I sat back in the leather chair, the leather creaking under my weight. The sum did not make sense in the context of the quiet old man who had asked me to adjust his pillows.
“Julian lived on tea and toast,” I said. “He wore the same wool coat for ten years.”
“He spent nothing on himself,” Arthur agreed, opening a drawer. “But he was a very wealthy man.”
Arthur pulled a heavy ledger from the bottom drawer and laid it between us. It was the same leather-bound book I had seen in the green backpack.
“Caleb has been trying to force his father into a conservatorship for eighteen months,” Arthur said. “He wants to clear the title so his development company can proceed.”
“What kind of development?” I asked.
Arthur opened the ledger. The pages were filled with Julian’s neat, slanted handwriting, listing fabric orders from decades ago, but the back pages contained pasted newspaper clippings and printed emails.
“A fifty-story luxury tower,” Arthur said, pointing to a diagram of a glass skyscraper. “It would cover the entire block.”
