Chapter 15: The Reporter

"What kind of statement?" I asked.

"Sworn, through the Lathrops' lawyers. The editor wouldn't send it to me." Quentin put the phone away. "I'll call him. I'll tell him it's a lie."

"No, you won't," I said.

He stared at me.

"Every time you speak for me, somebody gets to say I can't speak for myself."

He shut his mouth.

The story went up online at six the next morning.

Lost Talcott Heiress Was "Raised for a Check," Sister Says.

There was a photo of Tinsley on her white sofa.

There was a photo of Mama's house, taken from the road, with the gutters hanging.

By seven, Liberty had read it.

By eight, the deacon's wife was on our porch in her bathrobe with her phone in her hand.

"A check?" she said. "Your mama drove a 1994 Buick with a coat hanger for an antenna."

"I know."

"She fostered six children in that house. She bought their shoes at the Dollar General and went without her own."

"I know."

"Well, somebody in Boston doesn't."

She went home and started calling people.

I sat at the kitchen table with my phone and Simon's card.

He picked up on the first ring.

"I want to call the reporter," I said. "Myself. I want her to come down here and look."

"Okay."

"You're not going to tell me it's a bad idea?"

"It's your story. Do you want her number, or do you want my office to set it up?"

"The number."

He read it to me. I wrote it on the back of an electric bill.

"Simon."

"Yes."

"Are you still at the motel with the empty pool?"

A pause.

"The ice machine works," he said. "I'm told that's rare."

The reporter came down on Monday.

She was about forty, in a parka too heavy for North Carolina, with a notebook she wrote in sideways.

She expected me alone in a kitchen.

The deacon's wife had other plans.

When I walked the reporter into the fellowship hall at Liberty First Baptist, there were sixty people in it and eleven covered dishes.

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