Back at the hotel, Simone ordered a cab. Barry drove a battered station wagon with a large dog crate in the back and no evidence that an engineer of his experience had ever been overpaid. Across the street, Friday night had reached that lovely brief hour in late spring when people take their jackets off and carry them without admitting they have chosen the wrong season to go out. Maya stopped Luis before he could return to his wife.
“The woman in the shop. Is she one of the eighteen?”
“Nineteen,” he said. “If you count people who stayed somewhere more than four nights out of seven instead of people on the lease. There’s the woman in your shop and her girl. A young guy who did the night work at a bakery. A retired couple who looked after an old man on the third floor. The old man got moved into residential care. The people who helped him with his laundry and listened to the baseball with him got left on the spreadsheet under miscellaneous expenses.”
“How many actual people?”
“Forty-seven. It was forty-six when the water came through. Ben wasn’t here yet.” He smiled. “My wife got as far as the ambulance and then said, no, apparently this is the place. He was born on a stretcher under the front awning. Every time he sees the little lights go round he starts to laugh.”
“What’s the woman’s name?”
“That’s hers to tell you. And you ought to know something else before you get too excited about the money that’s gone missing. My van didn’t come out of my savings. Winter Quay bought it. They let me work it off on weekends. Julian didn’t invent the idea of making a person useful. I asked him. I needed a vehicle to take Ben to day care. We’ve got a receipt for every hour. Not everybody who made an arrangement with your uncle is going to want to see him get hurt.”
She wanted badly to say that she didn’t want him hurt either. Instead she asked, “Who does the van belong to now?”
“I’ve got the title.”
“Then why did you have your hands up against that truck this evening as though they were about to take something they still owned?”
He gazed at the entrance to the parking garage. “People can be made to feel a lot of things,” he said, “without anybody ever saying the words.”
Upstairs, Eli had fallen asleep with his head on Evelyn’s thigh. Her mother was watching a nature documentary with the subtitles on and the volume low. A tiny seabird kept diving into very rough water. The camera followed it under the surface where the current was unexpectedly gentle and the light came down like torn pieces of foil.
“Was Dad afraid?” Maya asked.
“Of what?”
“Dying.”
“Yes.” Evelyn turned the volume off entirely. “A person can be scared to go and ready to go at the same time. Most days it was changing the sheets and finding a pillow that didn’t make his neck hurt. The fear would come in like a neighbor who wanted to borrow some sugar. After a bit it would go away again.”
“Did he say anything about the hotel?”
“He asked me more than once if I’d locked the back door of the shop. We were in a room at the hospital, but I’d tell him I had, because he liked to know. The last thing he asked me was if I’d kept Mick’s old piano in tune. I said of course. We got on very well once we stopped demanding that we both be in the same place.”
Maya pulled the cover up over Eli’s bare foot. “There’s a woman and a child living in the shop.”
“Her name is Helen. Her daughter is called Ruth. I let them keep a key after she left Linden. Helen’s on nights at a distribution center and the girl stays with a friend while she works. Usually. It’s been a difficult month.”
“You could have told me.”
“Yes, I could have. You could have come for supper more than once since the funeral. There are probably a thousand things we both could have done.” Evelyn shifted the boy’s head onto the pillow. He made a noise like a very small motorboat and subsided. “It isn’t a competition, Maya.”
“Dad signed blank sheets and left them for other people to fill in.”
A long pause. “Did he?”
“Peter says he did. I have a bill from six weeks after he died with his signature on it.”
“Peter is a sweet man who can tell you which of his bosses is asking a question without looking up from his paper. I wouldn’t use him for a compass.”
“Did Dad sign those sheets?”
“Probably. Ask yourself what they looked like when he signed them.”
Maya thought of the form. Old paper, blue heading, the little star with four points. “You think they were already printed?”
“I used your father as a witness twice in forty years of business. Both times he took the top off my pen and drew a line through every space above his name. He grew up with a man who borrowed on his wharves before he owned a ship. Martin didn’t sign blank sheets.”
Maya got out the photograph of Marisol’s bill and made it bigger on her phone. There was a little white band above the signature, a break in the yellowed grain of the paper. It might have been nothing. It might have been a different piece of paper laid over a printed page before the result was copied and copied again. There were a number of things a person with enough time and the right kind of patience could make a signature say.