Chapter 10

Ray Tibbs reached Grant Halloway while he was still talking.

"-and I want it noted that at no point did I personally benefit from a single dollar-"

"Sir," Tibbs said. "You'll come with us."

Halloway kept going. He was still explaining when they turned him toward the mirrored doors, still explaining when his shoulder passed the exact spot where Ruben had stood three steps inside the room, still explaining when the doors swung shut behind him and cut him off in the middle of a sentence. Two hundred people watched him go and not one of them made a sound.

Then the doors closed, and the room breathed, and someone at the back began to clap.

Osei did not let it run. He raised one hand and it stopped.

"The audit will be public," he said. "Every gift given to the Chicago family will be traced to its source. Donors will be offered a full return or re-designation to the pediatric wing, at their choice. Mr. Halloway's access to foundation records and funds is void as of this minute. And I will be resigning my chairmanship at the end of the audit, because the seating card that started this was printed on my instruction and no one caught it but a volunteer."

He turned to Ruben.

"Which brings us to you, Mr. Coyle. The wing opens in April. The board would like to dedicate it to Margaret Coyle. We'd like a plaque, a dedication, and your permission to say her name out loud at every fundraiser for the next twenty years."

Ruben stood in front of the lectern with rain still beaded on his shoes and his neighbor's blazer hanging off him.

"No plaque," he said.

The room waited.

"The playroom on three," he said. "The one with the low shelves and the little wooden chairs. Margaret read to kids in there every Thursday for two years before she got sick. Right now it closes at six, so kids whose parents work nights sit in their rooms." He looked at Vasquez. "Keep it open every night. Staff it. Name it after her if you have to, but keep it open, and don't put it in the program. That's what I want. That's the whole thing."

Vasquez nodded once, hard, and wrote it down on the back of her own program.

They let him leave without a microphone. He took the bus home.

At eleven-forty that night, Ruben Coyle let himself into the third floor of St. Bridget's with a visitor badge Vasquez had signed at the desk, and stood in the playroom doorway. The lights were off. The night nurse had left one lamp burning over the low shelves, and the small wooden chairs sat in a half-circle the way a woman had arranged them four years ago for a circle of children who were too sick to sit on the floor.

He sat down in one of the little chairs. His knees came up almost to his chest.

Then he lifted the chain out of his collar and turned Margaret's ring between his fingers under the lamp, the way he had every night for four years, and this time he did not have to keep his name out of anything to do it.