"What genuine document?" he said.
"Ah." Alicia sat back. "That is the question of the week. Because here's fact three, and it's the one Gary's lawyer should have caught before he filed this with the court." She took a second, thinner envelope from Emma's bundle — Gary's solicitor's filing, the formal disclosure. "This purports to list Sarah's estate papers as Gary received them. Her bank statements, her insurance, the cottage deed — and her will. Except it doesn't list a will. It lists, and I quote, 'no testamentary document located'."
"But Sarah had a will," Emma said. "She told me. She told me at the kitchen table in January, when she made me promise about Leo. She said it was done properly, with a solicitor in Cannon Beach, and I was guardian, and the cottage was in trust for Leo, and Gary got — she laughed when she said it. She said Gary got her blessing and nothing else, because blessings were the only thing of hers he couldn't sell."
"Then a signed will exists, or existed," Alicia said. "And here is what I think, and it's a thought, not a fact yet: Gary has had access to it. To copy that signature so precisely, he needed a document Sarah signed carefully, at her best, with her full name — the way you sign a will. People don't sign birthday cards the way this was copied from. Too clean. Too formal. That S was made to be witnessed."
Emma put both hands over her face, briefly. When she took them away she was furious rather than frightened, which Nathan had learned was her better weather.
"He sat at her funeral lunch," she said, "and all the time he may have had her will in a drawer. While I was phoning solicitors. While I was telling Leo the house was his and nobody could take it, Gary had the paper that proved it, being used as a — as a stencil."
"We don't know that yet," Alicia said, gentle and immovable. "We know the signature was copied from a formal document. We know a will is missing from a filing made by the man who produced the copy. A court will want more than our certainty. So we get more."
She made a list: hospital records, subpoenaed; the Cannon Beach solicitor Sarah had used, traced through her bank statements; a forensic document examiner, instructed now; and the guardianship file updated, so Judge Solano heard about the claimed debt from Alicia first, in a calm letter, not from Gary's lawyer across a courtroom.
While Alicia dictated the first letters at dictation speed to her assistant over the phone — a calm, lethal letter to Gary's solicitor that used the word disclosure four times — Emma stood at the office window and phoned the school, then Dr. Ortiz's receptionist, then, after a moment, nobody at all; she just held the phone, looking down at the street, gathering the ordinary world back around herself like a coat. "One more thing," Alicia said, hanging up. "Nathan. I want your account of the cottage visit, written, tonight. His words at the gate, exactly. Men like Gary rely on everything staying as atmosphere — a feeling Emma had, a tone of voice. We are going to turn all of it into documents with dates on, because that is the weather he cannot operate in." Nathan said he would write it before his shift. Emma looked at him — the fire captain, volunteering for paperwork — and something in her face eased for the first time since the courier had knocked.
"Can he still win?" Emma asked. "Leo sleeps in that house in his head, Alicia. Even in Portland, that's where he sleeps."
"He can delay," Alicia said honestly. "That's what paper like this is for. To make keeping what's yours cost more than you've got — money, or nerve, or time. He has underestimated the nerve, I think. And the company you now keep."
On the steps outside, Emma stopped with the folder against her chest like a shield, and stood a moment in the spring sun.
"My sister signed her name carefully once," she said, "to protect her son. And he used it to try to steal from the same boy." She looked up at Nathan, and her eyes were dry and bright. "When this is over, I want Leo to learn to write his name from hers. The real one. With the gallop. And nobody — nobody — ever traces it again."
Chapter 10: Daniel's Journal
The storage unit in Astoria had been paid for, month after month for seven years, by a standing order Margaret had never explained to anyone, including herself.
"I told the bank it was for his tools," she said, on the drive down, in Nathan's truck, with the unit's spare key in an envelope on her lap. "It wasn't true. His tools went to the boatyard boys in a week, they needed them, Daniel would have wanted —" She watched the river widen beside the road. "It was for me. As long as the rent was paid, some part of him was still somewhere with a door on it. That is not a sane sentence, and I am too old to pretend otherwise."
Leo had stayed in Portland with Emma, on the strict understanding that anything of Daniel's that could be carried would be carried back, and that Nathan would not tidy his brother before Leo met him. "Don't tidy Dad," he had said.
The facility was orange-doored and echoing, out by the marina. Unit 14. The padlock had seized a little, and Nathan had to work it, and neither of them said the obvious thing: that Daniel's hands were the ones meant to do this, seven years ago.
Inside: a life, stacked. Sailing gear gone soft with mildew. A toolbox. Charts in tubes. Boxes of books. A denim jacket on a hook that made Margaret sit down, quite suddenly, on an upturned crate, and say, "That is enough of that," to no one, until she was ready to stand again.
