Grant brought the check to the Market Street office on a Friday in late June. He came in uniform, his new navy Hamilton County EMS trainee polo, and stood in the lobby looking enormous and nervous next to the old concrete core samples Mags kept on the windowsill like a row of strange pastries. Mags came out of her office, looked him up and down, and said, "You are the brother."
"Yes ma'am."
"Hm," Mags said, and went back into her office, and Grant looked at me like he'd been scanned by an airport machine.
The check was a cashier's check from First Horizon for seventy-one thousand three hundred dollars, made out to Josephine Idabelle Calder.
"I'm not taking that," I said.
"It's not mine," he said. "It was never mine. I'm just the guy who was holding it. Put it somewhere. Don't spend it if you don't want to. But I'm not keeping it, Jo, and I'm not giving it back to him, because he'll put it in Lakeshore Aluminum's pocket by Tuesday and it'll be gone, and then it'll really be gone."
We argued about it for twenty minutes in the parking lot of the aquarium, in the heat, while a school group in matching yellow T-shirts filed past us toward the penguins. In the end I took it. I opened a savings account at a credit union on Brainerd Road that afternoon, by myself, in my own name, and I put the check in it, and I didn't touch it. I just let it sit there, like a stone at the bottom of a creek, while the water went over it.
* * *
The call from Lorraine Beasley came on the Tuesday after Labor Day.
I was in the F-250 in a gravel turnout in Marion County, eating a pimento cheese sandwich and checking photos for a deck report, and my phone rang with a 423 number I didn't know, and I almost didn't answer.
"Is this Josephine Calder?" a woman said. Her voice was old and dry and precise, the voice of somebody who had spent a long time making other people say exactly what they meant. "Ida Pruitt's granddaughter?"
"Yes ma'am."
"My name is Lorraine Beasley. I was your grandmother's attorney, and before that, for about fifty years, I was her friend. I'm the trustee of the trust she established in her will." A pause. "Your mother came to see me last week. She asked me