277.👠 THE WHITE SHOE

Chapter 03 - The Woman at the Gate

Nora Ellison arrived wearing a navy coat that had been mended at the cuffs and carrying a paper bag of cinnamon rolls.

She was sixty-eight and had the compact, stubborn look of a woman who had raised children, buried a husband, and learned to repair her own porch steps. The taxi driver waited while she studied the mansion's iron gate.

Alexander met her outside. He had thought of a speech. He had intended to explain the missed calls, the letters, the arrangement with Veronica. The sight of Nora holding a bag of pastries made all his sentences seem inadequate.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"So am I," she answered. "But I haven't come to talk to you first."

He stepped aside.

Sofia stood in the front hall beside Beatrice. Her stuffed fox was tucked under one arm. She looked at Nora's gray hair, the bag, the sensible shoes.

"You're the picture lady," Sofia said.

Nora crouched, slowly, with one hand against her knee. "I'm your grandma. I sent you the green mitten."

Sofia studied her. "I only got one."

"That's because I lost the other before I finished it. I made you a new pair. They're in my bag."

For the first time since Alexander came home, Sofia laughed without checking anyone's face to see whether she had permission. She went to Nora on her own, and the older woman held her without making a spectacle of it.

The three of them ate cinnamon rolls in the morning room. Nora took hers with coffee, no sugar. Sofia liked the icing but not the raisins. Alexander watched his daughter pick them out and lay them carefully along the edge of the plate.

"Mara did that," Nora said. "Exactly that. She'd make a little fence of raisins and announce the cake was in jail."

A smile surprised Alexander. He could see Mara at twenty-nine in a yellow kitchen, pushing raisins toward him with a look of mock severity. He had not allowed himself a memory of his wife that wasn't tied to a coffin in nineteen months.

When Sofia went upstairs for her nap, Nora opened her purse and took out a slim folder tied with ribbon.

"My daughter called me the morning she died," she said. "She was going to see you, not leave you. I want you to understand that."

"I never thought she was leaving."

"Then why did your lawyer tell me to stop asking about the papers?"

"What papers?"

Nora untied the ribbon. Inside were copies of a deed and a will, signed before Mara married Alexander. Her family owned a strip of land along the Illinois lakeshore, a place called Holloway Point. It included an old boat landing and the only service road between a private marina and the public highway.

"Mara inherited it from her grandfather. She put it into trust for Sofia. I was named an independent trustee. No sale without my consent."

"I know about the trust."

"Then you know I refused to sell."

He looked up. "Sell to whom?"

"Dominic Mercer. His attorney called last spring. Said the marina needed the road. I told him the land wasn't mine to trade. After that, people stopped answering my calls."

Alexander's stomach tightened. Dominic had been assembling a new shipping venture for two years. He spoke of warehouses, berths, import licenses and redevelopment grants. Alexander had agreed to finance preliminary surveys, believing it was ordinary business. The site had been described on every map he saw as an unremarkable access strip.

"Why didn't Mara tell me?" he asked.

"She tried. She said you changed the subject whenever she mentioned Dominic."

There was no triumph in Nora's face. Only fatigue.

"Mara loved you," she continued. "That did not mean she trusted the men around you. Those aren't the same thing."

She showed him a second document: a petition supposedly signed by Nora, releasing her position as trustee because of declining memory. Her name had been traced poorly. The middle initial was wrong. At the bottom was a doctor's letter stating she suffered from progressive confusion.

"I have arthritis," Nora said. "Some mornings I put my glasses in the refrigerator. Neither condition makes me incapable of knowing where my granddaughter's property is."

Alexander recognized the name of the doctor. He had treated Dominic's father.

"Where did you get this?"

"A clerk in the county office. Her mother and I used to work at the same school. She thought I'd want to know somebody was telling the court I couldn't manage my own affairs. The petition hasn't been approved. Yet."

The room went still.

"You need an attorney who's never been to dinner with Dominic," Nora said. "I already have one."

Alexander almost objected. He was accustomed to bringing in attorneys, not being told someone else had found one first. Then he pictured the little chair near the laundry stairs and let his objection die.

"Tell me her name."

"June Avery. She used to work in the state attorney's office. She and Mara went to law school together before Mara moved into community work."

His phone vibrated. Dominic was calling. Alexander let it ring out.

"I can protect Sofia," he said.

"Can you?" Nora asked, not unkindly. "You protected a business while your daughter learned to apologize for spilling milk."

He looked away. The truth was not less true because it was painful.

Nora gathered the copies and left one page on the table. It was an agreement for the pending transfer of Holloway Point to Mercer Harbor Development. The price was substantial, but the money would not go directly to Sofia. It would be invested under a management contract controlled by Dominic's company.

Alexander saw his own initials beside the first three clauses.

He had signed dozens of documents during a night flight from New York, his assistant holding pages beneath a reading light while he thought about the funeral of a man he had once feared.

"These are mine," he said.

"Are they?"

He studied the final page. There, below a witness line, was the signature that would release his daughter's property to Dominic's venture once Nora's removal was approved.

The handwriting was perfect. More perfect than his own, which always deteriorated near the end of a long name.

And beside it was a date on which Alexander had been in a Swiss hospital, sitting through the final hours of his father's life.