The Missing Page

The house on Comfrey Lane smelled like dust and her mother's lavender polish, and it was hers, free and clear, and it felt like a museum of a life she'd been evicted from.

Marta came over with wine and righteous fury. "Say the word and I'll key his car."

"He doesn't drive. He has a man."

"Then I'll key the man." Marta flopped onto the couch that had survived the collectors. "You know what the worst part is? You two were disgustingly close to real. I was at the wedding. I saw him look at you when you fixed that ring."

"He looked at me the way he looks at quarterly reports."

"Imogen." Marta was quiet a moment. "Nobody looks at quarterly reports like that."

On Saturday she took the bus to St. Anselm's cemetery and stood in front of a headstone so new the grass hadn't decided about it yet. WALTER ALOYSIUS CROWTHER, and underneath, because he'd been who he was: HE LET THEM WIN BADLY.

"I lost the house," she told him. "I mean, I kept the house. You'd think that was the point, right? That was the whole point."

The wind did its best.

"You should have seen his face when I left," she said. "He looked like the soup was beige."

She set a white knight at the base of the stone, one she'd lifted from the library set and would lie about forever, and took the bus home.

Forty-one floors up, in a penthouse that had gone back to being a hotel, Sebastian Crowther was not sleeping.

He told himself he was working. The stock had steadied. Vivienne had gone quiet, which in Vivienne meant loaded. At 2 a.m. he gave up and went to the library, because it was the only room that didn't smell like nothing, and sat down at Walter's chess set, and played out the almost-mate Imogen had left him like a map.

White wins in one. She'd had it. She'd had it the whole time.

He lifted the board to put it away and heard it: a tiny slide of paper against wood.

The lining of the box was loose. Old glue, or old secrets. His grandfather had survived a war and a hostile takeover; of course the man had false bottoms in his furniture. Inside lay a torn strip of paper, a clean professional edge, and a photograph gone soft at the corners.

The photograph: a hospital solarium, thirty years gone. A young nurse with Imogen's hands and a smile that was doing its best, and in the bed, propped on pillows, an elegant woman who had to be Margaret Crowther, laughing at something outside the frame.

The strip of paper was the end of the letter.

- paid the forty thousand myself, anonymously, because some debts aren't paid in money; they're paid in mercy, thirty years late. I didn't buy you a nurse, boy. I cleared a runway. Eileen's daughter asked for the cardiac ward on her own; I had a friend on the hospital board mention the opening. Everything after that, she earned.

I picked your wife for you. I did it the way I did everything, by cheating, and I'd do it again. She's the only thing in your life that isn't collateral.

Don't waste her the way I wasted Margaret's last years on phone calls.

Make the soup. Learn the names of her brother's sins. Lose a game to her on purpose, badly, and tell her it's from me.

W.

Sebastian sat in the dark library for a long time, the strip of paper in one hand and the photograph in the other.

Walter's effects had come through Vivienne's office. The torn page hadn't been lost. It had been filed, the way you file a weapon for later, and the investigator's report, the nine days, the deposit, all of it had been built from a truth cut in half.

He called Moss. It was 2:40 in the morning; Moss answered on the second ring, awake the way Moss was always awake.

"Chain of custody on my grandfather's personal effects," Sebastian said. "Every hand, every signature, from the hospital to this building. Tonight."

"Already pulled it," Moss said. "I've been waiting for you to ask."

"One more thing, sir." Moss did something he rarely did: he hesitated. "The investigators never found a sender for the cash deposit because there was no sender to find. The money was withdrawn from Mr. Walter's private account six weeks before he was admitted. By Mr. Walter. In person, sir. The branch manager remembered the car."

Sebastian closed his eyes. "He paid her debt in person."

"He paid her debt in person, and made the branch staff promise the anonymity. He was, the manager said, very amused about the whole thing."

Of course he had been. Walter Crowther, eighty-one, dying on schedule, driving himself across two hundred miles to hand a bank manager cash like a man dealing one last hand off the bottom of the deck.

The television in the study was still on mute from the evening numbers. Sebastian looked up at it and his own face looked back, under a chyron he hadn't heard arrive:

CROWTHER BOARD CALLS EMERGENCY SESSION - PRESS CONFERENCE FRIDAY - SOURCES: "MARRIAGE OVER."

And there, half a frame behind the anchor, leaving the Crowther building in a red coat, escorted by Vivienne's own car, was Bianca Lancaster.