263.🌧️ THE WALLET SHE RETURNED

Chapter 03 - A Signature After Death

In the morning, Adeline woke on a sofa with a blanket tucked beneath her feet and thought for one bewildered second that she was back in her aunt Evelyn's house. She could hear a pan being moved on the stove. Someone was singing badly to a radio. It was the ordinary music of another person's home.

Then she saw the borrowed shoes beside the sofa and remembered the restaurant, the wallet, the photograph.

At breakfast Lucia served eggs on chipped blue plates. “If you want another,” she told Adeline, “you can ask for it. I don't count eggs.”

Adeline smiled. She found herself close to tears and disliked that very much.

Enzo arrived with a paper sack of bagels and a woman in a charcoal coat who introduced herself as Miriam Gold, an attorney. Miriam was fifty-eight, wore practical shoes, and spoke with the composed impatience of someone accustomed to judges explaining the obvious to her.

“I don't work for Mr. Rinaldi's companies,” she told Adeline immediately. “I run an independent practice. If you want me to represent you, he'll pay my fee, but you will be my client.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Ask him,” Miriam said. “I've stopped trying to guess.”

Enzo didn't look offended. “My father may have taken something that belonged to your mother. If he did, I need to know. And I can afford to help you find out.”

Adeline considered this. “I don't want charity.”

“Neither do I,” he said.

She was not certain she believed him. The difference was that he did not require her to pretend she did.

At the county records office, Adeline's old access card had long since been deactivated. She entered through the public door with Miriam and sat beneath fluorescent lights that made everybody look faintly ill. A clerk named Mrs. Cooper recognized her and drew in a sharp breath.

“They said you were under investigation.”

“I was.”

“Well.” Mrs. Cooper glanced at Miriam. “They never told us why.”

“Do they ever?” Miriam asked pleasantly.

The public index listed an instrument recorded on May 20, 2013. The scan showed a deed transferring the Saint Agnes property from the Saint Agnes Women's Trust to Cain-Rinaldi Holdings. Six signatures appeared on the last page, one for each founding member.

Adeline read them slowly. Lucia Rinaldi. Carmen Reyes. Grace Vance. Ruth Delaney. Beatrice Russo. Helen Pike.

Her mother's signature slanted left and finished with an exuberant upward stroke. Grace had signed birthday cards exactly that way.

Except the final e was wrong.

“She always made a small loop here,” Adeline said. “She'd taught me to copy it when I was five.”

Miriam leaned closer. “Good. We won't rely on that alone, but good.”

Beside the signature appeared a notarization by Judith Cain. Preston's mother.

The date at the foot of the page was more than a year after Grace's funeral.

Miriam made a certified-copy request and asked Mrs. Cooper for the supporting affidavit. Mrs. Cooper typed, frowned, typed again, then summoned her supervisor. The supervisor returned with the expression of a man carrying a tray of glasses across a slippery floor.

“There is no supporting affidavit in the electronic file.”

“Was one recorded?” Miriam asked.

“It should have been.”

“That's not the same answer.”

The supervisor looked at Adeline. “Maybe you remember where it went.”

His accusation was light enough to deny if challenged. It landed anyway.

“I never handled this deed,” she said. “I indexed inspection permits. The access they accused me of using was issued after my termination date.”

Miriam turned toward the supervisor. “Please put your concerns in writing. With the dates.”

He chose not to.

“Samuel still hasn't surfaced.”

“Could he have gone somewhere on purpose?” Adeline asked.

“He's seventy-two and has a heart condition. If he meant to disappear, he'd have remembered his medication.”

Adeline thought of the pharmacy receipt in the wallet. It bore yesterday's date and listed one prescription she couldn't pronounce.

“Someone wants the original deed,” she said.

“Someone wants us to stop looking for it,” Miriam corrected. “A distinction worth keeping.”

At the bakery, Marisol's mother was taking trays of almond cookies from the oven. Carmen Reyes was fifty-seven, broad-shouldered, with flour on the side of her face and a pale crescent scar behind her left ear. She listened without interrupting while Marisol told her about the wallet and the papers.

When Marisol finished, Carmen put the tray down on the counter so carefully that the movement itself looked frightened.

“Lucia told you about Saint Agnes?”

“Yes.”

“And Grace?”

“Yes.”

Carmen went to the sink and washed hands that were not dirty. “Grace was a good woman. Better than we were to her.”

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“Because you were nine when it burned. Because I had you to feed.”

“That doesn't answer it.”

“It answers more than you think.”

Marisol turned away. She'd never been especially interested in her mother's past. A child imagines her mother began existing when she did, and Marisol had been no better than most children. Now she saw the old scar differently, as a sentence she had failed to read.

By evening, Miriam had obtained an emergency preservation order for the county's archived paper records. A judge would hear the matter later in the week, but the order prohibited the routine destruction or alteration of relevant files.

Adeline read her mother's name on the copied deed again. “If the signatures are false, why not just prove it and take the building back?”

Miriam laid her fork beside her plate. “Because the property has changed hands, debts have been secured against it, and the people who arranged those transactions have lawyers who are very good at making a straightforward wrong last for years. But there are ways to stop a sale while we sort it out.”

“A sale?” Lucia asked.

Enzo glanced down.

Miriam looked at him. “You haven't told them?”

He pushed back his chair, ashamed of his own hesitation. “Cain-Rinaldi Holdings is under contract to sell the building to a development company. I inherited a stake. I didn't approve the sale, but my brother controls the voting shares.”

“Matteo?” Lucia said.

“He says he's selling it to pay down debt.”

“Whose debt?” Adeline asked.

Enzo had no answer.

Then his phone lit with a message from the bank's transaction-monitoring office. Miriam read it over his shoulder with his permission. An account had been located in a recent property-disbursement search. It was receiving small quarterly payments marked ST. AGNES BENEFICIARY DISTRIBUTION.