Chapter 37 - THE TRAIN TO NORTH CAROLINA
By April, the mountain laurel was beginning to bloom along the railway embankments outside Altoona, splashing patches of pale pink across the gray slate and limestone cuts.
Marco left the hardware store in Clara’s capable hands for three days, boarding the southbound morning train that connected through Harrisburg toward the Piedmont region of North Carolina. He didn't carry a suitcase—only his calfskin ledger tucked securely beneath his arm and the heavy gold signet ring wrapped in a square of soft green felt inside his coat pocket.
The train rattled southward through the rolling green hills of Virginia and into the red clay landscape of the Carolinas, past endless rows of budding dogwood trees and quiet country stations where no one got off and no one got on.
When the train pulled into the station at Butner, the air was warm and smelled heavily of pine resin and damp earth.
Marco walked the mile from the station to the federal medical facility—a sprawling, low-brick complex surrounded by unobtrusive chain-link fences and rolling lawns kept green by southern spring rains. He didn't need a visitor's pass; he had called ahead using a name the prison administration recognized from three decades of federal compliance audits.
The visiting room at Butner was quiet—no screaming inmates, no slamming steel doors, only the soft hum of an overhead air conditioner fighting the rising April humidity.
Dominic Valente sat at a corner table near a high, unbarred window that looked out over a courtyard of flowering peach trees. He wore a standard institutional khaki jumpsuit, his hair entirely white now, his shoulders slightly rounded beneath the cloth, but his dark eyes retained that cold, piercing clarity that had once made half the city of Philadelphia look down at their shoes when he walked into a room.
Marco walked across the linoleum floor, pulled out the chair opposite him, and sat down without a word. He reached into his coat, unwrapped the green felt square, and placed the heavy gold signet ring on the table between them.
Dominic looked down at the ring. He didn't touch it.
"You kept the books well, Marco," Dominic said, his voice lower and raspier than it had been in the Philadelphia study, but steady as an anchor chain. "Even when the numbers didn't make sense."
"The numbers always make sense, Dominic," Marco replied quietly, adjusting his wire-rimmed spectacles. "You just have to know which page to burn."
Dominic looked up, staring straight into Marco’s gray eyes for a long, unbroken moment. Then, for the first time in fifteen years, a slow, dry chuckle escaped his throat—a sound like dry leaves scraping across a stone courtyard in autumn.
"The boxwoods are dead by now," Dominic said.
May you like
"No," Marco answered, sliding the gold ring across the laminate table toward the older man's weathered hand. "Clara took a cutting before we left. It’s growing in a clay pot above the hardware store in Altoona. The leaves are green."
Dominic picked up the signet ring, weighed it in his palm, and slowly slid it back onto his right ring finger where it belonged. He didn't speak again. Marco didn't either. They sat together in silence as the spring sunlight moved slowly across the linoleum floor, until the guard tapped twice on the door frame to signal that the hour was over.
