The kitchen clock ticked—*tock, tock, tock*—in the suffocating stillness.
Trevor took a trembling step backward, his boots grinding into the broken champagne glass. « Harold… listen, man… this was just a family joke… Margaret thought you were depressed… Beverly and I were just trying to help you guys book that cruise— »
« Trevor, » I said, looking at my brother-in-law with an expression of pure, unvarnished truth.
« Shut your mouth. »
I pointed toward the living room rug.
« Sit on that sofa. Both of you. And do not stand up until the state police open that front door. »
Twelve minutes in an Appalachian hollow can feel like twelve years when the reckoning is rolling down the mountain.
Margaret didn’t sit on the sofa. She paced the kitchen floorboards, her designer leather mules clicking frantically against the ceramic tiles, avoiding the pool of spilled champagne that Trevor had clumsily tried to wipe up with paper towels. Her hands fluttered to her hair, then to her linen collar, her breath catching in ragged, shallow gasps that sounded like dry leaves scraping over asphalt.
« Harold, this is absurd! » Margaret hissed, her voice vibrating with that high, desperate pitch she used whenever an audit or an unpaid property tax notice arrived in our mailbox. « The FBI? Federal preservation liens? You never told me that old thing was military property! For thirty-six years, you told me your father bought it after the war! »
I sat at the oak dining table—the table my father had helped me build from salvaged red oak in 1974—and looked at my pocket watch.
