2. Founders Daughter
Chapter two
Founder's Daughter
Nova
The compound was four miles north of The Rusty Cage, up a county road that turned to gravel a mile before the gate.
I'd been on this road at night, in my mother's old Civic, age twelve, half-asleep in the back seat while Rosa drove with both hands tight on the wheel and didn't look in the rearview mirror once. I'd been too young then to understand the distinction between leaving and fleeing. I understood it now.
Vance had insisted I ride back in the truck with him and his driver rather than follow in my own car.
I'd declined, pleasantly, citing the need to call my advisor.
He'd accepted this, pleasantly, in the way that powerful men accept small refusals when they're confident the larger game is already won.
The gate was the same gate. Iron and weld work, painted black, flanked by two cameras that were newer than I remembered.
A prospect I didn't recognize punched a code and waved me through without looking at my face.
Inside the compound fence: the main clubhouse low and long on the left, the garage bays right, the separate structures that housed the dorms and the kitchen and the room they called the chapel set back and to the right of everything else, the only building with a cross above the door that meant nothing religious and everything else.
Hawthorne met me at the gate.
He hadn't aged so much as calcified. Sergeant-at-arms, old guard, sixty-something with a face that had been hewn rather than grown.
He'd been a fixture in this compound since before my father built it, which meant he'd been watching people come and go for thirty years and had developed the particular expression of a man who noticed everything and said less than nothing.
He'd known me at twelve. At twelve, I was the president's daughter, the girl who ran in the parking lot on roller skates and knew which men would give her candy and which ones watched her too carefully.
At twenty-two, I was something else. He looked at me long enough to recalibrate and then held out a hand.
"Miss Santos."
"Hawthorne." I shook it. His grip said nothing had changed and everything had. "Good to see you."
He walked me to the main building without ceremony.
Vance's truck had come through behind me, but Vance was already elsewhere — a phone call, or the calculation of some next move, or the demonstration that he didn't need to personally escort a guest to understand what they were doing on his property.
The main building smelled like the bar but more so.
More lived-in. Coffee and motor oil and the deep-lodged smell of decades of cigarettes that had been smoked in every room and were now as structural as the wood they'd stained.
The hallway from the entrance was narrow and low-ceilinged, doors on both sides, the carpet worn to subfloor in the center where thirty years of boots had walked.
I knew where they were taking me before we reached the door.
It was at the end of the hall, north-facing, the room with the window that looked out toward the property line and the oak tree line beyond.
My father's room. He'd kept it until he died — kept a toothbrush here and a change of clothes and the reading glasses he was too vain to wear in front of the club — and from the outside, the door was exactly as I remembered it.
Colt was leaning against the wall beside it.
He'd come in a different way than I had.
Faster, or longer-established in his routes, or he'd simply known we were coming here and had moved ahead of us.
He straightened when I approached. Full height, which was considerable.
The ice-pale eyes did the same thing they'd done at the bar — assessor's scan, brief and total.
"I'll show you the room," he said.
It wasn't a question. Hawthorne peeled off without comment.
Colt opened the door. I walked in first.
The room had been altered and it hadn't been.
The bed was made, the dresser cleared, the bookshelf that my father had kept stacked three-deep with paperback crime novels emptied to two shelves of nothing.
The walls held no photographs. The desk — my father's old oak desk with the water ring on the left corner that he'd made the second year of the club when Preach had spilled a glass of iced tea — the desk was cleared to bare wood except for one thing.
A rifle scope. Set at the near-right corner. Not my father's. Too new, too clean, the lens covers still on.
I looked at it. I didn't touch it.
"The scope," Colt said, from behind me. Not explaining, not apologizing. Stating.
"I see it." I turned around. He was in the doorway, arms folded, his expression the kind of settled that takes years to grow. "You've been using this room."
"For storage." A pause that meant he was deciding how much that was true. "Sometimes."
