Chapter 17: The March Paper

In the lobby of Granger Tower, the old woman with the cane stopped me.

Rhodri had gone ahead to the revolving door, and she let him go.

She took my hand in a dry grip and put something small into it, wrapped in a handkerchief.

"Open it later," she said. "It was my mother's."

"I can't take-"

"I'm not giving it to you. I'm loaning it to you, until my grandnephew has finished being a fool."

She thumped her cane once on the marble and walked off.

I did not unwrap it.

I carried it back to Merrow Glass in my fist.

The foreman met me at the gate and told me my father had been arrested at nine that morning, in the Lake Forest driveway.

Theft from a pension fund.

My stepmother had given a statement and then, he said, gone to a hotel.

I climbed the stairs to my mother's office, and I did what I should have done on Monday.

I took my father's old keys and went down to his office behind the packing floor.

The center drawer of his desk was locked.

The key was the small brass one on his ring, and the drawer held one folder.

The tab said MARCH.

My name was on the first page.

Ground Lease, it read, in the heavy type lawyers use for things they hope you will not finish.

The Merrow hot shop, the long brick building on the north lot where my mother had blown glass for thirty years.

Ninety-nine years.

Lessee: the Granger Family Trust.

Paid in advance: two million, four hundred thousand dollars.

Signed, Augustus Merrow, trustee.

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