"Then we deal with what's real." He looked round the painted kitchen, at the gulls flying at Leo-height towards the window, at the bear in the yellow raincoat waiting patiently in the studio for a hand that would not come back to finish him. "But a man who brings wine to a threat, Emma, is a man who knows his paper won't survive being read."
Chapter 9: Gary's Paper
Gary's paper arrived on Thursday, by courier, in an envelope so thick it had to be posted through Emma's letterbox in two attempts.
She did not open it alone. She waited until Leo was at school, drove to Alicia Grant's office with it on the passenger seat like a passenger, and laid it on the desk of Nathan's oldest friend from college with hands that were not quite steady.
Alicia read the way she did everything: fast, twice, the second time with a pencil.
"Right," she said at last. "Let me tell you what this claims, before I tell you what it is." She turned the document around. "A personal loan. Eighty-five thousand dollars, advanced to Sarah Collins by Gary Holt in March of last year, for medical expenses, repayable in twelve months, secured — and here's the poetry — on the Cannon Beach cottage, which would transfer to Gary if the loan wasn't repaid. Signed by Sarah. Witnessed by a neighbour of Gary's in Bend. Dated the fourteenth of March."
"March," Emma said. "Last March Sarah was —"
"Tell me."
"She was in hospital. She'd had the second surgery. She was in from the ninth to the twenty-second, and for half of it she couldn't hold a pen. She couldn't hold a cup. I was there every day. She did not sign a loan in Bend, three hours away, attached to that hospital by tubes."
Alicia asked for the March days in order, and Emma gave them the way she gave everything about that month, from a memory she had clearly built into a wall and furnished. The ninth, admission. The tenth, the surgery that was supposed to take two hours and took five. The eleventh, the twelfth, a corridor, a machine, Sarah's hand too swollen for her ring. "She dictated a shopping list on the eighteenth," Emma said. "For when she got home. Lemons. She was planning lemons, Alicia. She was not planning eighty-five thousand dollars." Alicia wrote it all down without looking up, and then she turned the loan document over and considered its back, the way she considered everything, as if paper had a tell. "The money was supposedly advanced in cash and by cheque," she said. "There is no cheque. There is no bank record in the disclosure that matches it, no withdrawal, nothing. A man lends eighty-five thousand dollars and keeps no proof he ever had it to lend. That is not lending, Emma. That is theatre with props."
Alicia was already writing. "Good. That's fact one, and it's checkable: admission records, surgical dates. Fact two —" she flipped the page over, held the signature up against the light from the window, and then took, from Emma's folder, a birthday card Sarah had sent Leo's teacher two years earlier, and laid the two signatures side by side. "Look. Don't touch. Look."
Emma looked. Her sister's signature had a gallop in it: the S tall and looping, the h finished with a flick that sometimes dotted the i in Collins by accident, gloriously, her whole life.
The signature on Gary's paper had the tall S. It had the flick. It had them the way a photocopy has a view.
"It's the same," Emma whispered. "It's exactly the same. That's worse, isn't it? If it was different, it would just be a lie. This is her, copied."
"It is her signature's shape," Alicia said carefully, "with none of its behaviour. A real signature changes every time a human writes it — speed, pressure, the little lifts of the pen. This one overlays. Watch." She slipped the loan page over the card on the lightbox she kept for exhibits, aligned the two names, and the shapes slid into each other like a key into its own lock. "Identical to the millimetre. Nobody signs identically twice, Emma. Not after chemo. Not ever. This was traced, or transferred, from some genuine document Sarah signed — and whoever did it had the genuine document to copy from."
The room went very quiet, except for Nathan, who had been standing at the window with his arms folded, captain-still, the way he stood in doorways at fires while he decided which wall to trust.
"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."