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“You come well recommended. This here’s my daughter.”
    Corella sat at the end of the bed, dressed in black, down to the socks and shoes, her hair short like a man’s. His other daughter, Cynthia, was the pretty one, but she wasn’t Lorene’s child. Cynthia lived with her mother far away—St. Louis, the last anybody heard.
    Corella would never move away. She was Daddy’s little princess, homely like him.
    Marguerite extended her hand. “Pleasure.”
    “Obliged,” Corella said.
    Pilgrim shooed both Robert and his daughter from the room. Robert went quick, Corella less so. Clingy , that was the word he wanted. But bitter. He waited for the door to close.
    “I got the feeling,” he said, “way your voice sounded over the phone—”
    “You were right, there are problems.” Marguerite removed a thin stack of papers from her briefcase, copies of documents she’d discovered at the County Recorder. “With the Excelsior property.”
    She explained what she’d found. Six months earlier, the IRS had filed tax liens for over $300,000 in back taxes against a Raymont Williams—who came with a generous assortment of aliases. Soon after that, Lorene, who worked at a local credit union, recorded the first of three powers-of-attorney, forging Pilgrim’s signature and getting a notary at the credit union to validate it. Then, acting as Pilgrim’s surrogate under the power-of-attorney, she took out a loan for $120,000, same amount as the oldest of the tax liens, securing it with the Excelsior property.
    But no release of lien was ever recorded. Apparently, when Lorene realized how easily she could phony up a loan, she got the fever. The IRS could wait for its money. Two more loans followed for increasingly shameless sums from hard-money lenders. The house was now leveraged to the hilt, the total indebtedness over $600,000, and that was just principal. Worse, though Lorene had made a token effort to cover her tracks, keep up with the payments, she’d already slipped into default.
    “Expects me to come to the rescue,” Pilgrim guessed.
    “It’s that or lose the house to foreclosure,” Marguerite said.
    “All that happen in just six months?” Pilgrim chided himself for not seeing it sooner. Hadn’t even known about this Raymont fool till recent. Why hadn’t Corella told him? She went to see her mother from time to time—not often, they didn’t get on, but often enough. Daddy’s homely, clingy, bitter little princess was playing both sides. But she’d pay. Everyone would pay.
    Marguerite said, “You’ve got a very strong case against the notary, pretty strong against the lenders, though the last two are a step above loan sharks. I don’t know what Lorene told them—”
    “Woman can charm a stump.”
    “But they’ll want their money. They’ll know they can’t go against Lorene or this Raymont individual for recovery. And they could say they had a right to rely on the notary and turn on her, but her pockets most likely aren’t that deep either. So they’ll come after you. And my guess is they won’t be nice about it.”
    “How you figure?”
    “It’ll suit their purposes to stick with Lorene and her story, at least for a while. She’ll say she had your full authority to do what she did and now you’re just reneging out of jealousy. It’s not an argument that’ll carry the day, not in the end, but the whole thing could get so drawn out and ugly they could grind you down, force a settlement that still leaves you holding a pretty sizable bag.”
    “Maybe I’ll just walk away from the house.”
    “If you’re okay with that, why not do it now? Save yourself my legal fees.”
    Pilgrim cackled. “You don’t want my money?”
    “Not as much as some other people do, apparently.”
    Pilgrim blinked his eyes. He could feel the water building up. “And this Raymont Williams, this phony preacher, he walks away clean.”
    “I call it the Deadbeat Write-off. Meanwhile, for you, this could all get very