Chapter Nineteen Settling Accounts
In which a newsboy gets his train set, a dog gets a home, and a debt finally comes due
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The days that followed were busy, happy ones, though threaded through with pieces of unfinished business neither Graham nor Calie meant to leave dangling before they sailed.
They went first to the courthouse, where they had the marriage license corrected — Caleb Graham's name entered in place of Gregory Hostetler's — a matter of some twenty minutes and a few signatures, though it left them both laughing afterward at how strange it felt to make official, in ink, a fact their hearts had settled days before.
Next they traveled to the hospital, arms loaded with fruit and a small mechanical train Calie had insisted on buying the moment she saw it in a shop window, and found the newsboy sitting up in bed, his leg in a plaster cast propped on a pillow, grinning ear to ear the moment he recognized Graham's face.
"Hey, mister! You came back like you said!"
"I told you I would," Graham said, pulling a chair close. "How's the leg?"
"Doc says I'll walk fine, just gotta wait it out.
" The boy's eyes went round at the sight of the train, and rounder still when Calie knelt beside the bed and told him, gently, that there'd be a proper set of crutches waiting for him the day he was discharged, and a standing invitation to visit them whenever he liked.
"You're the lady from the wedding," the boy said suddenly, studying her with the frank, unfiltered curiosity of the very young. "I remember. You had on a big white dress."
Calie laughed, delighted. "I did. And this is my husband, who very nearly missed his own wedding on account of you."
"Sorry about that," the boy said, entirely unbothered, already absorbed in winding the train's small key.
Matthew 25:40 rose in Graham as he watched them, warm and quiet: "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
" He thought of that first terrible cab ride, the boy's small voice asking him to stay, and felt, for the first time, that the debt had finally been paid in full — not by money left with a nurse in passing, but by simply coming back, and meaning to keep coming back.
They left him well fed on grapes and full of plans for the train set, and Calie cried a little in the cab afterward, though she insisted they were entirely happy tears.
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The white dog proved a rather easier reunion.
The boarding kennel remembered him fondly — "eats like a horse and never once tried to bite anyone," the attendant reported approvingly — and Jeff, informed of the animal's existence over dinner that same evening, declared himself the dog's new owner before anyone else had a chance to object.
"A dog that followed Caleb halfway across two states deserves a good home," Jeff announced, scratching the animal's ears with real enthusiasm the moment he was delivered to the Hawthorne front step, tail going like a metronome. "I'm calling him Burnham, after your alias. Fitting, don't you think?"
"Entirely too fitting," Graham said, laughing, and Calie declared it settled before either of them could argue further.
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The harder business waited at the courthouse, where Graham spent the better part of two mornings identifying Halifax and the five men who'd sat at that dinner table, laying out for a grim-faced prosecutor exactly how the cipher had been stolen, exactly what it had contained, and exactly how close it had come to falling into hands that would have used it to ruin better men than themselves.
Halifax's ruddy, genial face had gone gray and unfamiliar in the courtroom light, stripped of the easy charm that had made him such a convincing host. He did not once meet Graham's eyes.
Walking the prison corridor afterward on his way out, Graham passed a row of cells and caught, from one of them, the flat, resentful stare of the thick-set man who'd chased him halfway to Chicago and very nearly succeeded.
Neither of them said a word. There didn't seem to be anything left worth saying.
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It was in asking one of the investigators on the Halifax case for help locating Gregory Hostetler — a task Graham had taken on personally, for reasons he didn't fully explain to anyone but Calie — that he got his answer without having to search at all.
"You won't need to hunt for him," the investigator said, with the flat satisfaction of a man reporting good news.
"He's already inside. Picked up three days ago at the train station, if you can believe it, by the son of a man he forged papers against years back.
Old trust-fund case — the father died in prison for it.
The son's spent years tracking him down, and finally got his man the same night, apparently, that Hostetler's own wedding fell through. "
Graham sat with that a long moment, turning over the strange, tidy justice of it — a debt fifteen years old, called due on the very night Gregory Hostetler had meant to collect a debt of his own.
He went to the prison two days later, in his capacity as Calie's attorney rather than as her husband, and asked to see the prisoner alone.
Gregory Hostetler looked up from the small cell bench as the door opened, and Graham was struck, despite everything he already knew of the man, by how thoroughly the last weeks had worn him down — the polish entirely gone, replaced by something sullen and frightened and considerably smaller than the confident bridegroom who'd once planned to walk into that church and claim everything he thought he was owed.
"Who are you?" Hostetler demanded, though there was no real fight left in the question.
"I represent Miss Hawthorne," Graham said evenly, choosing the name deliberately, watching for the flinch it produced. "Mrs. Hostetler, I should say — though not to you. She's married. Happily, and permanently, and entirely out of your reach."
Something ugly moved across Hostetler's face — the last dying flicker of the man who'd spent three months believing a woman's whole fortune and future were his for the threatening. "That's not possible. She was promised to me."
"She was blackmailed into a promise," Graham said, keeping his voice level with real effort.
"There's a considerable difference, and any court in this country would agree with me.
I have her letters. I have yours. I have a fairly detailed accounting of exactly what you threatened, and precisely how false every word of it was.
" He let that sit a moment. "You're already answering for forgery and worse.
I'd think carefully before adding blackmail and extortion to the list, unless you're eager for a considerably longer stay in a place like this. "
Hostetler's face went through several ugly transformations — outrage, calculation, and finally, as the reality of his situation caught up with his temper, something closer to defeat. "What do you want from me?"
"Only your silence," Graham said. "Never write to her again.
Never approach her family. Never so much as speak her name to anyone who might carry it back to her.
Do that, and this conversation never happened.
Fail to do it, and I promise you every remaining year of your sentence will feel considerably longer than it already does. "
He rose to go, and found, at the door, that he had one more thing he wanted to say — not for any legal purpose, only for his own.
Romans 12:19 moved through him, steadying something that had wanted, for one hot instant, to say a great deal more than strict business required: "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.
" He was not the man appointed to deliver whatever final reckoning Gregory Hostetler still owed — the law, and apparently an old debt fifteen years overdue, had already seen to that far more thoroughly than Graham's own anger could manage.
"For what it's worth," he said, pausing at the door, "I hope you find some way to actually change, in whatever time you have in here. Not for her sake — she's well past needing anything more from you. For your own."
He left without waiting for an answer, and did not look back at the cell as the guard's key turned behind him.
Calie was waiting for him that evening with a question in her eyes she didn't quite know how to ask, and Graham answered it before she could find the words.
"It's done," he said simply, drawing her close. "He knows exactly what happens if he ever troubles you again, and I don't believe he has the nerve left in him to try. You never have to think of him again, if you don't want to."
She held onto him a long moment, and when she finally spoke, her voice had already begun to lighten.
"Then I don't intend to," she said. "Not one more minute of my life belongs to Gregory Hostetler. It all belongs to you now — and to whatever comes next."