Chapter 2 - A SIGNATURE THAT WASN’T MINE
Margaret printed the mortgage application at 1:14 in the morning.
I recognized the property description, the tax parcel number, and my father's name in the chain of title.
I did not recognize the signature on the last page.
It was an ambitious imitation of mine, with the exaggerated loop I used to make in college and had stopped making years ago.
“That's not my signature,” I said.
“I know,” Margaret answered.
“How can you be sure?”
“Because you signed the trust documents in front of me yesterday, and I watched you write your name.”
The requested loan amount was two hundred and forty thousand dollars.
I read the number until it stopped looking like money and started looking like a threat.
Daniel had promised Lauren an expensive wedding.
But this was enough to fund far more than a venue deposit.
The document carried the name of a small commercial lender, Keystone Capital Partners, and the contact number of a loan officer named Victor Hale.
Margaret drafted preservation notices and requests for the lender's underwriting records.
Then she called the county's emergency fraud contact, explaining that we suspected an unauthorized filing.
She was careful about every word.
A suspicion was not a conviction.
A signed page did not prove who had forged it.
But the timing and the amount made my hands shake.
At two in the morning, my brother, Owen, called.
We hadn't spoken since Dad's funeral, when grief made us both angry at the wrong people.
“Clare,” he said, breathless, “somebody broke into the old shop.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No, but Dad's metal filing cabinet is open.”
My father's shop was three blocks from the building he had left me.
It had been closed since his death, but Owen still checked it twice a week.
“Did they take anything?”
“That's what I'm trying to tell you.”
He swallowed audibly.
“The old accounting ledgers are gone.”
I remembered Dad hunched over those ledgers at the kitchen table, refusing to trust an expense until he'd written it down himself.
“Call the police,” I said.
“I already did.”
Then Owen lowered his voice.
“There's something else.”
I heard a door creak at his end of the line.
“Somebody left an envelope on Dad's workbench.”
“What does it say?”
“My name.”
He paused.
“Inside is a photograph of you outside the restaurant tonight.”
I stood so quickly my chair hit the wall.
“Are you alone?”
“I think so.”
Margaret took the phone.
She told him not to touch anything else, to wait where officers could find him, and to photograph the envelope only if doing so was safe.
When the call ended, she looked at me with an expression I would come to know too well.
It meant she had found another reason not to underestimate Daniel.
I thought about the stranger in the brown jacket.
I thought about my father's stolen ledgers.
And then Margaret's printer produced one final page from the lender's portal.
A contact email was listed for the borrower.
It wasn't mine.
It was an address I had never seen before, built from my first name and my father's surname.
The recovery phone number, however, was familiar.
May you like
It belonged to Patricia.
