Chapter 6
The letter came to the clinic, which was the first clever thing about it.
Not the apartment. Not through Lena. A cream envelope in the Tuesday mail at Lake Road Veterinary — a building Kristin did not own yet and would not for five more weeks — addressed to Kristin Hovde, DVM, in handwriting she had last seen against three lines in a register book.
Brynn brought it back to the treatment room between appointments and stood there while Kristin looked at it.
"Do you want me to open it?"
"No."
"Do you want me to burn it?"
"Not yet."
It was one page. It said:
Kristin —
I have something that belongs in your hands and not in mine. I would rather give it to you than to anyone else, and I would rather do it in person than have it arrive with a lawyer's cover letter attached.
I will be at the Club on Thursday at eleven. If you don't come I'll understand and I won't write again.
Jocelyn Harlow
Kristin read it twice and put it face down on the counter and did a rabies vaccination on a nine-year-old beagle named Duchess.
Then she went out to the truck and sat there for a while with the heater running and the October rain coming down the windshield in sheets.
She had been coming to the building three evenings a week since the middle of September. Not to work — she did not own it yet, and the seller had been decent about the lockbox and she was not going to abuse that. She came and she measured things.
The suite needed a table and a light and a scavenger and about nine thousand dollars of work.
The roof needed doing before February. The hole in exam two needed a piece of drywall and forty minutes.
She had a list in the back of the call book that was four pages long now, and every line of it was a thing she was going to do herself or pay for out of her own account, and reading that list was better than sleeping.
That was the state she was in when Jocelyn Harlow's handwriting came through the door: happier than she had been in nine years, five weeks out from a closing, with a four-page list.
She thought about that afterward too. That the letter had found her at the exact moment she had something to lose again.
"Absolutely not," said Lena Straub.
"I know."
"Kristin. I want to be extremely clear, because you are a client I like.
There is no version of this that is good for you.
She is a named individual in a matter I am building.
She is very possibly the single most exposed person in it.
If she wants to hand something over there is a process, and the process is she calls a lawyer and the lawyer calls me. "
"She's not going to do that."
"Then she doesn't get to hand it over."
Kristin was in the truck outside the Delano clinic with the phone on speaker and a chart on her knee.
"Lena. What happened to the originals?"
A pause on the line. It was the wrong kind of pause and Kristin sat up.
"You already know," she said.
"I've been waiting to tell you until I had it confirmed, and I got it confirmed Friday, and I was going to call you today.
" Lena's voice went carefully flat. "The Ellison Group's correspondence retention schedule is eighteen months for routine, and anything dispositioned 'no action' gets pulled at the annual purge. The purge ran the last week of March."
"Two weeks before I found the book."
"Two weeks before you found the book."
"So there's the register."
"There's the register, which is a line of somebody's handwriting, and there's a shredding certificate from a vendor in Eagan." Lena let that sit. "The letters themselves are gone. All three."
Kristin looked out at the rain.
"You've known since Friday."
"I've known since Friday and I have spent the weekend deciding how much it matters, and my honest answer is: less than you think, legally.
The register is the document. It shows they came, it shows what they were about, it shows who read them and what she wrote.
" A breath. "But you should know what you don't have. "
"What don't I have?"
"You don't have what he actually said," Lena said.
Here is what Kristin had never told anybody, including Brynn, including the woman in Edina she had seen four times in the spring and then stopped seeing.
She did not want the letters for the claim.
She wanted them because a man had sat down three times over four months and written her name, and she had never read one word of it.
She had been given a summary in a county building in March by a man in a tie who had turned the pages toward her and then turned them back.
He references you. He references the property.
She had said thank you. She had gone out to the parking lot.
Since April she had been carrying around a sentence she could not put down, and the sentence was: what did he think I was?
Not the man in the mudroom. She had no questions about the man in the mudroom.
The man who wrote in September, whose wife had been dead seventeen days, sitting somewhere in Anoka with a pen — what had he thought she was, when he wrote her name into it?
