The letters went out in batches, on the trust's letterhead, signed by the judge, with the arithmetic shown in full — *shown*, in columns, in the manner of a man who had computed them at a kitchen table and would have insisted that the members be permitted to check his work. That was Vera's condition too, added to the framework in her handwriting in the margin, which the trustees adopted as policy and Fred Ames did not dream of refusing: no letter would ask for gratitude, none would bear the bank's centennial branding, and every letter would state, in plain words near the top, *why*: that the conversion of 1998 had undervalued the members' ownership; that the bank's own records, and the records kept by its chief internal auditor, established the amount; that the member had been owed this money since before some of the letter's readers were born.
Not all of the answers were gentle. The trust's log — which the trustees, in the spirit of the new regime, published quarterly, entire — recorded the full weather of it: heirs who wept on the telephone; heirs who hung up, certain it was a fraud, and had to be persuaded by their own banks that the fraud ran the other way; one family that returned the check with a note saying the amount was correct but the twenty-seven years were not purchasable, which the judge read aloud at a staff meeting, standing, because she said some correspondence should be received on your feet. There were members still living who remembered. A woman of ninety-four, traced to a retirement community in Davenport, wrote back in a hand as upright as Emil's own that she had known the conversion number was wrong in 1998 — *I said so at the meeting. I was told the men had computed it. I am glad the men have been recomputed* — and asked that her share be divided between the two great-grandchildren whose college funds it now, belatedly, constituted.
The hard files were Nadia's specialty and, in time, her legend in the back room. There was the matter of *Kubiak, S.* — member number 2214, a balance of nine hundred and forty dollars in the summer of 1998, an address on the south side that had been a vacant lot since the year of the floods. The member was Stanley Kubiak, a pressman at the morning paper, dead these sixteen years, and the trail ran through a probate file under a misspelling, a church registry in a parish that had merged twice, and a daughter who had married in Omaha and divorced in Omaha and been, for nine years, findable under neither name. Nadia found her the way she found them all: by refusing to accept that the record had ended where the bank's patience would have. The daughter, Sylvia, fifty-one, a school administrator, drove down on a Saturday with the trust's letter folded in her purse and her father's passbook — the actual passbook, green cloth, kept in a drawer of things that could not be thrown away — and she stood in the lobby reading the wall until she found him, third panel, in Emil Stadler's order: *Kubiak, S.*, in letters the size of a name on a passbook cover.
"He used to say the bank was his," she told Nadia, at the tracing desk, with the passbook open between them like a third party to the conversation. "Not that he worked there. He printed newspapers. He said it the way men of his kind said it — *my bank* — and after the conversion he stopped saying it, and I was young and I thought it was the money. Fourteen thousand dollars he was owed, Ms. Kowalski, by your arithmetic, and I will tell you plainly that the money matters to my family and I am not too proud to be glad of it. But what he lost in 1998 wasn't fourteen thousand dollars. It was the sentence. He never said *my bank* again." She closed the passbook with care. "He died believing the institution had been sold out from under him by men whose names he never knew. The letter has the names in it. I read it to his stone. I am aware of how that sounds. I did it anyway, because he kept the book his whole life, in a drawer, and a man who keeps the book is a man who expects, eventually, to be answered."