Chapter 4
Story: The Chairwoman Grabbed a Six-Year-Old on Stage — Then the Locket Swung Into the Light
Margo didn't run. She had one job: hold the tote until her father finished playing. Nobody had told her what to do if her mother's locket was taken. So she did the only thing she could think of.
She reached into the tote bag.
Down in the orchestra pit on the right, her father had already half-risen from his cello, watching his daughter's back on the stage, one hand flat on the instrument so it wouldn't fall. He was forty-one, tired, in a rented tuxedo with a coffee stain on the left knee that he had spent nine minutes trying to rub out in the hotel bathroom. He knew what was in the tote. He had put the sheet of paper in there himself, that morning, before he could talk himself out of it.
He had not planned for anyone to see it.
Margo pulled the folded page out of the tote and held it up the way a much older person would hold up a document — straight-armed, at eye level, facing the room.
It was a single sheet of manuscript paper, handwritten, faded into that particular brown that comes from years in a drawer. Along the top: three staves of music in a small neat hand. Along the bottom: a date, eight years old. And on the bottom right, in blue ink, a signature, and six words in the margin.
The projection screen's inset panel had zoomed in automatically, because Trey in the booth was twenty-three years old and had the reflexes of someone who had watched this gala's slide deck for four years. He'd pushed the stage camera tighter without being asked. Now the whole ballroom — every table, front and back — could read what the child was holding.
The chairwoman had already begun to smile. This was excellent. A prop. Let her wave a prop. What could a piece of paper possibly prove, in a room where Celia Boyne-Ashford had signed the printed program that very afternoon.
"See?" Celia said, into the microphone. "Ladies and gentlemen — "
"Hollis." That was a new voice. A woman at table one — round glasses, gold name tag reading *Lila Fernandez, Development*. She had stood up. "Hollis, look at the screen."
At table one, Hollis Brand looked at the screen.
He saw what everyone saw: the small neat staves, the date, and the signature on the bottom right that was not Celia Boyne-Ashford's.
Hollis Brand had that signature tattooed somewhere in his chest, in the place where you keep the people you have buried.
He put his reading glasses on.
Then he began to walk up the aisle.
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