carriage house, deadheading roses with a pair of shears she stole from the garage. She told the cousin that Morrison was stationed in the Philippines. She still can't say the word *Fayetteville* without having to rinse her mouth.”
“And Reid?” Miles asked, his mouth full of biscuit.
“Federal medical facility in Butner,” Jonah said, his voice dropping into that quiet, steady register he’d found in Room 322. “They’re evaluating his cognitive capacity before they set the trial date for the procurement fraud. The lawyers say he doesn't know what year it is half the time. He keeps asking for his father to sign the timber leases.”
I didn't feel anything. No pity. No triumph. Just the dull, steady click of a lock that had finally turned all the way into the brass plate.
The front screen door rattled.
Captain Whitaker stepped into the kitchen. He had his helmet under his arm, his jump harness already slung over his shoulders, the thick green webbing pulled tight across his ribs, the quick-release box resting dead center over his buckle.
“Wind’s up, Vance,” Whitaker said, looking at me. “Drop zone Sicily has three knots out of the southwest. We’re wheels up at zero-seven-hundred.”
“Ready, Cap,” I said.
Miles stood up, wiped his mouth with his napkin, and reached into his pocket. He pulled out a small, velvet-lined box—not the Bergdorf Goodman box my mother used for her pearls, but an old, battered green steel container that had held spare parts for an M-16.
He opened it.
Inside were my paratrooper wings.
Only they weren't the dull silver wings I’d left on the green felt table in the Russell Building.
These wings were old. They were made of real silver—heavy, dark around the feathers where the tarnish had set in during fifty years in an iron box, with two small rubies set into the risers of the parachute.
“My granddaddy’s wings,” Miles said, lifting them out. “He wore them into Sainte-Mère-Église with the 505th. He told my dad that if anyone in this family ever married a girl who knew how to fall without screaming, she was supposed to have them.”
He stepped close to me, his hands steady, his rough, scarred fingers pinning the heavy silver through the stiff wool of my uniform jacket, right above my heart.
The pins went through the fabric with a dull, heavy *snap*.
“They fit,” Miles whispered.
“They’re heavy,” I said.
May you like
“They’re supposed to be,” he said. “They’re made of something that doesn't melt when the fire gets hot.”
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