Chapter 20: The Vote

At ten to nine the next morning, Nigel still wasn't answering his phone.

My father and I sat in the hall outside the boardroom on two hard chairs.

Costa stood by the window at the far end with his hands in his pockets, and he had not looked at me once.

Brooke came out of the elevator at five to.

She stopped a few feet away and did not sit.

"I'm only here to say it again," she said. "I don't need you to speak to me."

"I wasn't going to," I said.

She nodded and went to stand by the wall.

At nine o'clock the doors opened, and the woman with the cane said, "Come in."

Russell was already at the head of the table.

He did not look worried.

That frightened me more than anything.

I spoke first.

I put the twelve photographs on the glass, and I said what they showed, in plain words, without raising my voice.

The man with the pen read the penciled note aloud again.

"G. checked 2x. Fine. R."

"It's a sentimental scrap," Russell said.

"The company hired an examiner," said the woman with the cane. "Sit, Miss Coombs. Please."

A thin man in a gray suit stood from a chair by the wall.

He had a folder, and he had Costa's box of letters on the table in front of him.

"I compared the signature on the transfer with forty-one signed documents from the last six years," he said.

"The loop on the capital G runs the opposite direction. The pressure is also different."

"I would say the transfer was not written by the man who wrote these."

"Photographs," Russell said. "He's comparing photographs."

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