The Ledger Of Us

Chapter 4: The Scrapbook

By noon, Josie had sold ninety-one croissants and could not remember a single customer's face.

She had never been good at pretending. Her mother could weep at a parking ticket and be laughing by the next block, but Josie's feelings lived behind her teeth, and today they were pressing hard. *Walter did not take it.* Four words in her father's careful hand. Four words she had read so many times that they'd stopped looking like language.

Take what? Take it from whom?

A wife by New Year's. That was the other thing she couldn't stop hearing, in a small, clear, eight-year-old voice. It sat in her head beside the notebook like two puzzle pieces from different boxes.

She hadn't answered the stranger. The phone sat face down beside the register, and every time it buzzed, her stomach dropped. Most of the time it was a supplier. Once it was her dentist.

"You've given me the wrong change twice," said the man at the counter, with great patience.

"Sorry." Josie counted again. "Sorry. Long night."

"Take your time, sweetheart. Everybody in here's waiting on you anyway."

It was true. The line since yesterday's clip had been constant: curious regulars, strangers with phones, a woman who tipped forty dollars on a four-dollar scone and whispered, Don't sell. Josie had smiled at all of them. She was beginning to feel like a landmark.

The bell chimed behind the man, and her sister walked in.

Dani Marlowe was twenty-two and moved through the world as though she had a notebook open in her skull. She was wearing her press lanyard from the campus paper and holding two iced coffees, which she set down on the counter with the air of a woman delivering evidence.

"You look like death," she said cheerfully.

"Good morning to you too."

"It's afternoon. And you're famous. Do you know I've had eleven classmates ask if I'm related to you?" Dani slid one coffee across. "Priya texted me how's Josie four times today. Priya doesn't text. She sends calendar invites."

"I'm fine."

"You're fine the way a building is fine right before they put the yellow tape on it." Dani leaned her elbows on the glass. "I watched the clip forty times. He looked at you like he'd seen a ghost. And then I read up on him. Thirty-six, never been photographed smiling, fired a vice president by email from the back of a car. Do you know how many articles I found with the word 'ruthless'?"

"Many, I assume."

"Forty-one." She tilted her head. "And according to the guy at the bodega, he came back this morning at five a.m. with a child. So what's going on?"

Josie opened her mouth to say nothing. She remembered Priya's warning, tell her something boring, and picked the most boring true thing she could find.

"He wants to buy the building. I said no. His niece likes baking. That's the whole story."

Dani studied her for a long, assessing moment. Then she shrugged and sipped her coffee. "Okay. But if the whole story changes, I want the exclusive."

"You're my sister. You'll get the eulogy."

"Dark." Dani grinned. "I like it."

She left a minute later, tossing a wave over her shoulder, and Josie let out a long breath. She loved Dani with her whole heart. She also knew with perfect certainty that Dani would sell her own mother's secrets for a byline, if she thought the story was good enough.

Don't tell Dani, Priya had said. Not yet.

Josie wiped the already clean counter, and thought about who else in this neighborhood remembered 1986.

Mrs. Abernathy came in at three, as she had every weekday since before Josie was born.

She was eighty-one, four-foot-eleven, and wore a different brooch every day. Today it was a small enamel dragonfly. She had a cane she mostly used to point at things, and she had lived on this block longer than the bakery had been open, and she knew who had married whom, who had cheated, and which of the old brownstones had a body under the garden. Nobody had ever confirmed the last one.

"Earl Grey and a plain scone, dear. And don't give me the burnt one, I know you keep it for the health inspector."

"That's a lie. I eat the burnt ones."

"You were always a martyr." Mrs. Abernathy took her usual corner table. "I saw you on my grandnephew's telephone. You were splendid. You were rude, and I've waited sixty years for someone to be rude to a Hale." She patted the seat across from her. "Sit with me for a minute. You look like you need to."

It was an invitation Josie had not expected, and she took it before she could talk herself out of it. She brought the tea and sat down with her hands wrapped around a mug she didn't want.

"Mrs. A. You said sixty years. You knew the Hales?"

The dragonfly brooch winked in the window light. "I knew of them. Everyone did. Charles Hale used to be in the papers every other week." A small, tight smile. "But I'd rather talk about Walter. Why do you ask?"

"I'm thinking of putting up a little history display. Photos, old recipes. For the shop's anniversary." It came out smoother than Josie expected. She had learned from the best liars, after all, though she had never thought of her mother that way before. "I thought you might have some pictures."

Mrs. Abernathy's whole face lit like a lamp. "Oh, my darling. I have boxes."

