On May 1, I printed the FBI's indictment announcement and set it beside my lunch. The page described one count of wire fraud and alleged that Gordon had taken more than $53 million since 1990. I read the year again. The earlier public allegation had concerned more than $30 million since 2006; this reached much farther back. I could understand the difference between the figures without being able to take in either one.
A sandwich I had wrapped that morning lay unopened while I counted years I had worked in the office. That was not evidence of anything, but my mind kept doing it. I remembered requests postponed, conversations about money being tight, people going back to work after hearing no. The announcement did not tell me what each decision would have been without the alleged theft. I couldn't responsibly fill those spaces with whatever hurt most.
Otis found the printed announcement on my kitchen table two evenings later. "Are you reading it again?" he asked. I said I was trying to keep straight what had actually been charged. He pulled out a chair. "Then leave room for what you don't know," he said. "You always write clear to the edge." I moved my pencil away from the margin.
That Saturday, May 5, Beverly Sloane had several of us helping sort donated household things for neighbors who could use them. I had offered to test lamps and separate usable cords from damaged ones. It was work I could finish by looking at what was in my hands. Beverly stood beside me with a shade that would not sit straight and asked whether the figure in the news was really possible.
"That's what the indictment alleges," I said.
"I know that word matters. I'm asking because people keep saying you found it."
I set down the lamp before answering. Across the room, someone stopped folding a cloth. Beverly noticed and lowered her voice, but I asked her not to. If I answered privately, a shorter and more certain version might travel farther than anything I had actually said. I wanted the answer heard whole, even if it disappointed everyone.
"I found a statement for an account I didn't recognize while I was covering the work," I said. "I brought it to Della. She contacted law enforcement. I didn't trace fifty-three million dollars, and I didn't see everything described in that announcement."
A man holding a box of cups asked how nobody else could have known. It was a fair question to want answered. It was not one I could answer by naming the people I trusted or the people who had irritated me over the years. I told him that my not knowing did not prove what anyone else knew. He put the box down harder than necessary.
"Then you're saying everybody else did their job?" he asked.
"No. I can't establish that either."
For a moment, nobody moved. I could feel how unsatisfactory I sounded. People had brought a reasonable anger into the room, and I was offering distinctions instead of relief. Beverly turned the crooked shade in her hands. "What does your part prove, then?" she asked.
"That I encountered something I couldn't account for and reported it. The charge is a charge. I can't turn either of those things into a verdict on everybody who worked there." I wanted to add that I had tried to do my job honestly. Instead, I picked up the lamp and checked the fitting again. My character was not the question she had asked.
Beverly held the shade steady while I tightened the ring beneath it. "I don't need you to defend the whole office," she said. "I do need to know when you're telling me what you saw and when you're telling me what you read." We tested the lamp, then moved it to the usable table. Afterward, I wrote the announcement's date on my copy in larger figures. I would keep answering, but I would not let my small part become an explanation for the whole of it.