The printer's clerk stared after her as she left. "Miss Ellison," he called quietly, "I never said the forms were used for anything improper." She turned back. "I know. I am not asking you to accuse anyone. Only to remember what your hands actually printed." She had begun to understand how frightened ordinary people were of telling a truth that might cost them employment. She also understood that Harrow had depended upon that fear long before her father died.
At the bank, the chief cashier, Mr. Pritchard, listened with increasing discomfort. He had known Jonathan for two decades and had attended the funeral, but he would not let Clara see an account held under another person's name. She did not ask him to. Instead she placed the two sets of receipts side by side and requested that the bank preserve its original payment register until the trustees or a magistrate demanded an inspection. After a long silence he promised to do so. When she rose, he added, "Your father made that same request shortly before he became ill."
It was the first confirmation that Jonathan had discovered something while still alive. Mr. Pritchard remembered him standing in the very same office with his hat in his hand, asking why funds intended for widows had been transferred as commercial advances. The cashier had referred him to the trustees, whose chairman was Silas Harrow. Two days later Jonathan wrote the unsettled note now resting inside Clara's notebook. He had not been hiding his guilt. He had been trying to find a door that Harrow had already locked.
Harrow responded to her inquiries with an invitation printed on expensive cream paper. The annual Winter Relief Assembly would proceed as planned at his house, the letter said, in honor of Jonathan Ellison's original charitable intentions. Several benefactors were expected, along with creditors and trustees, and Harrow wished to present a proposal that would resolve the unfortunate shortage. Attendance would allow Miss Ellison to hear the settlement before a decision was announced. To outsiders the wording sounded generous; Clara recognized a summons to watch her father's reputation buried in public.
A second letter arrived from the creditor holding the mortgage on the Ellison house. The note had been transferred to a purchaser who intended to demand payment in full, and the family was given twenty-one days to settle the arrears. Samuel