She was an ancient woman now, gray-haired and very thin and even more severe than she had been before, but still living alone in the house on North Birch Street and still attending the Catholic church on Sunday mornings when she was able. After her son had been gone for about a month, in a kind of desperate form of masculine absurdity—since no woman would have even considered such a thing—several of the men in town decided that they would call on old Mrs. Burdette to ask her some questions. They thought it would be worthwhile to inquire if she had heard from her son. They hoped, if nothing else, that she might be able to suggest where he had gone.
So one afternoon they walked up onto the front porch and rang the doorbell. But after Mrs. Burdette had opened the door to them she didn’t ask them in. She merely waited inside, in the dark front hallway of the house, listening to their questions and foolish talk from beyond the scarcely-opened door. They continued to explain to her what they had come for. Then they stopped talking; she hadn’t said anything yet. She had simply stared at them out of those clean little wire-rimmed glasses while she studied one face and then another. She didn’t seem to know or even to care what they were talking about. In exasperation, one of the men said to her: “But, Mrs. Burdette, look here: you do know Jack’s gone, don’t you? You do read the local newspaper? Why, it’s been in the Mercury. Haven’t you seen it?”
When she spoke finally, her voice sounded harsh and rusty, as if she hadn’t used it in days. “I don’t know anything about your newspapers,” she said. “And I don’t want to. I read the Bible.”
Then she shut the door in their faces. They could hear her locking it. Afterward they could hear the faint sound of her steps retreating into the interior of the silent house. So the men were left standing on the front porch. They felt foolish. They looked at one another and moved quickly down off the porch like little boys who had done something silly.
In any case, by the end of January the alarm in Holt had turned at last to shock and fear. People had finally grown afraid that something serious had happened to Jack Burdette and they were disturbed to think so. They still liked Burdette and thinking something bad had happened to him made them feel less secure for themselves in their corner of Colorado. The police had begun to send out all-points bulletins across the state, hoping that might turn him up. But nothing did. Burdette had disappeared without a trace.
Meanwhile at the Farmers’ Co-op Elevator things were a mess. Without Burdette there to manage the elevator every day, nothing was getting done properly and Arch Withers and the other members of the board of directors didn’t know what to do. Finally they decided to ask Doyle Francis to come back. They wanted Doyle to run things again, on a temporary basis, so that the routine shipment of corn and wheat might continue once more, until Burdette turned up, or until … well, until they had to hire his replacement. Still they refused to think it would come to that.
Then, about the middle of February, that private feeling of shock and fearfulness in Holt turned suddenly to hostility and public outrage. For, by that time, Doyle Francis had had sufficient opportunity to examine the books at the elevator. And in going over the books he had discovered that something was wrong. He called a special meeting of the board to tell them about it. It was on a Tuesday afternoon.
“Jesus Christ,” he told the men when they were assembled before him in his office. “What in the goddamn hell were you boys thinking of anyhow?”
“What do you mean?” Arch Withers said.
“Didn’t you even check on him? Didn’t you even think to look at these books yourselves?”
“Of course we did. We looked at them. Charlie Soames went over these books every year with us. So did Jack Burdette. What’s wrong with them?”
“Plenty,” Doyle said.
“Like what, for instance?”
“Like this, goddamn it.” Doyle pointed to the books spread out before him on the desk. “As near as I can tell, you’re missing about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. That’s what’s wrong with them.”
“What? Hold on now. You mean to say—”
“I mean that’s just an old man’s estimate. It’s been going on for three or four years.”