I need more, Anna said at last. "Your bank records, to show no payment was ever made. The notary's log, to see whether he was ever where this paper says he was. Something with your real signature from around the same time β a check, a letter, anything β and I need to know where that signature could have been copied from. A forger needs a model, Mrs. Miller. They don't invent a signature. They trace one."
Ruth thought a moment, then said, "The church. I sign the attendance sheet every Sunday. Everyone does. It's kept in the back, on a clipboard, where anyone could look at it."
Anna wrote that down, pen moving faster. "Good. That's a start. And one more thing β did you ever give anyone a signed blank paper? A form? A permission slip? Anything with your name on it and nothing else?"
Ruth shook her head. "No. Never. Thomas taught me never to sign a blank paper. He said a signature was a promise, and you didn't make a promise to an empty page."
Anna smiled at that, briefly, and then her face grew serious again. She gathered the papers, tapped them straight on the desk, and looked at Ruth with the frankness Ruth had come to trust in her within a single morning.
Mrs. Miller, I will take your case. Legal aid exists for exactly this β for people with right on their side and no money to prove it. But understand what we are walking into. These papers look official: stamps, seals, a notary's name. A judge will not throw them out because we say so. We must prove, piece by piece, that they are false. And Crestline will fight us, because companies that forge one signature have usually forged the habit of getting away with it.
Bear started to speak, but Anna held up a hand, gently. "I tell you this not to frighten you, but because you deserve the truth before the fight, not during it. We can win this. I believe we can. But it will take time, and proof, and you telling your story, more than once, to people who will try to make you doubt it."
Ruth nodded, and folded her hands on her walker, and said, in the same steady voice she had used on her porch, "Then we will tell it as many times as it takes."
Anna looked down at the two signatures once more β the living one, quick and open, and the dead one, careful and closed β and frowned. Not in doubt, but the way a person frowns when they have seen something wrong done to someone good, and have decided, quietly and completely, to set it right.
The signature is wrong, she said. "And I am going to prove it."
Anna Reyes worked the way Ruth had learned, in a single morning, that good lawyers work: not with speeches, but with paper, patience, and a telephone that never rested. The day after Ruth's visit, she started with the bank, sending a formal request, on legal aid letterhead, for Ruth Miller's account records for the past two years, and then she waited, because banks move at the speed of banks, and the best way to hurry one was to be its most polite and persistent correspondent. While she waited, she went to the church.
The church was the small white building in the next town where Ruth had married Thomas and buried her husband and her son, and the pastor met Anna in the vestibule with the careful welcome of a man accustomed to strangers with difficult questions. Anna explained, plainly, that she represented Ruth Miller and needed to see the Sunday attendance sheets β not to pry, but because a signature on one of those sheets might be the key to a forgery. The pastor listened, then took her to a back room where the clipboards were kept, stacked by month, and together they found the sheets from the spring, when the sale papers were dated.
Anna laid the sheet beside the sale agreement on the pastor's table, and there it was, plain as a fingerprint: Ruth's signature, written in her own quick hand on a Sunday morning, the R looped high and open, the name trailing in the confident line Anna had studied in her office. Beside it, the signature on the sale papers β the same name, but not the same hand. The forger had copied the shape, but in copying it, they had frozen it. The R on the sale papers closed tight, the way a traced line closes when the pen follows a shape instead of making one. The tail of the M stopped dead where Ruth's swept up. Even the pressure was wrong: Ruth's pen had pressed lightly, the way a woman signs without thinking; the forged pen had pressed hard, the way a hand presses when afraid of a mistake.