And Leland Boyce. The order removed his bank from the trusteeship, which was within the department's gift, and referred the bank's conduct — the eleven quarters of attestation without computation, the loans against the corpus to the borrower the bank was trustee for — to the state banking regulator and to the prosecutors, which was the order's way of saying that the department's jurisdiction ended at a line and that beyond the line other offices would decide what the facts were for. A referral is not a charge, and a charge is not a verdict, and this story reports the referral as the record states it and reports no outcome, because no outcome is part of the record it has. Boyce's own account, given in his response to the department and repeated, with dignity, to the one reporter he agreed to see, was that he had relied on the schedules of a company audited by others, that his bank's practice had been the industry's practice, that his officers had performed diligently within the procedures as they had evolved, and that when a computation was finally demanded in terms that could not be harmonized, his bank had performed it, signed it, and sent it, knowing what it would do — which was true, and which stood in the record beside the other truth, that the computation had been available to his bank, at any hour of any day of fifteen years, for the asking of a single question his friendship had never permitted him to ask. He resigned the chairmanship of the Boyce Trust Company in the spring, in a letter that cited his years and his health, and the granite building on the downtown street kept its name, and the trust floor kept its hours, and the two trust officers who had built both sides of the fraction and divided were retained by the bank's new management and promoted, which the examiner who deposed them noted, in her own file, as the only entry in the entire affair that she had not had to correct.
Dunmore watched the order's entry from the house in Macon where he had gone to live after the resignation, a house near the funeral home where the company's map had begun. He gave no interview. He instructed no spokesman. The escrow of his shares was administered by an agent who sent him statements quarterly, as the order required statements to be sent to everyone whose money was in the story, and the statements showed the schedule being met, quarter by quarter, in the trustee's new computations — seventy-four, seventy-nine, eighty-three — the fraction climbing back toward the number on the other side of it, which was one hundred, and which had never, in fifteen years of filings, been the number at all. He did not attend the company's annual meeting. He did not write to the board. The founder's silence, which in his years of weather he had distributed so fluently to other men's moments, was now distributed to him, by events, in the only denomination events use, which is permanent.
The restitution was administered the way the damage had been done, which was one family at a time, at desks, and it took the better part of a year, because the order's auditors would not certify a name until the arrangement record had been read against the contract, and there were two hundred and fourteen names in Georgia, and behind every name a folder, and behind every folder a day on which a family had been doing the hardest arithmetic of its life and had been handed, in the middle of it, an additional sum.
The repayment letters were drafted by the department, not the company, which was the order's quiet judgment about whose prose the families would believe. Each letter identified the contract by its holder's name and its date. Each stated that an internal schedule, never filed with the department and never authorized to amend the contract, had been applied at the time of the funeral. Each stated the amount that had been charged under the schedule and the interest upon it at the statutory rate, and enclosed the sum in full, and closed with a sentence the department's lawyers had fought over for a week and finally kept for its plainness: the contract said no further sum would be asked of the family; a further sum was asked; the company was wrong; the money is returned. There was no request for a release. The order had specifically forbidden conditioning repayment on any signature, any acknowledgment, any document at all coming back the other way, because restitution that requires a signature, the lead examiner had said in the negotiation, in one of her rare departures from the passive voice, is not restitution but a purchase, and the department was not in the business of helping the company purchase its history.