Then there is the bag itself.
Divers had it in forty minutes. The river is eleven feet deep off that pier and there is a mud shelf.
The binder is duplicated. The tablet is encrypted, tracked and wiped remotely from a desk. Every page in that bag exists in three other places, one of which is in another state.
She threw nothing away. The assessment carried on at two o’clock that afternoon with a printed set.
The only thing my sister actually destroyed that morning was the version of herself that everybody on that pier had been prepared to believe.
And Wendell’s plan did not work either, which is the part nobody finds satisfying enough.
The assessment was not abandoned. It was delayed by three hours and forty minutes and it went ahead the same day with a printed set, and the divers who came for my bag were already suited up, and while they were down there somebody sensible asked them to have a look at two of the piles.
They had a look.
What they saw is the reason there is a process at all.
So a man spent eleven days winding up his wife in order to interrupt an inspection, and what he actually did was put two qualified divers in the water under my pier, four months before they were scheduled to go in.
I have not been able to find that funny yet. Kettleman finds it extremely funny.
But there was one thing in that bag that was not federal property.
In the outside pocket. The one with no zip.
PART 5
Our mother’s engagement ring.
The one Mum left to her.
It is in the will, in a line, with her name next to it. There was never any question about it and I have never wanted it.
I had been carrying it for two years.
Not in a drawer at home. In the front pocket of my work bag, through three ports and an eleven-week deployment, because I could not make myself post it and I could not make myself drive over and put it in her hand.
Every time I nearly did, I thought about the coffee urn.
The divers did not find it.
They found the bag on its side with the outside flap open and they went back down twice.
And they have been back once since, with a detector, on their own time, on a Saturday, because Kettleman asked them as a favour and did not tell me until it was over.
