He had not yet received the examiners' preliminary letter when he said this. It arrived three days later, addressed to the board, as the department's practice required, and it was Ames, as lead independent director, who received it from the company's secretary — who had logged it, and copied it, and very nearly, in the secretary's phrase afterward, sat on it until the general counsel returned from a deposition, a near-decision the examiners' file would also record — and it was Ames who read it first, standing in his own front hall with his coat still on, because the envelope's return address had told him, before he opened it, that whatever it contained was the version of the story that would be read into records he did not control, by people who did not attend his board's dinners, under rules that did not include the option of looking down at an agenda.
The preliminary letter was twenty-three pages, and Ames read it in his hall, and then again at his kitchen table, and then a third time with a pencil, which was his way with any document that proposed to change the duties of his day. It was not a rhetorical performance. The department did not write rhetorical performances. It wrote findings, in numbered paragraphs, each finding a door that opened onto a room the company would now be required to enter. The trusts were underfunded in the amount the trustee's computation had stated, subject to the examiners' own adjustments, which were small and unfavorable. The recognition of pre-need receipts as current revenue was contrary to the statute and to the trust agreements, and had been so for years. The loans from the trustee bank against the trust corpus were impermissible, documented, and outstanding. The amended fulfillment schedule had been applied to guaranteed contracts without filing, without authority, and without notice to the contract holders, in more than two hundred instances in the Georgia book that the examiners had verified and in an additional number, stated as a range, that the examination had identified but not yet verified, a range whose upper end Ames read twice, because it converted his understanding of the schedule from a practice into a policy with a geography. The trustee's confirmation letters for eleven quarters had attested figures the trustee had not computed. The examinations of the trusts had been postponed three times at the company's request, and the department, in a sentence whose restraint cost its author visible effort even on the page, recorded its own share of that history without flinching from it. And the company's announced replacement financing, being a loan from the trustee of the trusts in question, was an impermissible conflict, which the department voided by its election under the statute, effective on the date of a separate letter already sent.
There was no rhetoric in it, and yet standing in his hall Ames had felt the peculiar weight of the thing, which was the weight of a story being taken out of the hands of the people who had been telling it. For fifteen years Fairhaven had narrated itself: stewardship, continuity, care, the founder at the podium, the trustee's letter in the appendix, the number in the company's green. The preliminary letter narrated it otherwise, in the passive voice of findings, and the two narrations could not occupy the same company. One of them was going to have to be withdrawn, publicly, in the company's own filings, and Ames understood, with the clarity of a man who has wound down banks, that his duty had narrowed to a single corridor: to make the withdrawal happen at the hands of the board before it happened at the hands of the state, because the difference between those two events was the difference between a company that might survive its own history and a receivership with two hundred and twelve funeral homes in it and sixty thousand Georgia families holding contracts against the rubble.
He called the executive session for the following Tuesday. He did not circulate the letter in advance, which violated every custom of the board's paperwork and was, he explained to the secretary, the entire intention: the directors would read it in the room, all of it, at the table, in sequence, the way the company's paper had never yet been read in sequence by the people charged with the company. Dunmore arrived last, with Danvers, and took his seat at the head of the table with the founder's ease, and if he registered that the room's air was different he gave, Ames noted, no sign of it; fifteen years of rooms had trained him to treat all air as his own weather.