Silas turned his face slightly, the way he did when he was listening for something, though there was nothing to listen for except the ticking of the clock and the refrigerator's hum and the breathing of the people in the room. Then he said the last thing, and he said it simply, without raising his voice, without anger, as a statement of fact about his own life.
I was quiet. I'm not quiet anymore.
The silence after Silas's words lasted long enough for everyone in the room to understand that it was not empty. It was the kind of silence that follows a door being opened after a long time shut, air moving through a house again, and nobody wanted to be the first to stir it. Karen's hand stayed where it was on her father's arm. Otis stood near the doorway with his cap in his hands, the way he had stood when he first came in, only now he was not a visitor waiting to be told where to stand. He was a witness, and he knew it.
Deputy Hollis cleared his throat, quiet and respectful, and opened the folder he had carried in under his arm.
Mr. Whitmore, he said, "I'd like to read some of this into the record while we're all here, so there's no confusion about what happens next. Is that all right with you?"
Silas nodded. "Read it plain," he said. "I've had enough of things being read around me."
Attorney Wren took the bank pages from her own folder and laid them on the table in front of Silas, though he could not see them, and began in a voice as steady as a clerk reading a ledger. She read the date on the account-addition form, and the signature at the bottom of it, and the name that had been added to Silas Whitmore's checking account. She read the withdrawals in order, the way a story is told when you want someone to understand how it changed. At first they were small and easy to explain away: forty dollars here, sixty there, amounts that could have been groceries or a pharmacy run or gas for the car. Then they grew. Three hundred. Five hundred. Nine hundred dollars in a single week, in a month when Silas had not left the house except for the scooter repairs and one trip to the doctor that Paula herself had driven him to. Several of the withdrawal slips bore a signature that was not Silas's. Wren read the name on each one without emphasis, the way she might read any fact, and each time the name was Paula Krueger.
Paula, who had been standing near the kitchen counter with her arms folded, began to shake her head before Wren was halfway through.
That isn't how it was, she said. "He asked me to handle the money. He couldn't read the statements. Somebody had to do it. I was doing him a favor, and now you're all turning it around."
Miss Krueger, Hollis said, not raising his voice, "you'll have your chance to answer all of this. Right now, we're going to finish the record."
Wren went on. She read the mail log Karen had built over the previous two days, with help from the post office and from her own memory of what she had sent: birthday cards that never arrived, a letter from an old friend in Birmingham, a notice from the county about a property matter that Silas had never been told existed. Each item had a date it was sent and a blank space where a delivery to Silas's hands should have been. Paula said the mail must have been lost, that the rural route was unreliable, that Silas forgot things sometimes, that a blind old man couldn't be expected to remember every envelope. Her voice stayed pleasant, but it was thinning, the way a coat thins at the elbows when it has been worn too long, and underneath the pleasantness there was something sharp now, something that had not been there when she used to compliment Otis's shop.
Then Hollis read Delia Brooks's statement. He read it slowly, because Delia had written it in her own hand and asked that it be read exactly as she wrote it. She had seen Paula answer questions that were asked of Silas, answering before he could draw breath, more times than she could count. She had seen Paula take the mail from the box on days when Silas was sitting on his own porch, twenty feet away, and carry it into the house without a word. She had heard Paula tell a neighbor that Silas was "resting" on a Sunday afternoon when Delia knew, because she had been on the phone with Karen that same week, that Karen had been trying to reach him. Delia wrote that she was ashamed she had recommended Paula in the first place, and that she would say so to anyone who asked, because a recommendation was a kind of responsibility and she had not understood that until now.
Paula's pleasant voice broke open then, not into shouting, but into something faster and higher, a rush of explanations that tripped over each other. She had been underpaid. She had worked nights. She had kept the house clean and the meals cooked and nobody had thanked her. Silas had wanted her to have the money, he had told her so, he had said she was like family, and if a man said that, what was a woman supposed to do, refuse a gift? She looked at Silas as she said it, as if she expected him to rescue her the way he had once, by silence, let her version of things stand.