Chapter 11: Box 1138

I stood in the alley with soot on my face and my grandfather's last home burning behind me, and what frightened me most was that I had no idea how long my visions would keep arriving in time.

"My lady, we have to move," Hollis said, his hand firm under my elbow. "The police will be here in minutes, and Moreau's men will be watching to see who walks out."

He guided me down the alley to the cross street, where his SUV was parked half a block away, untouched. Elias helped him settle Mr. Walton in the back seat, and I climbed in beside the old driver, still shaking. My ears were ringing, and every few seconds I caught myself staring at my own hands as if they belonged to someone else.

Elias's friend, Dr. Okoro, ran a small private clinic above a pharmacy on the other side of the city. He opened the back door himself at half past one in the morning, still wearing the green scrubs from the hospital, and took one look at the four of us before stepping aside without a word. "Put him on the table," he said, nodding toward Mr. Walton. "And you," he added to me, "sit down before you fall down."

"I'm fine."

"You're gray, and you smell like smoke." He pressed a cup of water into my hands. "Drink."

He worked on Mr. Walton for almost an hour, cleaning the wound, stitching it closed, and starting a drip. When he came out, he peeled off his gloves and looked at Elias with the expression of a man who had decided not to ask questions he wasn't going to like the answers to.

"He'll be all right. He needs rest and fluids, and he can stay here as long as he needs to." He glanced at me. "Elias told me the girl is in danger too. I don't know what's going on, Miss Halvorsen, but if you need a doctor who can keep quiet, you have one."

"Thank you," I said, and my voice cracked, because it was the second time that night a stranger had stood up for me when my own family wouldn't.

I didn't sleep. I sat in a plastic chair in the clinic's waiting room with my grandfather's coat around my shoulders, listening to the hum of the vending machine, and watched the sky turn from black to gray through the blinds. Hollis stood by the window the whole time. Near dawn, I finally spoke.

"The visions don't always come in time, do they?"

"I imagine not, my lady."

"What if the next one is too late?"

He was quiet for a moment. "Then we do what we did tonight. We stay one step ahead, and we trust each other. Mr. Walter never saw the future, and he still managed to protect you for eighteen years. You are not alone in this."

I leaned my head back against the wall and tried to believe him.

Marlow Trust and Savings occupied a gray stone building on a quiet street, with brass doors that hadn't changed in a century and a doorman in a long coat who looked at Hollis's soot-streaked jacket with polite horror. It was a minute past nine when we walked in. A white-haired woman in a navy suit rose from behind a mahogany desk, and her eyes went straight to the pendant at my throat.

"Miss Halvorsen," she said quietly. "I am Mrs. Aldous, the vault manager. Your grandfather told me that someday a girl would arrive with his jade and nothing else. I have waited eleven years."

She led us down a marble staircase to a vault of polished steel, where long walls of small brass doors gleamed under soft light. Box 1138 was near the bottom. I slid the little key into the lock, and it turned with a smooth click, as if it had been oiled for this exact moment.

Inside the box lay three things: a thick leather ledger bound in black, a small flash drive, and a sealed envelope with my name on the front in my grandfather's writing.

I picked up the envelope first. My hands were not quite steady. Elias took the ledger from the box and opened it on the narrow table, running a finger down the columns of figures with a lawyer's practiced eye. Hollis stayed near the door, watching the stairs.

"This is it," Elias said softly. "Every transfer, every account, every date. Your father's company has been moving Moreau's money for nearly seventeen years. It's all here, Miss Tessa. With this, we can destroy them both."

"Nell," I said. "We still have to think about Nell."

"We will. But first, you should see this." He turned the ledger toward me, his voice odd and careful. "The last few pages."

I stepped closer. The final entries were recent, from just the past few months, a long list of transfers authorized by two signatures at the bottom of each page. The first signature, bold and slanting, I recognized at once. Gregory Halvorsen.

The second was a neat, rounded hand I had seen on every letter I'd ever received from home, all three of them, sent in eighteen years. Each one signed with the same careful loops.

Miriam Halvorsen.

I stared at it until the letters swam. My mother's name sat beside my father's on every page, line after line after line, in ink that was no more than a few months old.

"She signed these," I whispered. "She knew."