THE ROOM UNDER HER NAME

She went back to the chair room. The grocery bag waited where she had left it. Under the complaint and the yellow slips lay an envelope containing an order for twelve hundred new sheets of stationery. On the back of the order, in her father’s handwriting, was a telephone number. Maya recognized the local exchange. A glass repair shop she used to pass on the walk home from school. That shop had closed the year she started college. Whoever had torn off this corner of paper had done it a very long time ago.

She took the papers to a desk lamp. On the guest bill, beneath the white band, her father’s signature ended in a long curve that turned up into the printed y in occupancy. In the insurer’s version, below a completely different paragraph, was the very same curve ending in a faint speck of blue. She took out receipts until she found it. A document dated 1996, signed by her father to guarantee the redemption of fifty-dollar vouchers in the event that operational control of the Calder passed to somebody else. The signature’s last curve crossed the word occupancy.

Somebody had taken the oldest promise in the building and copied the signature off it to make a bill.

The door moved. She expected Teddy. Instead Peter came in carrying a pair of reading glasses and two mugs of tea.

“I figured it would happen eventually,” he said. “I figured when it did I’d want to be the one to come down with the tea.”

Chapter 6 — The Price of a Chair

Peter pulled out one of the old chairs. It gave a squeak of protest and settled under his weight. The tea was stone cold. He had made it upstairs and spent a good long time deciding whether to come down.

“My daughter’s name is Jane,” he said. “She married a veterinarian who can’t stand cats. Funny household. She says people can choose which animals they treat but the public refuses to accept this.”

Maya waited.

“I have spent the last year going home to my wife and making up cheerful stories about the people I work with. A man paid six hundred dollars to fly his dog to a birthday party. A guest came downstairs in her slippers and thought the concierge was her husband. I haven’t been above moving the stories around in time a little, making Tuesday interesting at the expense of Friday. You start doing it with stories because the people you’re telling them to are tired, and they work hard and they deserve something better than a line about a broken toilet. Then somebody asks where you’ve been and what you signed and you find out you’ve learned to do it with other things as well.”

“Did you make that signature?”

“Yes. I did. The first time was for a perfectly decent reason.”

“You keep saying things like that as though one day I’ll forget to ask about the second time.”

He took a swallow of cold tea. “First use was in December, on the actual insurance claim. Martin was in the hospital. We needed to attest that the residents had been staying here. I used the signature he’d used on the voucher. I told him about it the next day and he said, all right, Pete, you saved me a trip. Two days later he came into the office. He was supposed to come in for an hour. He was there all day. At the end he said he would sign papers to let me do it in my own name if I ever needed to again.”

“Did he?”

“Yes. Limited authorization. Claims only. I put it in the file and forgot which file. He died three weeks later.”

“And the family invoices?”

“Julian wanted a statement of what the residents had incurred so the insurers would quit waiting for one another to agree on who had the primary responsibility. They had to see a real bill. That was his argument. They had to see a real guest and a real charge and then they could pay us and start a fight among themselves afterward. They were supposed to be sample invoices. I was supposed to stamp them for demonstration only. Only I didn’t.”

“Because?”

“Because Julian asked what good a sample would be against a real debt we were trying to collect. Because my daughter and her wife had just put an offer on a little house and I was going to help with the down payment. Because I’d been here thirty-two years and was too scared to find out what I’d be worth on the open market. Take your pick.”

“And you sent these to families who were already covered by vouchers.”

“I signed off on the batch. Claire did the mailing. The family was supposed to appeal. Then we would cancel the bill and we’d have a record of what the room actually cost the hotel. I didn’t understand Marisol would let anybody take four hundred dollars out of a joint bank account until she told me it had happened.”

“And when she told you?”

“I promised her an answer by Thursday.”

“Which Thursday?”

“About eight Thursdays ago.”

Maya once lost twelve thousand dollars on a construction job because she had failed to ask a question in the particular five minutes available before a truckful of concrete was poured. She had blamed the contractor and the driver and herself and, finally, the weather. The weather had been the weather generally on earth rather than the weather that day, which had been fine. Mistakes had very short lives until you fed them. Then they grew teeth.

“How much in all?”

“Collected from residents? Just over twenty-three thousand. Paid by insurers to Winter Quay? A hundred and twelve thousand, give or take. We ought to have had that straightaway. He used some of it to keep the repairs going at Linden and make interest payments. About seventy thousand is missing from the accounts I can find.”

She did the sums again. That was about half a payroll. Enough to change a future if you found it in time or ruin the remainder if you did not.