The Letter in the Locker

Odáliz Reyes had run Adrian Voss's household and his labs for nineteen years, and she had the particular flat politeness of a person who has watched a great man rot and kept the job anyway. Later, standing in the door with the laundry bag still on her shoulder, she would say the only thing she ever said about it: that he had once paid for her brother's surgery, and that she had never found a way to stop owing him for it.

She came to Nora's office on a Thursday, in her coat, standing, and put a folded sheet of paper on the desk without sitting down.

"It was in his locker at the club," she said. "Tuesday. I go in on Tuesdays to collect the laundry. It had come apart at the fold so I read it. Then I put it back and then I took it out again and drove here."

The letter was four lines long, in ink, addressed to no one.

I have taken what I need and I am not giving it back. Do not write to me again. If you come to the door I will not open it and you will not like what happens next. You have four days, and then I keep the house.

"Sit down, Odáliz."

"I'd rather stand."

"Did you tell him you took it?"

"I told him I was going to a funeral." She looked at the wall. "I'm going to be at a funeral, Miss Bellamy. I just don't know whose."

Nora sent the letter to Casper Lund, a document examiner she had used twice and never socially, and got his call a day later. Lund was a small man with a large magnifying lamp and absolutely no interest in drama, which made him, in Nora's private opinion, the most reliable witness in the city.

"It's the same hand," he said.

Nora read the four lines again, and this time she read the words and the hand together. The letter was written by a man who had taken everything from another man. The handwriting was Adrian Voss's.

"You're sure."

"I'm sure it's the same hand, which is not the same as being sure it's the same person." He laid the two pages side by side under the lamp and stood back. "Look at the a. Look at the g." She looked. The slant ran downhill to the right, and the way the g finished without ever being lifted was the same in both. "Twenty-six years," he said, "and I have never seen a forgery do that. Somebody taught themself to write like somebody else and did not quite manage it." He began packing the lamp away. "I'll bill you."

Nora sat with the two pages under the lamp for a long time after he left. She kept thinking about the number on the stainless cabinet, changing while she watched. She kept thinking: a correction. She kept thinking: only one of us is having a good time.