The scrapbook arrived the next morning, hand-delivered by a grandnephew in a bicycle helmet. It was the size of a paving stone, bound in green cloth gone soft at the corners, and it smelled of dust and lavender. A note was tucked inside the cover in spidery blue ink. For the display. Do be careful, the glue is older than you.

Josie took it to the back office after closing and laid it on the desk under the lamp.

She turned the pages slowly. Walter at the counter in a paper hat. Walter at a block party, a toddler on his shoulders, a young Roz with her face scrunched in laughter. Her grandmother in a kerchief, hair silvering, standing beside a cake that read Happy 25th, Marlowe's. Josie touched that one. Her grandmother had died when Josie was nine, and she had never quite forgiven herself for forgetting the sound of the woman's voice.

Then the photographs changed.

They changed slowly, so that she almost missed it. By the end of the book, Walter's smile had gone tight. In one picture he was standing outside the bakery with his arms crossed and a look on his face that Josie had seen on her father in the months before he died, the look of a man carrying something he was not allowed to put down.

The last three pages had been glued shut at the edges. She worked a butter knife carefully under the seam.

Tucked inside was a single photograph, and beside it, folded small, a torn scrap of newsprint. She unfolded the scrap first. It was brittle as a dead leaf, the edge ragged where someone had ripped it from a larger page. All that survived was the bottom of a headline and a fragment of a column.

...LYN BAKER QUESTIONED IN HALE CAPITAL...

...denied any knowledge of the missing...

Josie's breath left her.

Questioned. Not mourned. Not remembered. Her grandfather had been questioned. And nobody in her family, not her mother, not her father, not one of the photographs in the old frames on the wall, had ever said so.

She set the scrap down very carefully and picked up the photograph.

Black and white, creased, a little blurred. Walter stood beside a banquet table at some kind of charity dinner, in a rented-looking tuxedo, looking profoundly uncomfortable. On either side of him stood two men in expensive suits. They were both smiling the way people smile in front of cameras and nowhere else.

The older one had a heavy, handsome, pleased face. The younger one was thinner, sharper, with narrow eyes and a mouth that curled very slightly at one corner, as though he had just thought of a joke nobody else was invited to.

Josie knew that mouth.

She had looked it up at 2 a.m. that week, in the glare of her laptop, in a photograph of a silver-haired man at a hospital gala. She had seen the same slow smile on the face of a man she had never met, whose name Priya had said like an unpleasant diagnosis.

Victor Hale. Forty years younger, and already perfect.

She flipped the photograph over. On the back, in pencil, someone had written a date and, beneath it, two initials, pressed so lightly she had to tilt the page toward the lamp.

C.H. — V.H.

Charles Hale. Victor Hale.

H.H. in her father's notebook. Hale and Hale. Two men, two initials, and her grandfather standing between them with the face of a man who had just realized he was in the wrong room.

She took out her phone and photographed the picture, front and back, and the newsprint scrap, and her fingers were shaking so badly she made herself do it twice. Then she photographed three more pages of the scrapbook so it wouldn't look like she'd only cared about one, and she thought, absurdly, *Priya would be proud of my chain of custody.*

She was closing the cover when the phone buzzed in her hand.

Unknown number.

Good. Now you've seen his face.

Josie stared at the screen. A cold thread ran down her spine, slow, like water finding its level. The scrapbook had been in her hands for twenty minutes. Nobody had been in the room.

She typed with unsteady thumbs, deleted it, typed again.

Who are you?

The three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared.

Someone who'd like to see you win. Check your door.

She went out through the front, bracing for nothing.

The street was dark and wet with a recent drizzle. The streetlight buzzed its usual flickering orange. And on the glass of her bakery door, pressed flat with four neat strips of tape, hung a single sheet of crisp white paper.

NOTICE OF SCHEDULED STRUCTURAL INSPECTION.

Josie pulled it free and read it twice under the lamp.

Pursuant to the terms of the commercial lease and the Owner's right of reasonable entry, a building inspection of the premises will be conducted on Thursday at 9:00 a.m. by qualified engineers. Tenants are advised to ensure full access to all floors, utility rooms, and basement spaces.

Signed at the bottom with a flat, expensive flourish. Linden Row Holdings, LLC.

She read it a third time. Nate had told her at dawn, with a straight face, that he had an engineer drive past her building. He had offered to fix her pipes. He had said no strings.

Either he was a better liar than she had given him credit for.

Or someone else had signed his name.

Josie folded the notice carefully and put it in her pocket, next to the photograph. Across the street, a car sat idling at the curb with its lights off. She hadn't seen it arrive. It pulled away without hurry as she watched, taillights smearing red on the wet asphalt, and turned the corner.

She locked the door behind her, and then, for the first time in her life, she checked it twice.