Residents filled every seat as I opened the chamber doors and walked inside, and I want to say plainly that I did not put a single one of them there.
Ellamae Dozier put them there. She is seventy-nine, she buried her husband in section nine in 1998, and she called the city clerk the morning after it happened and asked to be put on the agenda, and then she called about forty people who each called about forty people.
What she brought with her was two pages off a public records request, and she had to pay eleven dollars for the copies and she made a point of saying so.
Georgia law says a scrap metal dealer has to keep a record. Name, driver’s license, tag number, description, and the date, on every purchase, and the police can read those records any time they want, and so, it turns out, can a seventy-nine-year-old widow with a form off the internet.
Bronze vases from a cemetery are worth about ninety dollars at a scrap yard. They are worth about eleven hundred dollars to replace, which is why families cry when they go missing.
Two yards on the north side had bought eleven bronze cemetery vases in six weeks. Same seller. Name, license, tag, all of it, printed on a page that had been sitting in a filing cabinet the entire time nobody was asking.
The name was a man on the seasonal mowing crew the new superintendent had brought in on a cut-rate contract in March, which is the same contract he was hoping to expand once he had my job cleared out.
Ellamae read that page into the microphone with her reading glasses down her nose. Then she read the section numbers of the eleven graves.
Four of the families were in that room.
The superintendent tried to say something about how the matter was still under review and a councilman named Pettaway told him to sit down, and that was the whole of the discussion.
They voted that night to end the contract and to put me back with back pay. The superintendent lasted until August.
The part I keep is what happened after, out in the hall. A young woman I did not recognize handed me a card and said she’d been fourteen at her mother’s funeral in 2011 and that I’d walked her to the car with an umbrella and had not said one word the whole way, and she’d never forgotten it.
Inside the card she’d written the only line about all this that I’ve kept.
You have met this whole town on the worst day of its life. There is not one person in that room who was going to let you be called a thief.
The city replaced all eleven vases out of the contract money they got back. It took until October to get them set right.
I open the gates at ten till six. Section nine gets checked first, on account of Ellamae, who I will be hearing from if it doesn’t.