Chapter 17: White Roses

Brooke came to Winifred's back door at six on Saturday morning with a banker's box in her arms.

She had changed out of the white dress and into jeans. She had not slept.

"He went to a breakfast," she said. "The safe code is the date he bought the building. He thinks I don't know the date."

Winifred looked at her over the kettle.

"Sit," she said. "Eat something. Then you can tell me what kind of fool you are."

"Grandma."

"Eat."

Brooke ate half a lemon bar and cried into the other half, and Winifred put a hand on her hair as she passed behind the chair.

I opened the box.

It was a gray ledger, bound in cloth, in Preston's small square handwriting.

Maxwell stood at my shoulder and read it with me.

Wire by wire, the bridge financing was there. Not to a lender. To a company called Meridian Row, with Preston's name on its filing.

Beside every wire he'd written the same two letters, in pencil.

MC.

"Margin calls," Maxwell said. "He was trading against the building loans. He lost it, and he put the loss in my money."

"And in my signature," I said.

Page nine of the Q2 report was folded into the back of the ledger.

The figures on it were not the figures in the ledger.

Someone had changed them after I'd signed, and the paper under my name was clean.

"I didn't sign that," I said.

"I know."

"I signed a different page. He swapped it."

Maxwell took the sheet out of my hand, very carefully, and looked at my signature a long time.

"I know," he said again.

At five that afternoon, a black car stopped on the street in front of the house.

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