Grant heard enough to intervene. He smiled, placed his hands in his coat pockets, and told Evan not to turn a holiday goodwill measure into a federal case. He said there was a store full of merchandise and that Evan should go buy his child a present instead of worrying over technicalities. Two supervisors laughed, and one clapped Evan lightly on the back as though they were all enjoying a joke together.
Evan looked down at the black ink stamped along the bottom of the certificate. It identified the lot as BM19-CORP, followed by a series of serial numbers. A serial number told him the paper had entered a controlled system somewhere, and controlled systems generated records. That thought steadied him more than any argument he could have won in the room.
"When did Blackridge purchase this lot?" he asked Preston.
"That isn't your concern."
"All right," Evan said. "I understand."
He asked for his leave, took his coat from the stairwell, and walked outside into air cold enough to make his lungs ache. In the car, he sat for ninety seconds with the unopened lunch Sophie had packed for him and the envelope on the passenger seat. He felt angry, but beneath the anger was something colder and more useful. There was a number on the paper. Numbers had origins, and Evan intended to find this one's.
Becket Home & Market had once been a fixture across southwestern Ohio. It sold cookware, towels, furniture, appliances, and the kind of practical household things people bought on Saturday mornings when they were trying to improve a life they expected to live in for a long time. Evan remembered his parents purchasing a dining table from its Union Road store when he was twelve. He remembered waiting in a parking lot while two employees struggled to fit the heavy box into an aging station wagon, and he remembered his father slipping them five dollars for helping.
By the time Evan arrived on Harmon Avenue, more than half the chain's stores had closed. The old corporate office occupied the upper floors of a brick building above a furniture outlet whose windows were covered with paper. A weathered sign still listed departments that no longer existed, and somebody had placed a potted plant beside the directory in an attempt to make the lobby look inhabited. Evan took the elevator to the third floor and followed a strip of light beneath a frosted-glass door.
Inside, a woman in a blue cardigan was packing accounting ledgers into banker boxes. She looked up with the patient resignation of someone who had answered too many questions about things the business could no longer provide. When Evan said he had several Becket certificates, she began explaining the company's expiration policy. He stopped her gently and said he wasn't asking to redeem them yet.
"I need to know when this lot was sold," he said, showing her the back of one certificate. "There's a code here. I assume it belongs to an issuance record."
She read it and frowned. "Most people ask whether we'll take the paper."
"That's a fair question too. I'm asking a different one."
The woman introduced herself as Ruth Mercer, the last full-time administrative employee at the location. She took the certificate into a back office and returned a moment later with Leonard Beckett. Leonard was sixty-two, square-shouldered and tired around the eyes, with rough hands that suggested he had spent more time unloading merchandise than signing contracts. He greeted Evan politely, but his expression said he expected another argument about an expired store credit.