By the first week of January the Christmas decorations had come down and the folder on our dining table had grown from a single envelope to a full accordion file. Nothing about it had arrived by magic. Celia Navarro had asked for more, in writing, the way she said she would, and on the fifth a second set of copies came through her office, sent voluntarily by the trustee's side. No one had been forced. Celia was careful to say that twice on the phone.
Mara spread the pages across the table that evening and handed me a stack of yellow tabs. 'I don't want to do this alone,' she said, 'but I don't want you reading it for ammunition either.' I told her I would sort what she told me to sort and keep my opinions in my pocket. She nodded and slid the first pile over.
We made categories, because the pages made no sense in the order they came. One pile was the vehicle: a title transfer and insurance payments for a truck Nolan drove. One was business expenses, rent on a warehouse and invoices from an event-rental company that I recognized only by its logo. One was property taxes on a house that, as far as the records showed, Nolan and his family lived in. The last was a transfer labeled as covering a failed investment, with a bank memo so short it told us almost nothing.
Those were in addition to the renovation summary and the $85,000 line we already had. I laid the old pages beside the new ones and felt something go quiet in my chest. In November, two items could have been exceptions, a bad year, a favor. Now the same direction showed up across several years. The money kept moving toward Nolan.
'Don't say it,' Mara said, not unkindly.
'I wasn't going to.'
'You were about to say pattern.' She tapped the table. 'Celia says a pile of amounts proves nothing by itself. The trust document might allow some of it. Some might be a real loan. Some might be a mistake in the books. Each one needs its own answer.'
'Then we write the questions that way,' I said.
So we did. Mara typed and I read lines aloud. For each item, a column for the date, the payee, the copy we had, and the copy we lacked. Was the truck a gift, an advance, or a trust expense? Was there a signed note for the warehouse rent? Who decided the property taxes belonged to the trust and not to the people living there? Did the failed-investment transfer ever get repaid, and if so, where was that recorded? Mara added one more on her own: whether the $85,000 loan had terms, because a loan with no paper behind it was a different thing from one with a schedule.
I caught myself wanting to add a column for what Grant knew. I said so, and she shook her head. 'We don't have that. A number doesn't tell us why somebody did something.' She deleted nothing, because I hadn't typed it. She just looked at me until I put the pen down.
Near ten she called Celia's voicemail and left a clean message listing the categories and the gaps. I would only hear Celia's answer the next morning, January 6, when she phoned back and Mara put her on speaker and I stayed in my chair at the end of the table. That is getting ahead of the evening, so I'll set it down here and go back. Celia thanked her for the index. She said she would read the documents against the instrument herself and would tell Mara what they supported and what they did not. Then she said, kindly, that my part was finished once the copies were organized. She wasn't hiring a husband to be her forensic accountant, and Mara didn't need one. I said that suited me fine.
Back on the evening of January 5, before any of that, we were still at the table. The last tab in the file was different. At the bottom of the second set, behind an index sheet, sat a plain envelope with the trustee's cover note clipped to it: one letter, copied from an older file, included with the supplemental records. The handwriting on the front of the copy was Amos Bellamy's. Mara went still when she saw it.
She did not open it. She read the cover note, then the index line that listed it, and set the envelope on the table between us. It had come in the same folder as the truck titles and the tax bills. Nobody had announced what it meant, and no one had said it changed a single line of the trust.
'Tomorrow morning,' she said. 'Not tonight.' She put it in the front of the accordion file and closed the flap, and I turned off the lamp over the table.