Chapter 20: What He Owed

"A lien on what?" I said.

"On forty percent of Lowry Freight, Mrs. Reyburn, held as security for two point three million dollars."

"On what signature?"

The collector slid a photocopy across the table.

It was a proxy form, dated March, with my name signed at the bottom.

I read it once.

"That isn't mine," I said.

"It looks like yours to me."

"The y doesn't lift at the end. Mine flicks up. I have signed it that way since I was nine."

The banker took the page and held it next to Joan's revocation.

"It doesn't lift," she said.

"Mr. Reyburn told me it was genuine," the collector said. "I don't make loans against a signature I can't verify, which is why I'm sitting here."

"Tilda forgot signing it," Gavin said. He was on his feet. "That's the whole point of this entire year. She doesn't remember."

"I remember every document I've signed since March," I said. "I wrote them down in a notebook, because you told me I was forgetting."

I looked at the woman on his right.

"Odette."

She hadn't moved.

She sat with both hands on the lid of her laptop and her eyes on the table.

"Odette, I told you to bring me something I could hold."

Her chair scraped.

Odette stood up.

She was pale, and she looked very young in the green cardigan, with her hair pulled back so tightly that her temples stood out.

"I signed it," she said.

The room went silent.

"I signed Tilda's name on that proxy, in March, in Gavin's office, with a pen he gave me. He stood behind my chair and corrected the loop."

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