The written statement arrived by email two days later, Monday morning, July 25, before I'd even finished my coffee, and I read it standing at the front desk with the archive still dark around me. Silas had kept it short. The suggestion in the promotional and final theatrical cuts of this film that Mara Ellery anticipated or staged her 1980 discovery of recovered ransom currency was not supported by the complete recorded interview and has been removed. I read it twice more, checking for the hedge words people like him usually leave themselves, the almost-apologies, the to the extent that. There weren't any. I printed it, dated it, and clipped it behind the full contextual transcript in the donor folder, where anyone could ask to see both, side by side, for as long as this archive existed to keep them.
How long that would be was its own smaller question, and I spent Tuesday afternoon answering it the only honest way I had left, which was with the hours board by the front door. I took down the sign that said open five days and put up one that said open Wednesday through Friday, afternoons only, and didn't dress it up as anything other than what it was. Nella Mercer had called that morning to check in, careful as always not to promise more than her agency could deliver, and when I told her about the reduced hours she didn't offer money she didn't have, which I'd come to respect about her. "The case file notation stays open," she said instead. "Specific physical evidence related to parachutes or ransom money, with a verifiable chain of custody, the Federal Air Crimes Office still wants to hear about it, and you can keep quoting that invitation without implying agency endorsement of the exhibit." I told her the invitation could stay on a final panel within the third table's Unresolved section as long as she wanted it there, and we left it that plainly, no theories traded, no case closed, just a door propped the width it had always been.
Lenora came by Thursday, the first slow afternoon of the new shorter week, and sat across from me at the reading table with her hands wrapped around a cup of tea she didn't drink. "I've been thinking," she said, "that there's more I remember than what I said Saturday. Not about him. About the four of us left on that plane, what we said to each other, what we didn't say, the kind of thing that never makes it into anybody's documentary because it isn't dramatic enough." She looked at me carefully, the way she had back in May when she was deciding whether to trust me with the first piece of it. "Would there be a place for that here, separate from all this." I told her yes, that I'd start a crew recollections file, hers first, recorded on her own terms with no theory attached and no deadline tied to anyone's premiere, something that could sit quietly in the archive and simply be true for as long as anyone wanted to read it. She nodded like that was exactly the size of thing she'd hoped I'd offer, nothing grander, and said she'd come back next week with a notebook.
I walked her to the door when she left, and stood a minute on the step after she'd gone, looking down the block toward the river that still didn't have anything new to tell anyone, forty-five years on, not about where he'd landed or whether he had, not about the rest of the money, not about who he really was under a ticket alias whose user had never been identified. I didn't have that answer. I'd never claimed to. What I had instead, finally, free and clear, was my own nine-year-old voice back in my own keeping, an unresolved card on a table that said exactly as much as it should, a smaller set of hours that were still mine to keep, and a woman down the street getting ready to tell the truth about a single frightened flight on her own schedule. It wasn't the ending I'd have chosen in May. It was the one I could live inside honestly, and that, I'd learned this summer, was worth more than I used to think.