Chapter 97: The Consulting Fee
The page was a photocopy of a photocopy, and the toner had gone gray along the left edge.
I kept it flat on the table with a napkin under my cup, because the cup left rings and I did not want a ring on that page.
It was a household coding sheet for October 2025.
Roz Achebe had kept a carbon of every one of them for twenty-eight years.
Third drawer of the pantry desk, in a binder with a cracked spine, because that was how she had been taught to reconcile petty cash in 1998.
Most of the lines were what you would expect from a house on Astor Street.
Florist, nine hundred and twelve dollars. Piano tuning, two hundred. Window washing, eleven hundred and fifty. A refrigeration repair that cost more than my rent.
Then, eleven lines down, in the same typeface as everything above it:
MONTIGUE ADVISORY LLC — CONSULTING, HOUSEHOLD — 10/20/25 — 85,000.00 — REF 0001-448-2071 — 7420.
I had been looking at that line for nine days.
I can tell you what I did not know about it, which was almost everything.
I did not know what Montigue Advisory LLC was.
I did not know who had authorized it.
I did not know which account the money left, only that the code in the last column, 7420, was not one Roz recognized, and Roz recognized all of them.
I knew the date.
Twentieth of October, 2025.
Ana Reyes-Blackwood died on the ninth of December, 2025.
Serena Montigue moved into that house on the twentieth of February, 2026.
Fifty days before. Four months before.
That was the whole of it. A name, a number, a date.
I want to be honest about what that is worth, because for about three days I thought it was worth everything.
It is worth nothing.
A photocopy of a carbon of an internal coding sheet. No letterhead. No signature. No bank on it anywhere. Taken out of a drawer by a housekeeper who was not entitled to it.
Any lawyer in this city could have made it disappear in one sentence, and I already knew which sentence.
Where did you get it, Ms. Carter.
I took out the notebook — the green one, the fourth one since March — and I wrote a heading at the top of a clean page.
WHAT WOULD MAKE THIS REAL.
Then I wrote five lines under it, and I numbered them, because numbering things is what I do instead of panicking.
One. Proof the company exists. Who filed it. When. Who owns it.
Two. The invoice. Somebody billed for this. An invoice says what the money was for.
Three. The bank record. The account it left and the account it landed in, and the date both sides agree on.
Four. The tax filing. Eighty-five thousand dollars does not move in this country without leaving a form behind.
Five. Somebody who can ask for one, two, three and four and be answered.
I looked at line five for a long time.
Because that was the only one that mattered, and it was the only one that had nothing to do with paper.
I was twenty-six. Three years of nursing school and no license. Suspended from a job I had not been fired from, in a studio on Wolcott with a radiator that knocked.
Nobody in the world was obliged to answer a single question I asked.
That is the part people get wrong about this kind of thing. They think the hard part is finding it.
The hard part is that finding it does not do anything.
A woman two tables over was feeding a toddler bits of a doughnut, and he turned his head to the door every time it opened.
Ethan did that. Seventeen months old, and he did that.
I made myself stop watching and look back down at the page.
Under the five lines I wrote a sixth line, which was not a step, only a fact.
She was hired eighteen weeks before she moved in and I do not know what for.
I want to be accurate about the order of things, because the order is my only defense against sounding cleverer than I was.
In December of 2026 I did not think Constance Blackwood had bought a wife.
I thought she had paid somebody in the same autumn her daughter-in-law stopped being well, and that strange was all I had.
I folded the sheet along its old fold and slid it into the plastic sleeve in the inside pocket of my coat.
I asked for a refill. She charged me for a new cup and I paid it, because it was not a week for arguing about ninety cents.
Outside, the wind came up Ashland the way it does in December, straight and uninterested.
I stood at the corner with one hand on the sleeve.
Item one on the list, I thought.
Companies are not private.
Companies are the one thing in this entire country that a person like me is allowed to look at.
I walked the six blocks to the library on Lincoln instead of taking the bus, because the bus was two twenty-five and I had the time.