“What? . . . No, not this time.” Elizabeth went to the door with Lucy, as conscious and careful of the checks in her hand as though she were holding a loaded gun. “I hope Steven’s better. Give him our best, will you?”
Constance was moving briskly about in the upper hall; from the children’s room came intermittent thumps and shouts of delight. She was safe, for a few minutes at least; she could examine the forgeries more closely.
Someone had been very careful over these. It had taken time and practice even to approximate the intricate loops and angles of Elizabeth’s handwriting. She went to the desk and got out a cancelled check, cashed in September, and compared it with the forgeries—and yes, the “Sarah E. Bennett” was particularly good, even to the scrambling backtrack with which the t’s were crossed. The writer had evidently been more nervous over Elizabeth’s signature; it had a cautious look. But, she found, it had improved. The first was palpably odd to anyone who knew her writing well; the third would easily have fooled, for instance, Oliver.
“Elizabeth?” said Constance inquiringly at the head of the stairs.
She put the checks back in the envelope and went up in a dream. Constance, dismayingly real and severe, confronted her at the linen closet. “Elizabeth, I do think something should be done about the laundry. Just look at this—they’ve sent you another sheet that doesn’t belong to you.”
She held out the offending linen, and Elizabeth gave it an uncaring glance. “Oh. Is it in reasonably good condition, do you suppose?”
“I haven’t looked,” said Constance affrontedly. “Here—just feel it for yourself. It’s obviously a Coarse Percale.”
Who else could have made an epithet out of that? wondered Elizabeth giddily. I don’t care what you say about him, he’s nothing but a Coarse Percale.’ Aloud she said guiltily, “I suppose I ought to speak to them. If you’d put it up on the top shelf—”
“—you’ll forget all about it,” finished Constance, smiling faintly. “If you don’t mind my doing it, I’ll just take care of it myself.”
Elizabeth must have replied to that, because in another instant she was in her own bedroom, the door closed, the perfidious sheet sponged out of her mind then and forever. She was aware, as she sat down on her bed, of the slow shocked pounding of her heart. She singled out the three checks again and turned them over. One hundred and five dollars—but still considerate of whoever had written them, because wasn’t she liable?
The endorsement on the backs was small and wooden, totally unlike Mrs. Bennett’s flourishing hand. No worry for the forger there, because Mrs. Bennett had cashed her checks locally and these had been cashed at Elizabeth’s bank. Nos. 351, 353, and 354. The attempt on No. 352 had apparently failed to measure up.
Not Mrs. Bennett—not even if she were still in the country and Elizabeth had surprised her with checks and tracing-paper and pen; not Mrs. Bennett whose final parting had been accomplished with an unashamed sniffle.
But someone who had access to Elizabeth’s personalized checks, kept in the desk in the living-room. Someone who had the opportunity to remove and study a cancelled check for the proper amount and the manner of writing Sarah Bennett’s name.
A woman, posing briefly and boldly as Sarah Bennett.
Mr. Delbow, assistant cashier, said briskly, “Now, if you’ll just sigh this stop-payment order—it’s required, you understand. Well send you affidavits in the course of a day or two, and if you’ll sign and return those . . .”
He was more than a little puzzled about Mrs. Oliver March, head bent as she wrote her name on a form at the comer of his desk, stone martens looped about the expensively-tailored shoulders of her suit. His reassurances that she hadn’t lost on the forged checks—“When we pay out money over a faulty signature the liability is ours, Mrs. March”—hadn’t brought the color back into the noticeably pale pointed face. And it was very hard to read the eyes behind the brief black veiling.
He had already exhausted the possibilities of Mrs. Bennett; he had summoned the teller who had handled the check cashed at this, the main branch. All three checks had been cashed within the course of two hours, the latter two at a branch in the West End. The tellers concerned had written Mrs. Bennett’s address on the backs of the checks; in no case had the identification presented been noted down, which was in itself a rule of the bank.
Mr. Delbow said as Elizabeth restored his pen, “This means, of course, Mrs. March, that whoever wrote these checks has some identification belonging to Mrs. Bennett. Otherwise the checks wouldn’t have been cashed at all.”
She merely nodded. The assistant cashier then explained that although the bank would attempt prosecution the chances of their finding the culprit were almost negligible, unless the forger should turn out to be an habitual offender. To his bewilderment, he could have sworn that Mrs. March looked relieved. He said, “I’ll have the amount credited to your account at once,” and she stood up, gathering her gloves and bag, giving him a sudden wry smile.
“The odd part of all this is that I’ve been banking here nearly four years, and when I try to cash a check your people stop just short of fingerprinting.”
“Always the way,” murmured Mr. Delbow musically, putting a guiding hand on her arm; “always the way, isn’t it?”
The interview at the bank had taken longer than she expected; Elizabeth, driving toward home, got caught in early commuter traffic and sat through a succession of red lights with an anxious eye on her watch. It was very important to get home before Oliver if her trip to Boston were to look purely casual—and she had been instantly determined that Oliver, to whom she would once have turned instinctively, should know nothing at all about the forgeries.
Because Oliver, mercilessly logical, would disregard personalities when he arrived at
