Inside her own door, she locked it, bolted it, and put the freesias in a water glass on the piano because she had no vase. Their scent rose at once, sweet and clean, through the small rooms.
The boundary had held. Not because she had trusted it — because she hadn't, not yet — but because it had been built, it turned out, to hold whether she trusted it or not.
Chapter 9: The Forged Signature
Tony Barrett worked the way Maya imagined he had once prosecuted: in neat piles, in pencil, in occupied silence. On the Thursday after the tuner came, he asked — through Lucia, at Maya's convenience — whether she would come to the office with anything bearing her real signature. She brought what she had: a birthday card she had signed for her mother and never sent, two old payslips, and, wrapped in a tea towel, one of her father's bar ledgers from Sullivan's, salvaged the week the locks changed.
"I learned to sign my name in this," she said, laying the ledger open. Its pages were ruled by hand, Seamus Sullivan's upright figures marching down the columns — stock taken, tabs settled, a piper paid cash. On the inside cover, in a schoolgirl's hand practised over and over down the flyleaf, was her own name, a dozen times, at twelve, at thirteen, at fourteen. "Dad said if I was going to write it on his accounts one day, I'd write it properly."
Tony studied the flyleaf a long time. Then, with the air of a man laying out a hand of cards he had not dealt, he opened his folder and set three documents in a row on the desk between them.
"These are copies," he said. "Obtaining them took some courtesy calls. The loan agreement first. Forty thousand dollars, secured against the bar and, as it turns out, against the inheritance your father left in trust — which could only be touched with your signature. Then the deed transfer, moving Sullivan's out of your name and into a holding company. And here, the witness statement from the notary, confirming you signed both in her presence." He turned the loan agreement toward her. "Is that your signature, Miss Sullivan?"
Maya looked, and felt the room tilt very slightly, because it almost was. Maya Sullivan, in ink, at the foot of a document that had ruined her. The M rose as hers rose. The y fell as hers fell. For a sick second she doubted herself the way she had been made to doubt herself for months, in bank offices and solicitors' letters — I signed so much when Dad died, perhaps I —
"The S," she said.
"Tell me."
"In Sullivan. My S loops back. Look at the ledger — look at any of them. My father taught me on his name first. The pen goes up and loops back through itself, like a knot. Every time. I've done it ten thousand times. It was our name — I never wrote it any other way." Her finger hovered over the forgery, not touching it, as if it might be contagious. "That S doesn't loop. It just — curves. Like someone copying the shape of the word and not knowing the hand that writes it. That's not my hand not knowing itself. Ryan watched me sign things for two years and he still got his own fiancée's name wrong."
Tony made a note, in pencil, in a hand so tidy it looked printed. "For what it's worth," he said, "a document examiner will see considerably more than that. The hesitation marks here, and here. The pressure is a copyist's pressure — even, careful, drawn rather than written. But your loop is the kind of detail juries understand, and more importantly, it's the kind of detail that tells me where to dig. A forgery this close was practised. Practised forgeries leave a trail of practice."
He turned the deed transfer over. On its reverse, crisp and official, sat the notary's stamp and signature. "Now the stamp. The notary is a real woman — Mrs. Dolores Finch, retired now, office formerly on West Madison. I spoke with her yesterday. Notaries keep a journal, Miss Sullivan. Every act, numbered, dated, with the signer's identification recorded. It is the dullest book in the law and the hardest to argue with." He set a fourth sheet beside the deed: a photocopied page, dense with entries in faded blue ink. "Mrs. Finch, who is eighty-one and extremely annoyed, let me copy the pages for the week in question. There is no entry for you. There is no entry for either document. There is no entry at all on the date stamped here — it was a Sunday, and Dolores Finch has not worked a Sunday since 1987."
Maya laughed, and found it came out wet. She pressed the heel of her hand to her eyes. "A Sunday."
"A Sunday," Tony agreed. "Mr. Cole is not a stupid man, which will make this harder in some ways and easier in others. He was, however, in a hurry, and he used people in a hurry. A stamp can be bought. A journal cannot be back-written without the whole book betraying it. This" — he touched the photocopy with one fingertip — "is where your paper trail begins. Not with proving a negative. With a real book, kept by a real woman, that says you were never there."
For the first time in a year, proof was pointed at the truth instead of at her. Maya sat with that until she could speak steadily.
"What happens now?" she asked. "And don't soften it. That was in my terms."
"It was, and I won't. Now it gets slow, and some of it will be unpleasant. I will commission a certified document examiner. I will file for the loan records from the lender, who will not enjoy learning what they hold. There may be a criminal referral — fraud, forgery — and there may not. And Mr. Cole, when he learns the paper is moving, will not be pleased. But before any of it, I need one thing from you, done properly."
He took a fresh sheet, dated it, and set it before her with a pen that was not the club's gold-scripted pad but plain office paper, because this was not the club's business. "A formal statement. In your own words. That you did not sign these documents, did not attend any notary on that date, did not authorise any loan or transfer, and did not receive the money. Take your time. Write it as if the only reader were Mrs. Finch's journal — plain, and true, and nothing you cannot stand over."
Maya wrote for twenty minutes. Her hand ached. Halfway through, without a word, Tony refreshed her water and left the room for exactly the time it took her to finish the hardest paragraph — the one about Ryan, and the engagement, and the winter she had believed him — and when he returned it was as if he had never been gone.