He pulled a yellow legal pad from the middle desk drawer and a cheap ballpoint from his pocket. He clicked the point out and drew a dollar sign on the notepad, then a circle around it and a diagonal line through it. If this incorporation business was true, his plans might be in trouble. That Devonshire woman had had that tone of voice people use when they’d won one, but some people were pretty good at faking it. Was she pleased because she was right, or pleased because he’d lost his temper believing her lie? He drew another dollar sign, this one sprouting wings. Was she crazy? She’d acted nuts when Officer Cross brought that hurt cat into the place—but that lady cop and the schoolteacher had been all excited as well. What was that all about?

Okay, okay, he remembered seeing a cat belonging to Margot in the store, a big fat thing, sleeping in a chair. (He was drawing a cat’s head, with crosses for eyes, as he thought this.) He didn’t remember its name, but it had been white, like the hurt cat might have been under the dirt. So maybe it was Margot’s cat. So what? Betsy Devonshire hadn’t been in town long enough to get attached to it, had she? All three of those women went hustling it off to the animal doctor like it was a human emergency.

Check cat, he wrote on the pad, because he was a detail person, and it might be useful to know if it still lived.

But that wasn’t the real problem here. The real problem was, what if Betsy hadn’t been just making idle threats about the corporation? He unlocked his desk and got out a photocopy of the lease, almost illegible with scrawled notes. The original must have been drawn up by his brother from memory, to judge by the semilegal language of the thing. That was what the notes were about: they marked the chinks he’d found in it, hoping one would be the crowbar to pry Margot out of her place. None of them so far had proved strong enough, and now this sister claimed she had a chink of her own that meant she could stay if she wanted to.

“Assigned the lease,” that was the term she used, a legalism he was familiar with, being a landlord. It meant that the tenant turned the lease over to a new tenant. In every lease Mickels had ever signed, when assignment wasn’t flat forbidden, the landlord’s permission was needed for assignment. He glanced over the document, more to refresh his memory than to glean information, because he was already pretty sure the clause forbidding assignment was not in Margot’s lease. And it wasn’t.