“To save yourself and Han.” He shook his head. “Ain’t we a pair, A.P.?”
“Hannah suspects I did it.”
“Oh, her father can do no wrong in her eyes?”
Then his expression changed and another item on the agenda appeared.
“Have you noticed anything about my marvelous complexion? Don’t have much of a tan.”
She gave a laugh. “You’ve been in jail for nearly a year, Jon.”
“I’d still be looking this way if I’d been sunbathing in the Bahamas.”
He displayed some puncture wounds on his arm.
She frowned.
“Chemo.”
She stared at the needle marks. “Oh, Jon, no!”
“Found out about two months ago. Been with me for a while, looks like. I knew I was feeling bad, but they don’t have the best doctors in County. They had a good shrink, but the internist was a kid. Treating cons for practice. I had a session at Trevor County Med yesterday. Then went to my motel room and puked like I’d been drinking. Only, this time I was sober, so I could enjoy the lovely experience to its fullest.”
She was about to ask about the prognosis, which she had always found an ugly word, fit only for medical pros, not to be used among those we loved.
But she didn’t need to. He’d understand it was the next logical question. He said, “It’s not looking too good. They don’t tell you exactly, you know. But I got a little time left in me.” A grin. Then he said briskly, “Enough of this, A.P. Right now we got work to do. Let’s get to it.”
He turned his hand over and pressed hers, palm to palm, and he helped her stand.
84
Colter Shaw said, “Dark enough.”
The four were in the front room. Shaw and Hannah had been looking out the windows. He had seen nothing of the Twins. The girl confirmed that she hadn’t either.
“Ah, Han,” Merritt said to his daughter. “Something I brought for you.”
The incongruity was almost funny. The man sounded as if he’d just arrived at a party with a gift for the birthday girl.
He took the backpack. “We had a metalworking shop in prison. For rehab. Somebody’d try to make a crossbow or knife sometimes, but what we weresupposedto make were coatracks and boot scrapers. You remember our project? That we were working on when I went out—that night in November?”
“For class. We had to make some historical thing. Something to do with Ferrington.”
“I said I’d be back and we’d finish it.” He clicked his tongue. “And we know how that ended.”
She nodded, her face solemn.
“Well, here it is.”
He pulled out the clock that Shaw had seen earlier when he’d searched the bag.
Hannah actually gasped, looking at the thing. She whispered, “The Water Clock.”
Shaw hadn’t paid attention before but he now saw that it was a faithful reproduction of what he’d seen on the Carnegie Building beside the Kenoah.
The only difference was that the hands were not in the angel wings pose.
“It really works. Water drips from here.” He tapped a reservoir in the top. “And turns the gears. Probably wouldn’t want to run railroads according to it, or schedule airliners, but it’s accurate enough. I tried it out.”