There were other boxes, and they opened them the way you go through a house after a death, in the order you can bear. Daniel's sailing certificates in a plastic wallet, every grade passed first time, which made Margaret make a noise between a laugh and the other thing. His charts, rolled tight, the routes to Cannon Beach pencilled and re-pencilled until the paper had furred. A tide table for a year seven years gone, annotated in the margins with weather he had hoped for. And his toolbox, which Nathan opened last and closed again quickly, because Daniel — drifting, hopeless Daniel, who lost coats and deadlines and once an entire dinghy — had left every tool cleaned, oiled and wrapped in cloth, in size order, ready. "He kept things ready," Margaret said, wonderingly. "Boats. Tools. Other people's birthdays. It was only ever his own life he couldn't seem to keep the appointments for." "He was keeping them," Nathan said. "Just not in your order, Mom."
The journal was in the second box, under a coil of rope: a waterproof notebook, Daniel's sprawling hand in pencil that had survived the damp. Nathan read the first entries standing up. Daniel bored between seasons. Daniel in February: MET SARAH AGAIN — THE ILLUSTRATOR FROM THE BOOKSHOP SIGNING, THE ONE WHO DRAWS BEARS THAT LOOK LIKE THEY PAY TAXES. SHE CORRECTED TWO OF MY KNOTS.
"Nathan," Margaret said, "sit down to read that. Whatever it is, sit down."
He sat on the crate beside her, and they read together, the way they had not read together since he was small enough to be read to.
Spring became summer in Daniel's pencil. The entries lengthened. He wrote about Sarah's cottage, her mother's garden, her laugh in a chandlery. He wrote, with an astonishment that came off the page like heat: SHE SAYS A BOAT IS JUST A HOUSE THAT ADMITS IT CAN SINK. I HAVE NEVER LOVED ANYONE WHO WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING. IT IS VERY RESTFUL.
Then, in August, the entry Nathan had driven a hundred miles and seven years to find:
AUGUST 19. SARAH IS PREGNANT. I AM GOING TO BE A FATHER. I SAT ON HER PORCH AND CRIED LIKE A BOY AND SHE MADE TEA IN THE MIDDLE OF IT BECAUSE SHE SAYS TEA IS WHAT YOU DO WITH A CATASTROPHE, EVEN THE GOOD KIND. WE HAVE CHOSEN THE NAME LEO IF HE'S A BOY, FOR HER GRANDFATHER, AND I HAVE ALREADY TOLD THE BABY, THROUGH HER SKIN, THAT THE SEA IS HIS IF HE WANTS IT AND NOT ONE INCH OF IT IF HE DOESN'T.
"He knew," Margaret said, into her hands. "He knew, he knew, he was happy. All these years I have been telling myself he never even — that it was some girl, some accident — he knew, and he was happy, and he chose the name. Leo is the name his father chose."
The entries after that were plans, unembarrassed and detailed: the ring, bought in September, described with a drawing. The cottage roof, to be fixed before winter. The proposal, rehearsed three ways. And the last long entry, dated the second of October, the handwriting faster, the pencil pressed harder:
There was an entry from September, too, that Nathan read standing at the crate with the light going, and then read again sitting down. Daniel had been saving — actually saving, in a boatyard account he described as NATHAN-PROOF, BECAUSE HE CANNOT ARGUE WITH A PASSBOOK — and had written out, in columns, what the money was for: the ring, the cottage roof, a crib THAT DOES NOT COME FROM A CATALOGUE PICTURE OF A FAMILY THAT LOOKS NOTHING LIKE US. And beneath the columns, a list headed FOR THE HOUSE: the gutter over the porch, the gate mended SO LEO CANNOT OPEN IT TILL HE'S FORTY, a night-light for the hall, BECAUSE SARAH SAYS EVERY HOUSE NEEDS ONE ROOM THAT IS NEVER COMPLETELY DARK. Margaret laughed then, outright, alone in the buzzing unit, and wiped her face with the heel of her hand. "A night-light," she said. "Seven years I have been buying flowers for a grave, and the boy was planning a night-light."
TELLING NATHAN ON FRIDAY. I HAVE PRACTISED. NATH, YOU WERE RIGHT ABOUT HALF OF IT AND WRONG ABOUT THE HALF THAT MATTERED. I AM NOT DRIFTING. I HAVE AN ANCHOR NOW — HA. I AM ASKING YOU TO BE GODFATHER BECAUSE YOU ARE THE STEADIEST MAN I KNOW AND BECAUSE WHEN I AM FRIGHTENED OF BEING A FATHER, WHICH IS EVERY DAY, I THINK: BE MORE LIKE NATHAN, EXCEPT THE TIES. IF HE SAYS YES I WILL CRY AND DENY IT. IF HE LAUGHS I WILL PUSH HIM OFF THE DOCK LIKE 1998.
And underneath, in smaller writing, the thing Nathan would carry out of that orange-doored room and keep for the rest of his life: