Landon stood, and he straightened his jacket, and he smoothed his hair, and for a moment he looked like the son I had raised, and then he opened his mouth, and the man he had become spoke, and the boy was gone. "I have listened to all of this," he said, "and I am sorry, truly sorry, that my mother has been misled, and that these good people have been misled with her. But the truth is simple, and I will tell it plainly. My mother is ill. She has been ill for a long time. She is confused. She fell from the deck of the Danube Empress by accident, and she was rescued, and she has built a story around that accident, a story in which I am a villain, because her illness has made her afraid of me, and of everyone."
He paused, and he looked around the room, and his voice grew softer, and more sorrowful. "The invoices are real," he said. "The repairs were real. My mother kept her little book, but she did not keep it well, not in recent years. She missed things. She forgot things. The yards did the work, and they were paid, and the company has the receipts. As for the bank records, the money in my account is my own. I have investments. I have lent money, and I have been repaid. And the sale of the two boats, that was my mother's own wish. She told me herself, before the cruise, that the boats were a burden, and that she wanted them sold. I have a letter, in her handwriting, in which she says so."
A letter. He had a letter. He reached into his jacket, and he took out a folded sheet of paper, and he held it up, and I felt a cold shock run through me, because I had never written such a letter, and I knew, in that instant, that it was a forgery, and that he had made it for this moment, and that he believed it would save him.
The hearing chair held out a hand. "Let the clerk see the letter," the chair said. The clerk took it, and he laid it on the table before the chair, and the chair read it, and then the chair looked at me. "Mrs. Haversham, is this your handwriting?"
I stood, and I walked to the table, and I looked at the paper, and I saw at once that it was not mine. The letters were too neat, too even, too careful, the handwriting of a man trying to write like a woman, and the words were wrong, and the phrases were wrong, and the date was wrong, and everything about it was wrong. "No," I said. "It is not my handwriting. I have kept a logbook for forty years. This room has seen my handwriting. You have seen it. This is not it. And I have never written such a letter. I have never wanted the Wachau Queen and the Vienna Star sold. They are the heart of my company. I would sooner sell my own house."
The chair turned the letter over, and read the back, and then looked up, and spoke to Landon. "Mr. Haversham, this letter is dated the day after the anniversary cruise. The day after your mother is said to have drowned. How could she have written it then?"
The silence in the room was absolute. Landon stared at the letter, and his mouth opened, and no sound came out, and his face went white, and then red, and then white again, and his lawyer put a hand on his arm, and Landon shook it off, and he tried to speak, and the words came out in a rush. "It was a mistake. The date is a mistake. I meant to write— I mean, she wrote it before, and I copied it— I mean—"
He stopped, and he looked around the room, and he saw the faces looking back at him, and he saw that there was no one left who believed him, not his lawyer, not the chair, not the clerk, not his wife, not his son, and least of all me. He sat down, slowly, and he put his head in his hands, and his shoulders shook, and I felt no triumph at all, only a great, hollow sorrow, the sorrow of a mother watching her son destroy himself with his own hands, in front of everyone, with his own lie.
The hearing chair set the letter down, and spoke, quietly, and clearly. "The letter is entered as evidence," the chair said. "It is dated after the reported death of its supposed author. This authority will draw its own conclusions." The clerk tied a tag to the letter, and set it beside the other papers, and I sat down, and Wesley took my hand, and I looked out of the window at the river, and I thought of the night I had gone into the water, and of the cold, and of the dark, and of how far I had come from that night to this room, and I knew that the end was near, and that it would come soon, and that it would be just.
Chapter 36
— The Arrest
The hearing chair sat in silence for a long moment after Landon's letter had been entered as evidence, and the room sat in silence with the chair. Then the chair looked up, and spoke, and the voice was neither warm nor cold, only fair.