Chapter 3

Dot called him back from the boathouse at two-fifteen, because there was one more thing she needed.

"Card says, 'Five lines - match lettering to enclosed,'" Dean told her. "There was a document in the file with the order. Envelope's still here. Paper isn't. Somebody picked it up in ninety-eight."

"What kind of document?"

"Didn't look. Wasn't mine."

Dot hung up and went up the hill to the porch, where Liza was standing with the trust binder and a phone against her ear.

"Cast," Dot said.

Liza finished her call and hung up.

"The fifth line is a casting," Dot said. "It came out of a mold made in 1998. You can't chisel a casting. You told the whole family I carved that name in with a chisel."

"I told the family you put it there." Liza set the binder down. "You found the rubbing. You found the pattern. You wrote the order. You had the ledger."

"Why would I want a fifth name?"

"Because a person who finds a missing heir is worth something to a family that wants to keep quiet." Liza smiled, and it wasn't unkind, which was worse. "You've got a boathouse and a pension and no house on the mainland, Dot. You'd have asked for a settlement. It's what people do."

Behind them the family was gathering for the two o'clock photograph on the lawn. Margaret in a straw hat. Toby holding his phone up for a selfie with the plaque. Paul doing nothing at all.

"I want the family to hear it," Dot said.

"They've heard it. I told them." Liza picked up the binder. "They believe me. That's the part you keep missing. Not because I'm the lawyer. Because you're the help."

Dot stood there a minute longer. She'd never hit anyone in her life.

Then Emmett came around the corner of the porch with a wet towel over his shoulder and stopped.

"Rose," he said.

Liza's head turned. "What did you say?"

"Nothing." Emmett looked at Dot, then at his aunt. "There was a woman named Rose. When I was a kid. She used to take me out to the float and bait the traps with me. She had a green bucket and she told me crabs can't count."

"You were nine," Liza said.

"I was nine."

"Children make up names."

Emmett held her eyes for a second, then didn't. He went back down toward the water.

Liza looked at Dot, and something moved behind her face that Dot had never seen there. Not anger. Recalculation.

"Go pack," she said.

At three-forty, Pruitt came out onto the porch with his laptop under his arm and asked Liza a question in a low voice, the way accountants do.

"I can't reconcile one line," he said. "The fifth distribution."

Liza's pen stopped.

"Every January since 2013," Pruitt said, "a fifth share goes out to an R.C. with no address on file. Not a reserve. Not an accrual. It's a wire."

"It's a code," Liza said.

"It's a wire," Pruitt said again, and went inside.