Silas had set up a second monitor in the back office of the archive this time, no audience of volunteers, just the two of us at the worktable where I usually catalogued donations, and he ran the full ninety-minute cut without a pause, watching me more than the screen. The structure was better than the trailer had suggested, more patient, built mostly from Lenora Pike's old recorded statements and county reporting from 1971, and for almost an hour I found myself grudgingly impressed by the craft of it. Then it reached the section about me, and craft turned into something else.
My own voice, nine years old, came tinny through an old tape recorder, saying you'd wrap it up so it looked like nothing, maybe bury part of it and keep part of it close, so if someone found one part they wouldn't look for the rest. Then the narrator intoned: some who were close to the case have speculated the money's unusual condition suggests deliberate concealment, consistent with later recollections. I sat up straighter. I recognized my voice from the county interview, but couldn't place the question. In the film, it landed directly after a shot of my father's name in an old property record for land near the riverbank, as if the sentence had been an answer to a question about inherited knowledge rather than a question whose wording I couldn't yet recover.
"That's edited," I said. "That's not what I was answering. You cut the reporter's question out entirely."
"I used your actual words," Silas said. "I didn't put anything in your mouth."
"You put it next to something that wasn't there when I said it." My throat was tight. "That's the same thing as writing new words, Silas, you just made me do the writing for you."
He didn't argue the point directly, which told me he knew I was right more than any argument would have. Instead he reached for a different kind of leverage. "I can give you a sit-down interview," he said, "shot properly, lit properly, where you get to say all of that in your own voice, present tense, the archive coordinator setting the record straight. It's a better role than the one you're fighting. People like a woman who corrects her own myth." He paused. "But it has to include an endorsement of the broader theory. That there's a real possibility he survived, landed near here, and that the money you found is the strongest piece of that we have."
"I'm not going to say something I don't believe just because the alternative is being misquoted." I said it, and meant it, and watched his face do the calculation again, the one where my cooperation and his funding promise sat on the same scale.
That was when, scrolling back through the film's footnoted source material displayed on his laptop screen, I saw the thumbnail: a cassette tape, labeled in handwriting I recognized as my own from a decade ago, logged as ALDER REACH ARCHIVE, ACC. #114, LOANED TO S. TRENT, SIGNED OUT JUNE 30, 2016. It was the full interview tape from that same county reporter in 1980, the one I'd donated years back and had completely forgotten was even in Silas's possession, not just an excerpt but the whole unedited recording, question and answer both.
"That's my donation," I said. "The full interview. Where is it right now?"
Silas's easy expression flickered, just slightly, the first real crack I'd seen in him. "In my equipment case. I'll have someone return it once we lock the edit."
"I want it back before that," I said, "and if you don't endorse what I actually said on it, I don't endorse your film, and I understand that means the archive loses the grant." Saying it out loud made it real in a way the arithmetic alone hadn't. "I'd rather lose the money than lose the only honest recording of what actually happened to me."