It took eleven minutes from the picking up of the binder. Fenn, who had sat behind counsel with his hands folded and his face arranged in an expression of total professional neutrality that cost him visible effort, did not permit himself to look at Loretta until they were in the corridor, and even then what he said was only: "She read the exhibits."
"She read the exhibits," Loretta said, "because we sent her exhibits that could survive being read. It is the entire practice of this firm, Russell. It has never been anything else."
The wire services moved the judgment within the hour, in the flat language of court reporting, and the company's stock, which had recovered some of its October losses on the podium speech and the replacement financing, gave the recovery back by the close, and kept giving. But the judgment's true weight was not in the trading. It was in a building across town where the Georgia insurance department's examination team, three weeks into the review the department had rescheduled on its own motion, read the pleadings in the company's own lawsuit — read Fairhaven's counsel arguing, in a public filing, that a twenty-seven-point correction in the funding of a regulated funeral trust was a technicality of timing and recognition — and the lead examiner made a note in the margin of the scope memorandum, and the scope of the examination widened, the way a river widens, by the simple addition of everything downstream.
For the examination was no longer, by then, only about whether the number was seventy-one. Examinations are conducted by people whose profession is the asking of the next question, and the next questions, in the Fairhaven file, had been waiting in the folder for years, in date order, in the company's own hand: if the trust was short, where had the money gone, and who had signed for its going, and what had the families been told in the meantime, at the desks, at the time of need, when the contracts came due and the promises in them presented themselves for payment to the only people in the entire structure who had never been given a lawyer, a podium, or a choice.
The Booker Funeral Home stood on Main Street in Perry, Georgia, in a white house with a porte-cochere that Elias Booker's grandfather had built in 1938 with money borrowed against the building itself, in a transaction the family still described, three generations later, as the original act of nerve from which all subsequent ones descended. The grandfather had buried Confederate widows' sons. The father had buried the county through the polio years and the war years and had kept, in the drawer of the desk in the arrangement office, every pre-need contract he had ever written, each one in a folder, each folder labeled in his hand, because he held the view — which he expressed to his son exactly once, in the year before he died, in the tone of a man handing over a tool rather than an opinion — that a funeral home was not the building or the cars or the license on the wall, but the sum of the promises it had outstanding, and that a man who did not know, to the folder, what he had promised, did not know what he owned.
Elias Booker had inherited that view along with the desk. He was seventy-nine years old in the autumn of the Fairhaven collapse, though he had not set foot in the home as its owner for six years, and he retained, into his retirement, the funeral director's permanent slight stoop of attention, the posture of a man still listening for the telephone in the next room. He had run the home for forty-one years. He had buried the parents of people he had later buried, and then, in the fullness of the county's arithmetic, some of the people themselves. He knew the county's families the way a country doctor knows them, by their losses in sequence, and they knew him, and when the letter had come, in his seventy-third year, from the Fairhaven Memorial Group, expressing admiration for the Bookers' stewardship and proposing an acquisition on terms that would, the letter said, secure the home's future and honor its past, he had done what his father would have done, which was to invite the suitors to Perry and feed them and listen to them in the arrangement office, at the desk, with the drawer shut between them like a held card.