She paused. Without the notebook, I have one side of the comparison. It's still significant. Crane's purchasing records are the other side. If those records show a pattern of buying cheap iron fittings in the same periods where steel was specified on the repair orders, then the notebook becomes corroborating evidence rather than primary evidence, Garrett said.
Yes, Martha said. Garrett put down his pen and looked at her with the careful assessment of someone revising his estimate of what he was dealing with. Mrs. Whitaker, he said. How long have you been building this case?
4 months formally, she said. 2 years informally from the moment Henry came home with pneumonia from a winter run. And I started looking at why the run went wrong. Something moved in Silas's expression at her left side. She felt it without looking.
The run that killed him. Garrett said Henry died of pneumonia 3 weeks after the run. She said the pneumonia came from exposure. The exposure from a wagon that broke down on a mountain road in November and took 4 hours to repair in the cold. She held the lawyer's gaze steadily.
When I looked at the wagon afterward, the failure was in a fitting that should have been steel and wasn't. I thought at the time it was a purchasing error, a mistake, something that slipped through. She paused. It took me two years in a job with Crane's company, and what I found in those maintenance records to understand it wasn't a mistake. The office was very quiet.
Garrett picked up his pen again. I'll file for a formal review of the maintenance records, he said. That puts them under legal protection. And Crane can't them without risk of additional charges once the filing is in. He wrote as he spoke.
"I'll also file to recover your withheld wages, which is a separate and somewhat simpler matter," he looked up. "And I want Holt statement on paper." "Will he give it?" Sila said, "He's already halfway there," Garrett said. "A man who keeps a piece of evidence doesn't throw it away without a reason. He capped his pen. Give me 3 days.
Martha and Silas found a boarding house for the night, two separate rooms, which was the only arrangement that would have been proper, and which neither of them discussed because it didn't require discussion. Martha lay awake in her room and thought about Henry's notebook in Crane's possession, and felt the grief of it, alongside the anger of it, because the notebook was Henry's handwriting. Henry's careful printed letters and his particular habit of underlining specifications twice and having it in Crane's hands felt like a violation of something that should have been untouchable. She heard the floorboards in the hallway creek and then stop outside her door. A moment of silence.