Clara asked him to challenge the claim immediately. He pointed out that Harrow had already persuaded two trustees and several creditors that a sale was necessary, and that the bank holding the fund's deposits was refusing to release its internal books without a formal demand. A hearing could take months. In the meantime, the warehouse might close, the fund's remaining payments would be frozen, and the families dependent on it would suffer. Mr. Dunleavy was not indifferent, merely frightened of promising what the law could not yet deliver.
For the next ten days Clara walked Philadelphia in boots that leaked at the seams. She visited warehouses where her father had purchased timber, countinghouses where he had sold cargo space, and offices where clerks lowered their voices when she entered. Some men refused to speak to her, saying their employers forbade discussion of the fund. Others offered sympathy that required nothing of them. She learned how thoroughly Harrow had threaded his influence through the waterfront, and how easily a single accusation could turn a familiar city into hostile territory.
Her oldest friend, Miriam Bell, worked with her mother in a dressmaking shop on Chestnut Street. Miriam had fitted the crimson gown Clara wore to the last winter assembly before Jonathan died, and she knew more about the city's private lives than most newspaper editors. She also possessed a talent for remembering who said what when they believed a seamstress was too insignificant to hear. When Clara came to her with a handful of conflicting dates, Miriam spread the papers across a cutting table between bolts of muslin. "You keep trying to read what Harrow says happened," she observed. "Perhaps we should look at what he needed everyone to forget."
One withdrawal was dated the nineteenth of October. Jonathan had spent that entire day in bed with a fever, and Clara herself had been sitting beside him, reading aloud from a book he scarcely heard. Yet the signature had been entered as though he had appeared at the bank in person. That seemed promising until Mr. Dunleavy explained that authorized payments could be ordered by written instruction. Someone could have carried the paper on Jonathan's behalf. Clara's memory, however certain, did not prove the signature had been forged.
Then Miriam noticed that three separate withdrawal orders referred to exactly the same shipment of imported oak, using identical wording down to an error in the spelling of the vessel's name. The dates differed, the amounts differed, and the supposed recipients