A woman who might help? A woman who was part of it? A soft place in the wall?
She had a rough guess. Guesses are not the same.
"Kristin," Lena said, on the phone, into the silence. "Are you there."
"I'm here."
"Don't go."
"Okay," Kristin said, and went.
The Club was decorated for something. It was always decorated for something.
October meant the duck-hunting lunch and the greens committee and a certain quality of tweed, and Kristin walked in at eleven on a Thursday in a clean flannel shirt and boots she had scraped in the lot, and she had eaten in that room three hundred times and it took her four seconds to understand that she had never once eaten in it as herself.
Jocelyn was at a two-top by the window. She stood when Kristin came in, which was correct, and did not put out her hand, which was also correct.
She looked well. That was going to be a thing Kristin had to get past in the first minute and she got past it in about forty seconds. Thirty-three years old, immaculate, a wool dress the color of oatmeal that had cost what a good heifer costs, and the same quiet.
"Thank you for coming."
"Let's not do that part," Kristin said, and sat down.
"All right."
A young man came and Jocelyn ordered coffee for both of them without asking, which told Kristin more about the next twenty minutes than anything that got said.
"You have something of mine."
"I have copies of three letters," Jocelyn said.
The room went a long way off.
"The originals were destroyed in the March purge," Jocelyn said. "I assume you know that by now. I made copies of all three at the time I logged them, because I make copies of everything I log, and they are in a box in my apartment in Deephaven, and they have been there since January."
"Why?"
"Because I make copies of everything I log."
"That's not what I'm asking."
"I know it isn't." Jocelyn folded her hands on the table. "You're asking whether I kept them because I knew. And the answer is no. I kept them the same way I kept nine hundred other things, and then on the tenth of February I remembered they existed and I have thought about them every day since."
Kristin sat very still.
"I want to say one thing," Jocelyn said, "and then I'll stop, because I know it isn't worth anything to you."
"Then don't."
"I read all three of them and I wrote what I wrote and nobody made me do it and I am not going to sit here and tell you I was overworked." Her voice did not change at all. "That's it. That's the whole thing I wanted to say."
And the terrible part — the part Kristin took home with her and turned over for weeks — was that it was well done. It was very well done. It gave away nothing, it excused nothing, and it landed in the room like an honest thing, and Kristin could not for the life of her tell whether it was one.
"You want something," Kristin said.
"Yes."
"Say it."
Jocelyn took an envelope out of her bag and set it on the table and did not slide it across.
"That's the September letter. The first one. It's a photocopy and I'll swear to what it is in any format you like." She kept two fingers on it. "The other two are at my apartment."
"And?"
"And I'd like something said, and I'd like it said by you."
"Go on."
"There is a version of the next year," Jocelyn said, "where I am the woman who buried the letters. It will be in a filing and then it will be in the paper, and the Conservancy will be very sorry and very quick, and I will not work in this state again. I'm thirty-three. I have a mother in Duluth."
"You did bury the letters."
"I made a judgment about three pieces of mail and it was the wrong judgment and it is not the same thing as burying them," Jocelyn said, "and the difference is going to be invisible in print, and you and I both know it."
"So what do you want me to say?"
"That I escalated them."
Kristin laughed. She did not mean to. It came out of her flat and short, one syllable, and two women at the next table looked over.
"You want me to say you escalated them."
"I want you to say that the letters were brought to the company's attention and that the failure was structural.
" Jocelyn's voice stayed exactly level. "Which is true, incidentally.
It is the truest sentence available. The failure was structural.
I was thirty-two years old and I was the only door to a man worth what he's worth and there was no process, no protocol, no security review that anybody had read, nobody above me and nobody beside me.
I was making it up. I made up the wrong thing. "
"And the affair?"
"That has nothing to do with the letters."
"It has everything to do with the letters," Kristin said. "You decided my mail didn't matter in the same season you decided my husband did."
For the first time, something moved in Jocelyn Harlow's face.