Serena's POV
The Camden Savings and Loan opens its vault at nine on Saturday morning for the first time in its hundred-and-forty-year history to a woman in a hospital wristband.
I'm still wearing it. Pen Bay Medical Center wanted to keep me another day. I told them politely that I'd been kept three years, and signed myself out at six.
Dominic walks beside me, with his arm round my waist, taking half my weight without seeming to. Torres is on my other side in her black wool coat with a sheet of paper in her hand. Behind us, Marcus, Caleb, and a quiet young bank manager with a bunch of keys and the stunned expression of a man whose Saturday has gone off the rails.
"Box one-one-four," he says. "It's, ah, it's been rented in the name of E. A. Vance since 2019. We've, ah, never had a warrant before."
"It's all right," says Torres kindly.
"I've only ever dealt with, with dentists."
The vault is cool and silent, lined with small steel doors. The manager turns his key. Torres turns hers. A long grey drawer slides out.
Inside is a single object.
It's a notebook.
A small, flat, dark-blue notebook, the sort you'd buy in a stationer's, with a cloth spine and a ribbon marker, soft with years. The corners are rubbed. The cover has a ring-mark, where a cup once stood.
I know it.
I know it before I touch it. I'd know it in the dark. It sat on the corner of a kitchen table in Camden, for the whole of my childhood, beside a pot of ink and a pair of reading glasses.
"Dad's," I whisper.
"Serena."
"It's his." I pick it up. My hands are shaking. "He kept the real accounts in it. He wouldn't let anyone touch it. He said a man should always keep two sets."
"Open it," says Dominic gently.
I do.
The first page is dated. March 3rd. The writing is small and upright and clear, in black ink, in the hand I saw on fourteen forged pages. The real one. Column on column, in careful figures, with notes in the margin. Query. Query. Who signed? Ask C.
I turn the pages.
The summer. The slow heartbreak of a man finding out, line by line, that a friend is a thief.
Aug 12. Spoke to A. He wept. Says he'll put it right. I believe him. God help me, I believe him.
I can't breathe.
Aug 19. Charles says he'll go to SEC with me if I give him till Friday. I said yes.
Aug 26. Friday came and went. C. didn't ring.
Sept 1. Am going to Rockland tomorrow to meet A. at the pier. He wants to talk. I have brought the book.
Nothing else.
The last written line is the fourth of September, in a firm, slightly slanting hand. Below it, the lines are blank, down and down, a whole page of white.
I turn it.
Torres draws a quiet breath.
There's something on the inside of the back cover. A single sheet of paper, folded in four, tucked under a flap and held there with a dab of glue. The paper's thin and cream-coloured. I know it. It's the writing paper from the study at Camden, with the faint crest at the top.
On the outside, in blue ink, in the old stooped hand, are two words.
For Birdie.
My knees go.
Dominic catches me.
I don't fall. He lowers me, quietly, onto the little steel stool beside the box, with his arms round my shoulders and his cheek against my hair, and I sit there with the folded page in my hands, and I can't open it.
"Take your time," says Torres.
She's turned her back.
She's standing in the doorway of the vault with her hands in her pockets, looking at the door. Marcus has gone out. Caleb is looking at the floor.
I unfold it.
My dear Birdie,
I'm writing this on the train. Don't ask me why. I think it's a habit, writing things down when I'm frightened. You always laughed at me for it.
I'm going to see an old friend this evening. I think I know what he'll say. I think he'll weep, and I think I'll want to forgive him, and I think that, because I'm a soft old fool, I very likely shall.
But I wanted you to know, in case I'm not as soft as I think.
I did it for the pensioners. Four thousand men and women who worked all their lives on the docks and put a little by, week by week, because they trusted a man to look after it. I couldn't look them in the face. I couldn't have gone on being the sort of father you'd have been proud of.
And I wanted to be that.
I've never said so. I'm not a man for saying. But you have been the best thing I ever did. When you were four you drew me a picture of a bird on a dock, and it was the worst bird I ever saw, and I kept it in my wallet for twenty years.
If it goes badly, don't be angry. Not for long. Anger is a heavy thing to carry, and you've got a lovely light heart, and I'd like you to keep it.
Look after Tessie. She's softer than she looks.
And whatever the water does,
Your loving Dad.
I read it twice.
I read it a third time.
The words go in like warm water, gently, through a crack. I don't cry at first. I just sit very still, with the page on my knee and my husband's arms round me, and I feel something I've carried so long I'd forgotten it was a weight begin, slowly, to lift.
Then the tears come.
They come without sound. They run down my face and drop onto the paper, and one of them blurs a line, and I wipe it with my thumb, carefully, as I would a painting.
"Birdie," says Dominic softly.
"He kept it twenty years."
"What?"
"The bird. In his wallet." I laugh, wetly. "It was awful. It looked like a potato with a beak."
He laughs too.
His chest shakes against my back. His lips are in my hair.
"Is it there?" he says.
"What?"
"In his wallet. In the evidence file."
I stop.
I look up at Torres, at her stiff back in the doorway.
"Dana?"
She turns.
Her eyes are wet. She takes them off, quickly, and polishes her glasses on the end of her scarf.
"I read the inventory," she says in a gruff voice. "Of the effects. Taken from the body twelve years ago. Wallet. Keys. One pocketwatch. A pen." She clears her throat. "And a child's drawing. Of a bird. In wax crayon."
I put my hand over my mouth.
"It's in a box in the evidence room in Rockland," says Torres. "It's been there for twelve years."
"I want it."
"You'll have it."
"I want it today."
"I'll drive you myself."
I smile at her, through my tears.
"Thank you," I say.
"Don't mention it."
"I mean it."
"I know." She puts her glasses back on. "Mrs Hale, I've prosecuted a lot of people. I don't think I've ever liked a witness so much."
"I'm not a witness."
"No?"
"I'm a daughter."
"Yes," says Dana Torres, gently. "I know."
She turns to the door.
And then her phone rings.
She looks at it. Her face changes. She answers, listens for ten seconds, and says, "When?"
A pause.
"Understood."
She hangs up.
"What is it?" says Dominic.
"That was the Knox County jail." Torres is looking at me, with a strange expression I can't read. "Augustus Brandt's refusing to speak to his lawyer. He's refusing food. He's refusing medical treatment for his hands."
"So?"
"He's asked for one visitor."
My stomach turns.
"Who?"
"You." She puts away the phone. "He says he'll tell you everything. On one condition. That Dominic's in the room."