Chapter 6

Nadia Fenn came to the hotel at noon.

She spread the letter flat on the little table by the window, put on reading glasses, and looked at the envelope for ninety full seconds without saying a word.

"Where'd you get this?" she said.

"Rosalind. She brought it to the pier."

"Did she hand it to you directly?"

"She left it on the workbench."

Nadia picked up her phone and took nine photographs, close, at an angle, with a coin laid along the bottom edge of the envelope for scale.

"Look at the top right," she said.

I looked. There was no stamp. Instead there was a small printed rectangle, the pale kind of ink you get from a postal meter.

"Postage meters," Nadia said. "Every meter on the planet has a serial number. This one's printed right here. I'm going to have somebody run it."

She made a call. She said the number twice. She sat down and wrote nothing for a while.

Then she said, "That meter was issued to the Rourke Maritime Foundation in 2013."

The room got very still.

"Twenty-two years ago," I said.

"Twelve."

"So the letter isn't thirty-five years old."

"The letter," Nadia said, "is a prop. Somebody at the Foundation typed it, metered it, and kept it in a drawer until they needed it. And this morning was the first time in thirty-five years they've needed it."

I sat down on the bed. Sophie was watching cartoons with the volume down, curled in the far corner with her feet tucked under her, pretending not to listen and listening to everything.

"Then she lied to my face," I said.

"She lied to your face," Nadia said, "which means she's frightened, which means she thinks there's something left to find."

Augustin arrived at two. He came in without knocking, sat down in the chair by the window, and looked at the letter for a long time with his hands folded over his stomach. He didn't say anything about his sister. Not one word. He just asked Nadia to keep going and then he sat there like a man waiting for a doctor.

Nadia had a laptop and a Foundation password that was three years old and still worked, which she said, flatly, was the single most damning fact she had found all day.

The Foundation's annual reports were public. Nadia pulled up the financials going back to the year after Celia disappeared and started scanning line items.

At eleven-forty that night she found it.

"Consulting services," she said. "Bayline Security Group. Sixty thousand dollars the first year, escalating to three hundred and forty thousand by last year."

"How long?"

"Every year," Nadia said. "Since 1990. Thirty-three consecutive years."

Augustin leaned forward and looked at the screen.

"Bayline," he said slowly. "That's the company that does the pier's security. That's Preston Hale's company."

"That's the company Preston Hale co-owns with a man named Dale Bayley," Nadia said. "And look at who authorized the payments. Every year. Same signature on every authorization line."

She turned the laptop around.

R. Rourke Ainsley.

I stood there and looked at my mother's name on a forger's letter and Rosalind's name on thirty-three years of payments to the man who had accused me of theft that afternoon, and I finally understood why Preston Hale had bought a carousel he didn't care about, and why he'd hired me nine years ago off a recommendation from a woman who lived in a trailer outside Bakersfield, and why he had circled today's date on his calendar in red.

I wasn't his employee.

I was his job.