"Do you?" Marsh was quiet for a moment. He looked at his notebook. Then he looked up. "Complaints filed with the county welfare office are technically confidential," he said.
"But I will tell you this." He paused. He was a man choosing his words with some care. I've conducted many assessments in my years in this position. I know the difference between a household that requires intervention and a household that someone wants to appear to require intervention.
He looked at Thomas. I'll be filing my report next week. I think you'll find it satisfactory. The kitchen was very quiet. Thank you, Thomas said.
Marsh stood. He looked around the kitchen, the order of it, the evidence of a house genuinely running, and he nodded once, the nod of a professional who has seen what he came to see. "Good day," he said, and left. The sound of his wagon diminishing down the road was the loudest thing in the kitchen for a full minute. Then Thomas said without turning around, "He knows it's Whitmore." "He didn't say that," Clare said.
"He didn't have to," Thomas said. He was right. He turned around. He's escalating, Thomas said. County welfare.
After the custody letter, he's escalating. Yes, Clare said. Which means Daryl's letter worried him, Thomas said. Which means we hit something real. After their trip to Milbrook, Darrow had sent a formal letter to Whitmore's bank, citing the Kettleworth correspondence to Harriet Mercer as potential evidence of bad faith in the bank's management of the Walker mortgage and requesting assurance that no acceleration clause would be invoked without legitimate cause.
It was a legal shot across the bow. Darl had been cautiously optimistic. Clare had been cautiously less so. She had been right to be cautious. He's going to come at us directly now, Clare said.
He's not building a case anymore. He's applying pressure. Thomas looked at her. What do we do? He said it was the same question he had asked weeks ago at the same table.
But it sounded different now. It sounded like the question of a man who was already getting up to fight asking his partner which direction to swing. We call his bluff, Clare said. We go public. Thomas blinked.
What? Whitmore's strategy depends on things looking inevitable, Clare said. Rumors in town, an anonymous letter to a grieving cousin, a welfare complaint filed quietly. All of it builds a picture that nobody can quite point at directly because none of it is public. She leaned forward.