She said it directly without asking him to feel anything about it. You're entitled to be angry. I'm not angry. He looked at the fire and then at her. I'm thinking about how to handle it.
She was quiet for a moment. Why aren't you angry? He thought about it honestly, the way she always asked things that deserved honest answers. "Because I believe you," he said. "And because you split wood in the cold, and you sat up three nights with my sick daughter and you haven't asked me for a single thing you couldn't eventually have given yourself. " People in trouble who are also decent people don't stop being decent people just because they're in trouble. " He paused.
"That's my experience anyway. " She looked at him for a long moment with an expression that was complicated in a way he didn't try to read. Then she looked at the fire. Thank you, she said. Don't thank me. Tell me everything about this man, Croft, so I know what I'm dealing with.
But she told him, Croft was 40 or so, according to what the attorney had gathered. A man who worked in the specific territory between a private detective and something less polite. Fletcher used him for things that required discretion and a tolerance for gray areas. He was methodical. He didn't make loud moves.
He tracked her from Philadelphia to Chicago to St. Louis to the agency's records in St. Louis and from there to the agency's placement files and from there to Harlo Creek, which had taken him 8 months and suggested both patients and resources. He won't come to the property directly. Viven said that's not how he works.
He'll gather information first, figure out what he's dealing with, then he'll decide whether to try to approach me or whether to go back to Fletcher and report the location and let Fletcher decide the next step. What would the next step be? Legal action, probably. Fletcher's lawyer filing documents in a Montana court claiming I've absconded with company property. She said it carefully.
The trunk, the documents, they'd call it theft. Could they make that stick? Not ultimately. My father's attorney would go to court with the original will in the correspondence and it would eventually come out right. But eventually is the problem.