“I don’t want revenge,” she said.
Mr. Grant folded his hands on the table. “What do you want?”
Grandma looked at me first. Then she looked out the window at nothing in particular.
“I want the truth.”
That was all. So the investigation continued, methodical and unglamorous, the way most real investigations actually are, nothing like the courtroom dramas television had trained all of us to expect.
The bank produced records going back well beyond the eleven months Mr. Grant had originally flagged. The travel agency produced booking information showing exactly six rooms reserved, never seven, at every hotel along the itinerary. The credit card company produced payment histories that traced, line by
line, the slow, steady drain from Grandma’s accounts into my aunt and father’s lives. The airline confirmed formally, in writing, that there had never once been a reservation under the name Hazel Carter, on that flight or any connecting one. The hotel in Paris confirmed that six rooms had been
