Chapter 17: The Lift in the M

"May I have a pen?" I said.

Camille's eyebrows rose.

Geoffrey slid a pen and a sheet of the Group's letterhead down the table.

I wrote my name.

Eleanor Clifford, in the hand I had used since before this country had a flag.

Then I wrote it again, and a third time, and turned the page around so the directors could see.

"Look at the M," I said. "Does my pen lift in it?"

The older executive by the window put on his glasses and bent over the page.

"No."

"Would you bring it to Ms. Dacre, and then bring her deed to me?"

He carried the sheet around the table.

Camille looked at it and did not take it.

He laid her 1931 deed next to my signatures, and the whole room leaned in.

"On hers," he said slowly, "the pen lifts halfway through the M."

"It does on every copy," I said. "Rowan."

Rowan unrolled the stack of onionskin sheets he had carried in.

He set it down beside the deed and fanned it out across the table.

There were a hundred pages, and the same name sat on every one, with the same small lift in the same letter.

"These were on a lightbox in a storage unit in Long Island City," he said. "Unit 214. Ms. Dacre's assistant paid the rent."

The directors stared at the sheets.

"She practiced," Rowan said. "She got better at it as she went. The last page is the one stamped on that deed."

Camille laughed.

"Anyone can print paper and call it evidence."

"Then look at this one," I said.

I opened Edmund's ledger.

The leather cracked as it fell flat, and the room went quiet.

I turned to a page that had been marked with a thread.