The second appointment was set for the first of December, a Tuesday, and this time Tolliver had a different clerk sitting beside him, a younger woman named Price who he said would be handling the intake paperwork since the file was moving toward transfer.
I brought three things in a plain folder: my corrected statement, a photostat of the October 1964 carbon, and a copy of Tess's note with my own written paragraph clipped beneath it, the one explaining plainly what the note did and did not say.
Price read through my statement first, and I watched her slow down at the section I'd labeled Direct Observation, where I'd written only what I had personally seen and done the night of September 14, nothing about what happened to the others once they cleared the wall I never got through.
Below that I had a second section, labeled Reported to Me by Investigators, covering the recovered strap, the hairbrush, the oilcloth, things I could describe only as they'd been shown to me, not as things I'd found myself. And a third, labeled Belief Without Evidence, which contained exactly one sentence: I do not know what became of them, and no document in my possession establishes that I do.
Tolliver looked up from his own copy and said, this is more careful than most statements we receive. I said, I spent seventeen years letting other people decide what my silence meant. I'd rather be specific now than easy to misread later.
Price slid a second form across the table, a short affidavit the bureau sometimes offered to next of kin or close witnesses, affirming a presumption of death so the file could be closed cleanly on paper. It would simplify the transfer, she said, not unkindly. A lot of families prefer the certainty, even if it's only administrative.
I read the form twice. It would have let me walk out of that office with something tidy, a sentence that ended the not-knowing on paper even though it couldn't end it anywhere else. I set it back down without signing it. I can't affirm something I don't actually know, I said. I'll sign what's true and leave the rest open.
Tolliver didn't push. He initialed the margin of my statement where I'd corrected the escape attempt language, stamped the photostat of the carbon, and clipped Tess's note copy with my explanatory paragraph behind my signed statement, in that order, so that nothing I hadn't written myself could be mistaken for part of my account.
He handed me back a receipt, a single carbon slip noting what had been submitted and the date, nothing more, no finding, no conclusion, no stamp declaring anyone alive or dead. I folded it once and put it in my coat pocket, the same pocket that had carried Tess's note folded small for seventeen years.
Is that it, I asked, and Price said that was it for my part, that the bureau would compile the file for transfer before year's end, and that my corrected account would travel with it exactly as submitted, labeled and bounded the way I'd written it.
Walking out past the bank lobby downstairs, I understood that I had not solved anything that morning, not found the three women, not learned whether the strap or the brush had traveled with someone living or only with the wreck of someone's leaving. I had only told the truth precisely enough that nobody could flatten it again without knowing exactly where they'd cut.
That was worth less than an answer and more than I expected, walking in that morning, it would turn out to be. I went home, hung my coat on its usual hook, and for the first time since the envelope arrived in early November, I slept the whole night through without once reaching for the shoebox under the blankets.