Wren was quiet for a moment. Otis could hear papers moving on her end of the line, the small sounds of a professional putting a case into order. Then she said the thing Otis had been hoping someone with authority would say, and she said it without drama, which made it land harder.
We can get the bank records, she said. "With Silas's consent, and with a letter from me, we can get the account-addition form and the withdrawal history. If the pattern is what you describe, the paper will speak for itself, and we will not need to rely on anyone's memory of a conversation. And we will do it through the bank and through the sheriff's office, not around them."
She also said something else, and Otis wrote it down on the back of his own note sheet, because it was the kind of sentence you want to keep exactly, the way you keep a torque specification exactly.
There is one rule for everything that follows, Wren said. "Quiet, lawful, and Silas's choice at every step. He is not a piece of evidence. He is the client. If he says stop, we stop. If he says go, we go. Nothing happens to him, or for him, without him."
Karen looked at Otis, and Otis looked at Karen, and both of them nodded, though Wren could not see them. It was the rule Otis had already been living by since Tuesday, though he had not put it into words. Quiet, because noise would send Paula running or tightening her grip, and a frightened keeper is more dangerous than a comfortable one. Lawful, because anything else would poison whatever came after, and a case built on a shortcut would collapse the first time a judge looked at it. And Silas's choice, because the whole harm of the last two years had been a man having his choices taken from him one small convenience at a time, and the remedy could not be another taking, even a kind one.
By the time the call ended, the light in the shop had gone amber through the front windows, and the three of them — Otis and Karen at the table, Wren's voice still in the room somehow, the way a good instruction stays in a room after it is given — had agreed on the shape of the next two days. Wren would write to the bank. Karen would stay close, but not go to the house yet, not until the papers were ready, because a daughter appearing on the porch too early would tell Paula everything. Otis would keep the shop open and keep his face plain, because Paula would be back for the scooter, and the last thing any of them needed was for Paula to see that something had changed.
Karen gathered her folder, thinner now that its contents had been copied and shared, and stood to leave, smoothing the folder's worn edge with her thumb as if to reassure herself it was still whole. At the door she turned back, and the light from outside caught her face, and Otis saw in it the same expression he had seen on Silas in the waiting area: relief, and fear, and the strange tiredness of a person who has finally stopped carrying something alone.
Thank you, she said, "for believing him before anyone else did."
Otis shook his head, because that was not quite right, and he wanted her to have the right version of it, the version she could carry home without guilt.
I didn't believe him before anyone else did, he said. "You believed him a year ago. You just didn't have anyone to believe him with."
Attorney Wren moved faster than Otis had expected, and he was grateful for it, because every day that passed with Paula in Silas's house was a day the pattern could deepen, and every day was also a day Silas spent wondering whether the man in the shop had meant what he said. By Thursday evening she had written to the bank with Silas's written consent — consent Karen had obtained from her father in a careful phone call that afternoon, in which Silas had said, plainly and without hesitation, that he wanted to know what had happened to his own money, and that he wanted it in writing, because a blind man knows the value of a thing being written down where other people can read it back to him. The bank, faced with a letter from an attorney and the account holder's own permission, produced the records without a fight. Banks, Otis reflected, are much braver about producing paper than about explaining it. Wren read them on Friday morning and called Otis and Karen together, and her voice on the phone had the flat quality of a person reading numbers that confirm the worst version of a story, the quality of a voice that has decided to let the numbers do the accusing.
The account-addition form was there, dated nearly two years earlier, adding Paula Krueger to Silas's checking account. The signature on it was Silas's, shaky but his own, and Wren did not pretend otherwise, because pretending otherwise would have weakened everything that came after. The harm had not begun with a forgery. It had begun with a convenience, offered gently, accepted by a grieving blind man who could not read the statements himself, a man who had just lost a wife of fifty-one years and who was grateful for any hand that offered to