The Notary

Harriet Voss lived two hours outside the city, in a small house with a wind chime that never stopped moving. She was seventy-eight, thin as paper, and she looked at us through a half-open door like she'd been expecting trouble for twenty-six years and it had finally arrived.

"I don't know anyone named Malhotra," she said, before I'd even finished introducing myself.

"Please," I said. "Just five minutes."

She hesitated, then opened the door wider, the wind chime clattering behind us.

Inside, her house was neat and small and smelled like lavender. She sat us down, arms crossed, and repeated, almost automatically, that she didn't remember, that it was a long time ago, that she notarized hundreds of documents in her career and couldn't be expected to remember one.

Then I put the photograph on her coffee table. My father and Gerald, young, laughing, in front of the folding table.

Something in her face changed.

She picked it up with both hands, and for a long moment she didn't say anything at all.

"He had kind eyes," she finally said. "Your father. I only met him the once."

"You do remember."

Harriet set the photo down carefully, like it might break. "There was a young man," she said, "who came to my office with a stack of papers already signed. He told me the other party had signed in front of a colleague and simply needed the notarization completed as a formality. I was new. I needed the work. I stamped what I was told to stamp." Her hands were trembling now. "I have wondered, for twenty-six years, whether I did something terrible."

"You did," I said, not unkindly. "But you can help fix it."

"Not here," she said suddenly, glancing past me toward the front window, toward the driveway. "If you want a sworn statement, I'll give you one. But not in this house. Someone from that company called me two years ago, out of nowhere, just to say hello, just to remind me they still had my number." She was already standing, ushering us toward the back door instead of the front. "Go now. Please."

Callum and I stepped out into the cold, the wind chime clanking wildly behind us, and I glanced back once at the street.

A car was parked at the curb three houses down, engine idling, headlights off.

I recognized the man behind the wheel. I'd seen him in the Larkspur hallway that very morning.

Douglas Kerrigan. General counsel.

He was watching us.