Everything personal had been removed — the photographs, the reading glasses, the one framed commendation from the city of Dallas that Eduardo Santos had received for the youth boxing program and had hung in the exact center of the wall above the desk because Rosa had insisted and Eduardo had pretended to be embarrassed and secretly been proud.
The room had been cleaned out to the level of utility and then the scope had been left on the desk, and the choice of that was not accident.
"Your things in the dresser," Colt said.
"The bathroom at the end of the hall serves this room and the one next to it.
Kitchen opens at six. Compound meals are breakfast and dinner.
Lunch you're on your own." He pushed off the doorframe.
"Vance will want to walk you through his version of the club structure tomorrow.
Interview format, probably. He'll have positions prepared. "
"And your version?"
He looked at me for a moment.
"My version isn't prepared," he said. He said it the way he said everything — flat, direct, no warmth in it and no hostility either. Just the fact. Then he was gone, his footsteps quiet in the hallway, and I was alone in my father's room.
I didn't sit down immediately. I walked the perimeter instead — the edge of the space, the four walls of it, running my hand along the shelf where the books had been, touching the dresser knob that was loose in the exact way it had always been loose.
My mother used to pull it off entirely when she was frustrated, set it on the surface, then spend ten minutes reattaching it while my father watched from the doorway with the expression of a man who understood he was the cause of most things going loose in his general vicinity.
The desk.
I stood in front of it for a long time. Ran my thumb over the water ring.
Then I pulled the desk drawer open — the right one, the one that slid without sticking, and found nothing but a pen and a rubber band.
I pulled the left drawer. It stuck. I worked it open the way I'd watched my father work it a hundred times, angled up slightly before out, and inside was a pen that had exploded and a rubber band and behind the rubber band, tucked against the back of the drawer where the drawer-pull shadow made a pocket of dark,
A photograph.
Three and a half by five inches. Kodak border. The quality of film from before everything went digital.
Me. Age ten, maybe eleven. Sitting on the hood of Eduardo Santos's bike, the '98 Road King, the one he sold the year before he died, with my feet swinging and my gap-toothed smile and the particular expression of a girl who believed that the world was the exact size of this compound, and that it was sufficient.
Behind me, three boys.
Twenty-seven, twenty-four, twenty. Colt Reeves with his arms folded and his chin raised, already the posture of a man who'd decided what his body needed to communicate.
Diego Moreno with one hand on the bike's seat and his face turned half away, as if the photograph was something he was allowing rather than inviting.
Bishop Royal, holding a Coke and looking directly at the camera with those already-old eyes.
I had given this photograph to my father.
It had been my birthday photograph. I didn't remember which birthday.
I'd had a copy printed and given it to him and he'd kept it in his desk, and when Rosa took me south at two in the morning, I'd thought about that photograph.
I'd told myself it was in the desk and one day I'd come back for it.
I'd been twelve and I'd believed in one day.
I held it in both hands.
Behind me, the room was quiet.
My father's desk. His room. His compound.
His club, built on a vision that someone had decided was worth killing him over.
I'd spent ten years at a disciplined distance from all of this, the scholarship, the honors courses, the relentless building of credentials that might give me the language to come back and understand what had happened.
The academic frame had been both true and necessary.
The IRB clearance was real. The dissertation was real.
But I was also the founder's daughter.
And my father had left this photograph in a drawer where he knew I'd find it, the same way he'd left every specific thing he'd wanted to say in a place that required you to look.
I put the photograph in my jacket pocket.
I did not cry. I had not cried about Eduardo Santos in three years, through a sustained act of will that had become its own kind of discipline. I catalogued instead. Noted the evidence. Filed the information.
The drawer. The photograph. The water ring on the desk.
Someone had been in this room regularly for a decade. The scope on the desk said it had been Colt. But the drawer had not been opened, the left drawer, the one with the trick, the one my father had never explained to anyone but me. The photograph had been there for ten years.
Waiting.