Her Mother’s Grave

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“Are you sure this is your mother’s handwriting?” Noah asked.

Josie plopped into her chair, the first painful throbs of a headache starting behind her eyes. When Josie didn’t answer him, he said, “Do you have a sample? Something that has her handwriting on it so we could compare?”

“I don’t need a sample,” Josie said.

From the guest chair in front of Josie’s desk, Gretchen said, “Lieutenant Fraley, did you learn to forge your parents’ signatures when you were a teenager?”

He looked at her. “What? No. Why would I need to forge their signatures?”

Gretchen shook her head, a look of mock sadness turning the corners of her mouth downward. “Well,” she said gravely, “you must come from a long line of goody-goodies.”

In spite of herself, Josie laughed long and loud, grateful to Gretchen for easing the tension in the room. Josie felt the tight muscles in her shoulder blades loosen a fraction as she laughed.

Noah raised a brow. “What?”

Josie said, “You’re kidding, right? You can’t forge either one of your parents’ signatures?”

His gaze snapped from Gretchen to Josie. “No. What are you—”

Gretchen cut him off by standing and flipping her open notebook to face him. Josie stood so she could see the page too. On it, in two radically different types of handwriting, Gretchen had written: Agnes Palmer and Fred Palmer. “My grandparents’ signatures,” she offered. “I lived with them during high school. How do you think I successfully cut school seventeen days of my senior year?”

Noah shook his head, but a small smile played on his lips. “So you were an overachiever then, were you?”

Gretchen slapped his shoulder with her notebook but laughed just the same.

Josie took a piece of paper out of the printer on the corner of her desk and signed her mother’s name as she had known it: Belinda Rose.

Both Gretchen and Noah stared at it, wide-eyed. It was a near-perfect match to the handwriting on the postcard. “I started cutting school when I was twelve,” Josie explained. “Also, my mom wasn’t around much, and she didn’t care about school or doctor’s appointments or much else when it came to me, so learning to forge her signature came in pretty handy until she left. Then when I moved in with my grandmother, she caught me trying to learn her handwriting and grounded me for a week.”

The levity in the room leached away as Josie placed her forged signature next to the postcard. She didn’t look at her officers. The throbbing behind her eyes had become a full-on pounding, like a heartbeat. She choked out the words, “Looks like my mother just graduated from person of interest to prime suspect.”