Church was the club's word for the long room at the back of the clubhouse, where the table was oak and scarred and older than most of the men who sat at it. Presidents of the Iron Guardians had been made and unmade at that table. Marcus took his seat at the head of it with the photograph laid flat in front of him, and fourteen patched members filed in and found their places in a silence so complete that the ice melting in the water glasses sounded like weather.
Richard "Red" Collins sat at Marcus's left — treasurer, keeper of the club's books for eleven years, a lean red-faced man of fifty with a laugh like a screen door and steady, clever hands. On the back of his right hand, spread from knuckle to wrist in faded green-black ink, an eagle rode with its wings thrown wide.
Marcus found that he could not stop looking at it. He pushed the thought away and failed to push it away.
"Emily's with Rebecca," said Danny Okafor — no relation, just the road captain, which on another day would have made somebody smile. "Rebecca's sister's a nurse. Sarah's got a head injury, concussion for sure, maybe worse. She's in and out. The doctor says she'll likely come around properly in a few hours."
Sarah Parker. Sarah. Marcus had stood up for her at a courthouse wedding in a borrowed suit, fourteen years and a lifetime ago, when she'd married his brother in a white dress she'd bought off a rack because Daniel said she looked like an angel who'd gotten lost on the way to somewhere better. He had danced with her at the reception. He had promised Daniel, drunk and weeping with happiness, that if anything ever happened, he'd look after her.
Then Daniel had died, and Sarah had vanished — a note, an emptied apartment, a grief so total that Marcus had understood it and let her go. He had sent money to a post office box for two years until the box closed. He had stood over Daniel's grave and told the stone that he'd failed at half his promise.
And all that time she had been alive, and raising a daughter, and hiding.
"Start at the beginning," Marcus said to Travis. His voice was level, which cost him more than shouting would have. "And understand me: I am not asking as your brother. I'm asking as your president. The beginning, Hawk."
Travis sat with his hands flat on the oak, palms down, the way a man sits when he's decided not to reach for anything ever again. "The beginning is fourteen years ago, the night of the Founder's Day ride—"
"No," Marcus said. "The beginning is three nights ago, at a house nobody was supposed to know about. Emily said men came. Emily said you took her mother. But before any of that—" He leaned forward. "—the girl arrived at my picnic carrying something. Rebecca searched her backpack with her permission, the way you'd check a kid's bag at the door of a school. Show them."
The door opened. Rebecca came in carrying the pink backpack by both straps, like a evidence bag, like a holy thing. She set it in the center of the table, unzipped it with care, and laid out its contents one by one on the oak where treaties and death sentences had been laid before.
A juice box. A hairbrush. A stuffed rabbit with one ear loved half bald.
And then: a key.
It was silver — not silver-colored, Marcus saw at once, but true silver gone soft with age, heavy, old-fashioned, with a long bit and a bow worked into a shape that made every man at the table go quiet at the same moment.
An eagle. Small, precise, unmistakable: an eagle with its wings swept down, folded under, head bowed — the wings inverted from every eagle any of them wore.
Rebecca laid beside it a folded square of paper — a child's drawing, crayon on notebook paper, done with fierce concentration: a building, a road, a row of doors, an X, and underneath in proud wobbling capitals, THE EAGLE FLIES HOME.
And last, she laid down a plastic hospital bracelet sleeve and a printed document in a clear cover, the kind hospitals give you at discharge, dense with small print.
"Emily says her father gave her the key," Rebecca said quietly. "She says he told her it opens the room under the old garage, where he died. She says it's the most important thing in the world and she's not allowed to give it to anybody but you, Marcus." Rebecca's eyes came up, and Marcus saw that even she — unflappable, steel-spined Rebecca — was frightened. "She says the man with the eagle on his hand took her daddy. And she says—" Rebecca stopped.
"Say it," Marcus said.
"She says it wasn't Richard's eagle." Rebecca's gaze slid, almost against her will, to the back of Richard Collins's right hand, where the green-black eagle rode wings-up in the lamplight. "Richard's eagle flies up. Emily says the man who took her father had the eagle upside down. Wings down. And Marcus—" She picked up the hospital document and turned it so he could read the header. "This was in the bag too. It's a discharge summary. It's dated yesterday."
Marcus read it, and the room tilted.
PATIENT: SULLIVAN, WALTER. AGE: 79. FACILITY: ST. BRIDGET'S LONG-TERM CARE. DISCHARGE: AGAINST ADVICE, TO FAMILY.
EMERGENCY CONTACT: SULLIVAN, DANIEL.
At that moment, from the kitchen doorway where nobody had thought to post a guard against an eight-year-old, Emily's voice came small and clear across the whole church:
"And Daddy said nobody's allowed to be mad at Uncle Travis until they hear about the night the motorcycle blew up. Daddy said Uncle Travis is the only reason he's anything." She stood in the doorway with the stuffed rabbit under one arm, looking at the table full of huge silent men. "Daddy also said to tell you the phone's gonna ring. Mama's phone. He said when it rings, you'll know it's real."
Rebecca's phone, sitting face-up beside the backpack, lit up and began to ring.