Doris Klein had looked at signatures for thirty-eight years, and Herb Wozniak's didn't lean the way it used to.
She noticed it on a Tuesday morning in January, at Herb's kitchen table, over coffee. The checkbook was lying open by the sugar bowl, the way it always did, because Herb had never in his life put anything away.
Doris wasn't snooping. She'd only glanced down.
The check on top of the stack of stubs was made out to Crystal Vance. Four hundred dollars. Groceries, it said on the memo line.
The signature said Herbert J. Wozniak.
Doris looked at it a long time.
She'd been a teller at First Valley Bank in Harmon Falls, Pennsylvania, from 1968 until she retired in 2006. In those days, a teller looked at every check that crossed the counter.
You learned the regulars. You learned their handwriting the way you learned their faces.
Herb's signature she'd known for fifty years. He'd banked at First Valley since he came home from the Army in 1966 and went to work at the steel mill in Aliquippa. She'd cashed his paychecks every other Friday until the mill closed.
Herb signed his name fast. He always had.
A big loop on the H, the J squeezed in like an afterthought, and a W that ran downhill to the right as if it were in a hurry to get home. The end of his signature always trailed off thin, where the pen had lifted while it was still moving.
The signature on the check to Crystal Vance was very neat.
It had the big loop on the H. It had the downhill W. But the line was the same thickness all the way through, from the first letter to the last, and the end of it didn't trail off.
It stopped. Like the pen had been set down carefully on the paper and picked up carefully again.
Doris had seen signatures like that before. A few dozen times, in thirty-eight years.
Every one of them had been forged.
"Herb," she said, "who's Crystal?"
Herb brightened. He was eighty-one, a widower for six years, a big gentle man with hands like baseball mitts and a memory that had started, the last year or so, to come and go.
"Crystal? Oh, she's a godsend, Dorie. She helps me out. Comes three mornings a week. Does the shopping, the pills, the laundry. My daughter found her through the church bulletin. She's real good to me."
"Does she write your checks?"
"Well, she fills them out. My hands aren't so good on the small writing anymore." He held them up and looked at them. "I sign them, though."
"Every one?"
Herb frowned. Doris watched the frown come and go, and she didn't like it.
"I think so," he said. "Sure."
Crystal Vance came in at ten. She was somewhere in her forties, blond and quick and pleasant, with a big purse and a coffee from the gas station. She called Herb "sweetie" and kissed the top of his head.
She saw Doris at the table and smiled with her mouth.
"You must be Doris," she said. "Herb talks about you."
"Herb and I go back a ways," Doris said.
Crystal's eyes went to the checkbook by the sugar bowl, and stayed there for just a second too long. Then she picked it up, closed it, and put it in the drawer by the phone.
"He leaves this out," she said lightly. "I keep telling him, sweetie, somebody could steal you blind."
Doris drove straight to the bank.
First Valley had a new building now, out by the highway, with a drive-through and a coffee machine. The young teller at the window was named Brianna and looked about sixteen. Doris asked if Mr. Wozniak's checks had been clearing.
Brianna couldn't tell her anything about another customer's account, of course. Doris knew that. She'd have said the same thing herself.
But the branch manager came out of her office. Her name was Kelly Hruska, and Doris had trained her as a teller in 1998.
"Mrs. Klein," Kelly said warmly. "What brings you in?"
Doris told her. Quietly, at the end of the counter. Kelly listened.
"The signature on his checks matches his card," Kelly said carefully. "I can't say more than that. But it matches. Our system flags anything that doesn't."
"Your system looks at the shape," Doris said. "It doesn't look at how the pen moved."
Kelly hesitated. "Mrs. Klein, I can't freeze an account because a signature looks neat. You know that. Mr. Wozniak would have to ask us himself. Or his power of attorney."
"Who's his power of attorney?"
"His daughter. In Arizona."
Herb's daughter didn't call back that day, or the next.
On Thursday morning, Herb called Doris instead.
His voice was strange. Uncertain and a little hurt, the way a child's voice sounds when somebody's told him a thing he doesn't understand.
"Dorie," he said. "Crystal says you went to the bank about me. She says you've been saying things. She says maybe you oughtn't come by anymore. For a while. She says it upsets me."
Doris held the phone.
"Does it upset you, Herb?"
"I don't know," he said. "I don't know what I think."
She heard a voice in the background then, bright and close, saying something she couldn't make out. Herb said, "I've got to go, Dorie," and the line went dead.
At 11:20 that same morning, Kelly Hruska called her from the bank.
"I'm not supposed to call you," Kelly said, very low. "I'm calling anyway. There's a woman at the drive-through right now with a check from Mr. Wozniak's account. It's made out to cash. Nine thousand dollars."