“Why do you have my daughter’s clipping?” I said.
“I don’t,” said Mr. Amory. “She does. And I’d like to understand why she brought it today.”
We both looked at Wynne.
She was sitting very straight with both hands on the edge of the chair, and she looked, to my enormous surprise, entirely calm.
“I didn’t think it was inappropriate,” she said. “I thought it was a family.”
Chapter 4: Eleven Miles
It took the county clerk two days.
That is not the number that people remember when I tell this, and I have to tell it to everybody, because everybody asks. They want to know how long the system took to fix what it broke. They want to hear seven years or a decade. They are disappointed to learn that it took a woman named Constanza Ng, who runs the records desk at the county courthouse, forty-eight hours, once somebody gave her the right name and asked the right question.
Mr. Amory had asked it.
He took the logbook page to her himself, on the Wednesday morning, with a copy of the clipping and my signed authorization. He did not ask for a favor. He asked for one specific thing. Please check whether a Waverly Linwood, of 14 Pennock Street, is recorded as deceased.
