The Families Heard Their Names Read Into The Court Record

Moving a kiln was not like moving a stove.

The bricks could crack. The elements needed care. I paid a mover $1,800, using a small loan from my credit union, and watched every turn of the truck wheels.

For a while, I worked from a borrowed bench in another potter's shop. I paid for shelf space by the firing. My old kiln waited under a tarp in dry storage.

Nico had taken my room. He had failed to take my trade.

Customers found me. Some wanted urns. Some wanted ordinary bowls. I welcomed those most on days when I could not bear another name.

I made a wide yellow bowl for a man who grew tomatoes. He argued cheerfully over the size, paid my deposit, and returned when he said he would. There was nothing for Elias to investigate. I put the balance in my bank account and bought clay. That small order helped me trust my working days again.

The investigation kept going while I worked.

Bank records matched the receipt numbers on my cards. The shed files matched the names on the false certificate. The document examiner reported that the signature image on the certificate came from the invoice file, including its stray mark.

Wes gave a statement through his lawyer. He had packed the urns away on Nico's orders and signed pickup papers he knew were false. The return crate had been a mistake. He had taken the wrong numbered crate from a row marked for empty returns.

One mistake had let Jonah leave that shed.

“Does helping make him innocent?” I asked Elias.

“No. It gives the court more facts.”

I appreciated his refusal to make it tidy.

The seventeen other urns went to the funeral directors each family chose after the needed checks and releases. I was told when the last transfer was complete. I never asked for the families' private choices.

June wanted a proper placement in the wall she had already visited so often. Ada offered a different niche, at no charge, and an independent funeral director to handle the work.

“Would you make another front?” June asked me.

“Any color you want.”

“The same. I liked what you made.”

That was the first time I cried about my own loss.

I made the front again. Jonah Pell. No middle initial. A fern beneath it, clear enough to feel with a fingertip.

June and Mara watched the urn placed. The director checked the number with them. Ada signed the record after the placement, and the family received a copy before they left.

I signed only the maker's line.

Eight months after the crate arrived, Nico entered guilty pleas to fraud and forgery charges. Wes admitted his part in the false records and the planned destruction of evidence. The lawyers had worked through agreements, but the judge still asked questions.

At sentencing, families could speak or submit letters. June chose a letter. She asked me to sit beside her while it was read.

“I used to think my husband was waiting for me to come on Sundays,” it said. “Now I wonder where he was on each Sunday. Please put that in your record too.”

Nico stood when it was his turn.

He spoke about business pressure. He spoke about the people he had served. Then the judge asked whether he accepted that he had sold completed services he had not performed.

“Yes,” he said.

There was no warmth in his voice. There was no ice either. He sounded like a man answering a question he could no longer avoid.

The judge sentenced him to seven years in prison and ordered restitution. Wes received six months in jail followed by probation, with his duties and payments set out in writing.

Harbor Rest's cemetery contract had already ended. Its remaining stock and vehicles were being sold under the court's supervision. No one in the business could decide which family received money first.

The restitution schedule listed $88,800 for the eighteen families, including June's extra charge. My unpaid $12,640 invoice was a separate approved business claim in the company windup.

I checked both totals with a pencil.

Afterward, June hugged me. Mara held all three of our coats while we tried to find our sleeves again.

Elias waited near the door. A younger investigator stood with him, holding the follow-up file.

“My witness work is finished,” Elias told me. “The office has assigned the remaining recovery checks to someone else.”

“Will you miss my folders?”

“I hope to meet you without one.”

I asked him to come to my garden the next Saturday.

“Nine?” he said.

“Bring gloves. This isn't a ceremonial visit.”

He bowed his head a little, as if I had invited him to a dance.

At home that evening, I found a large envelope in the mail. A garden cooperative had accepted my application for its empty workshop shed.

Inside lay a five-year lease, waiting for my signature.