“Write it up,” I said.

He wrote out the three-paragraph statement in dark blue ink, pressed his official seal into the lower corner, and slid it across the glass.

“Who took that paper to your bank?” he asked.

“It was my mother,” I told him.

He looked at me for two seconds, then slipped two extra copies into a brown paper sleeve.

“You take these to your lawyer right away.”

I drove back to Maple Street at one o’clock and parked my sedan three houses down by the hydrant on the corner.