The Paper Trail novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Guest Room

Her card is frozen, Lars Rhodes appears at the hotel and offers his guest house, and Ella hands him his wife's shoes.

I drove to the Pfister downtown, because it had a night desk and a doorman who did not ask questions.

I typed "Pfister" to Lars Rhodes at a red light and nothing else.

He did not answer.

At the front desk the clerk smiled and asked for a card.

I gave her mine, and she ran it.

She ran it again.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Haskell," she said, in the quiet voice clerks use for this. "It's declined."

I gave her a second card, and then the one I kept in my wallet for emergencies.

The third decline made a small, unlucky sound.

Judson had frozen every account in my name in the forty minutes since I left.

He must have done it from his phone, standing barefoot in my front hall.

I felt something I had not felt in a long time, which was a clean, bright respect for his speed.

"Put it on mine," said a man behind me.

I turned.

Lars Rhodes stood three feet away in a canvas work jacket with milk dust on the cuffs.

He was bigger than I remembered from the car that night last spring.

He had dark hair that needed cutting and a thin white scar that cut through his left eyebrow.

He was not looking at my face.

He was looking at the gray folder under my arm and the pair of nude heels hanging from two fingers of my other hand.

"You came," I said.

"I got your text," he said. "It said Pfister."

"Just that."

"It was a good word."

He slid a card across the marble to the clerk and said, "Whatever room she wants, for as long as she wants it."

The clerk took it with the relief of a woman handed a solution.

I waited until she turned away.

"I can pay for my own room," I said.

"Your cards are frozen."

"How do you know that?"

"Because it's what I'd have done," he said. "If I were him, and stupid."

I almost smiled, and it startled me.

We sat in the lobby bar, in two leather chairs angled away from the few other guests.

The bartender brought him a beer and me a ginger ale, because I had told him I was driving.

Lars did not ask me how I was.

I was grateful for that.

"I'm going to say something and you can tell me I'm wrong," he said.

"Okay."

"You looked calm in the video. Your hand was steady the whole time."

"It was a long video."

"Where did you learn to do that?"

I held out the heels to him.

He took them with both hands.

"Those were under my entry table," I said. "She wore them to brunch with me on Saturday."

"They're hers," he said.

"I thought you might want them back."

He turned one over and looked at the scuffed red sole.

"She wore these to our anniversary dinner," he said, flat.

"Then you can have both."

He set them on the low table between us, side by side.

Then he looked at the folder in my lap.

"May I?" he asked.

I opened it to the first tab and turned it toward him.

He read the wire authorization the way someone reads who is not a stranger to paper.

His thumb stopped at the signature.

"That's not yours," he said.

I stared at him.

"What?"

"That E is open," he said. "You close the loop."

My mouth went dry.

"How do you know how I sign my name?"

"You sent a Christmas card to the hospital board last year," he said. "Daphne keeps the cards. I notice handwriting."

It was a reasonable answer.

I could not say why I did not quite believe it.

Before I could ask, he put the folder down and pushed it back across the table.

"He forged you," he said. "On my wife's apartment."

"On Daphne's apartment," I said. "Yes."

"Then I'm sorry," he said. "It's my wife's apartment, and I didn't know."

"Do you know where it came from?"

"I thought she had a raise."

"She doesn't work, Lars."

"I know," he said. "I thought she was saving."

He rubbed the scar on his eyebrow with the back of his thumb.

It was an odd gesture, almost tender, and it made him look younger.

"Where is she tonight?" I asked.

"In my kitchen."

I blinked.

"She came home at nine with her hair wet," he said. "She said she had a migraine. She's sitting at my table drinking tea, waiting for me to come back and be the man she married."

"Does she know you saw it?"

"She knows I got a message."

He picked up one of the heels and weighed it in his palm.

"I haven't decided what to do with her yet," he said.

I looked at his hands.

They were wide and scarred across the knuckles, and perfectly calm.

For the first time that night, I felt the old thing stir in my chest, cold and sure and patient.

"I have," I said.

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