June Harper came to Amelia's office on Thursday with my email printed on one sheet.
She had been Leah's editor. I had seen her on television after the body was found: a woman with cropped gray hair who spoke as if every extra word cost the dead something.
In person she wore a raincoat with a missing button and carried a canvas bag repaired with red thread. She did not shake my hand.
“I don't want an interview,” I said.
“Neither do I. Your lawyer said there was something I needed to know.”
We sat on opposite sides of Amelia's meeting table. June placed the email between us.
I think you have the wrong person.
There was no typo in it. Nothing I could correct.
“Leah asked whether she could speak to me about old transport records,” I said. “I knew what she was asking. I denied it.”
“Yes.”
I looked up.
“She didn't believe you,” June said. “She put that in her notes.”
“Then why didn't she contact me again?”
“Because you said no. Because she had other sources. Because a stranger being frightened wasn't permission to make her life worse until she talked.”
I had imagined Leah trying to get at me. Another determined person wanting what I had. It was easier than imagining someone who had decided to leave me alone.
June unbuttoned her coat. She looked at Amelia.
“What precisely are you asking?”
“Whether the message or the subject was shared outside your newsroom. My client was approached by Mr. Soto this week about old papers.”
“The message wasn't shared with him. Leah asked him about the program. He told her it wasn't his program. Same name, different organization, overseas work too long ago. He offered to help her distinguish the records.”
“Did she accept?”
“She accepted documents. She didn't accept his conclusions.”
June pulled a notebook from her bag. Not Leah's notebook. Her own.
“The current claims were supposed to be for new arrivals to this city. New housing, transport, case support. Leah found people billed twice, people billed after leaving. Then she found dates of birth that were wrong by twenty years.”
“Wrong how?” I asked.
“Children turned back into children. Someone who was eight on a list twenty years old was eight again. Names recycled with a new birth year. Not every name. Enough to make the invoices look full.”
I could see the old yellow paper on the investigators' table.
“Why would he use real old names?”
“Because they came in sets,” June said. “Families. Plausible relationships. Someone had already done the work of making them look like people.”
“They were people.”
“I know.”
She waited until I looked at her.
“I'm telling you what the fraud was taking advantage of. I'm not agreeing with it.”
Amelia asked what evidence remained.
“Our copies of the city responses, invoice samples, Leah's draft and her source correspondence. The police have what we provided through counsel. We're preserving the rest. I'm not handing over people who haven't consented just because a bad thing happened.”
“I wasn't asking for their names.”
“Somebody always gets around to it.”
June turned her notebook to a clean page but did not write.
“Your old paper. Does it say arrived or received?”
“Received.”
“Where?”
I named the destination. A transit yard outside a small town. We had not gone there; our boat was taken to a different landing. Three countries and many other rooms lay between that landing and Pennsylvania.
June looked at Amelia, then at me.
“Leah had someone who remembered signing one.”
“Somebody else?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“I can't give you that.”
“Are they alive?”
“They were when she interviewed them.”
I had come to this meeting prepared to carry my guilt in front of a woman who disliked me. I had not prepared for it to stop being mine alone.
“Did they know where the others went?”
June shook her head.
“Not enough. That's what Leah was trying to establish. You understand the difference between a receipt being false and knowing what happened to every person on it.”
“I understand.”
“Then please don't go on television saying they were all killed. Their families have enough people telling them things nobody's proved.”
She said it without raising her voice. I felt it all the way into my hands.
“I won't.”
Amelia said, “Mira has provided the original copy to investigators.”
June looked at me for a long time.
“Good,” she said.
Not thank you. Not finally. Good, about the act itself.
She put my email back in her bag.
“There was something else,” she said. “Leah made a mistake. One of her earlier stories had a number wrong. A big one. Soto's people keep showing it to anyone who'll look.”
I remembered Ellen's envelope.
“Was it corrected?”
“Yes. On the page, with a note saying what changed. Leah hated the note. I made her write it herself.”
For the first time June almost smiled.
“She argued with me for forty minutes. Not about correcting it. About whether we should call it an error or an overstatement. Then she went back and used the word error. That's the part they leave out when they show you the screenshot.”
After she left, I sat beside the window in Amelia's office. Across the street a man was replacing letters on the board outside a church. There were not enough of one letter. He took a line down and started again.
“You could still advise me not to make a statement about the old list,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Do you think I shouldn't?”
Amelia sat in the other chair.
“I think we need to know which questions you can answer and which you can't. I think you have potential exposure that I am not going to dismiss with a comforting sentence. I think your silence has consequences too.”
“That's a very expensive answer that doesn't tell me what to do.”
“Correct.”
She handed me a blank sheet.
“Make two columns. What you saw. What somebody told you. Don't make a third for what you'd like to believe.”
I took the pen.
For the first time since the jury room, nobody was waiting for me to finish.