Beverly Sloane asked whether I wanted company going to Rockford on February 14. I had not told her I was going, only that I was considering it. She remembered the distinction when I pointed it out. "Then consider having company," she said. We arranged the ride without pretending that either of us knew what the day would give us. I put a notebook in my purse and left the office guide on its shelf.
The pavement was damp in places, and Beverly held her purse on her knees as I drove. She asked whether I expected to feel better afterward. I said I expected to know the sentence. That was the answer I trusted, though not the whole answer. Some part of me wanted a final event large enough to release all the smaller matters I had been carrying since the unfamiliar statement first reached my desk.
In Rockford, we joined people entering the federal court building. I remember the attention I gave to small instructions, where to stand and when to move, as though being a careful visitor were a useful contribution. Beverly kept close enough that I could see her coat when someone passed between us. We found seats. I placed the notebook on my lap but did not open it immediately.
I saw Gordon there, a familiar face in a setting where familiarity gave me no help. I had known the sound of his footsteps approaching an office door and the way he found a file without hesitation. Those memories did not tell me what he thought that morning. I kept my eyes on what was before me instead of trying to turn a lowered head or a movement of his hands into an explanation.
I did not make a transcript of the proceeding. When we came out, Beverly asked if I had written down the number. I showed her my nearly blank page and said I would check the published release before putting anything definite into my notes. I had wanted to be present, but presence did not make me a reliable keeper of every word spoken in a room that mattered to me.
The DOJ sentencing release dated February 14, 2013, supplied what I needed to record precisely: 235 months, nineteen years and seven months, imposed that day in Rockford. It described consideration of the financial loss and the damage to public confidence and government services. Those were the published grounds I could discuss without borrowing the authority of testimony I had not recorded or supplying words of my own to the judge.
On the return trip, Beverly asked me to say the number again. I did. She looked out through the side window. "That's a long sentence," she said. I agreed, and then said perhaps people could begin to feel something had been settled. The sentence was definite. I heard the hope in my own voice and wished I had left it at the number.
"Something has," she said. "Not everything." She shifted her purse off her knees. "If you wait years for something ordinary to be done, getting money later doesn't give you those years back. It doesn't go backward and make the waiting different." She did not name a particular missed service or claim to speak for everyone in Dixon. She was answering the comfort I had tried to take from the day.
I kept both hands on the wheel. "I suppose I wanted an ending I could recognize."
"You can recognize this one," she said. "It doesn't have to be all the others." We drove for a while without talking. Near home, she asked about Otis and the garage, and I told her the departure date. She repeated it once, as if giving that smaller date a place beside the larger one we had gone to hear.
The following day I read the recovery figures in the same release and began a separate page. Gross sales exceeding $12.38 million; nearly $9.5 million net in escrow as of February 14. I wrote the date beside both and did not add them. Gross sales and net funds were not separate recoveries, and escrow was not a declaration that every civic loss had been repaired. The page looked spare when I finished. I left room for later information, then closed the notebook and returned to the work of making it possible for someone else to sit at my desk.