Rabbinowitz took two more books from the pile, the disbursement journal and general ledger for 1897, and placed them in front of me. The same hand had made the entries in these books, though a little less precisely. Rabbinowitz again went through the monthly entries in the disbursement journal, comparing the amounts paid each supplier with that paid the year before. Everything seemed in order, the monthly totals were duly posted to the general ledger, and the trial balance at year’s end again showed a healthy company, all the shares of which were still owned by Elisha Poole.

He then placed the books for 1898 in front of me. As of March of that year the handwriting of the entries changed. “This is when, as best as Morris could tell, Reddman started keeping the books.”

“Any indication of why?” I asked.

“None,” said Morris, “but you might have noticed that Poole’s handwriting, it had started to deteriorate. We think maybe that might indicate a reason.”

“Any extra monies started being paid directly to Reddman?” I asked.

“No,” said Rabbinowitz. “That, of course, was the first thing we checked. Reddman, he received only modest raises all along until he finally bought the company outright. He started as an apprentice tinsmith and, even though he took on more responsibility, his pay remained rather miserly. But I want to show you something here.” He pointed to an entry in the disbursement journal for payments made to a farmer named Anderson. “Notice here that shortly after Reddman started doing the books, the disbursements to Anderson jumped up slightly in proportion to the amounts paid to the other farmers, just a few hundred dollars, but still an increase.”

“Maybe Anderson started expanding his output.”

“That of course is possible,” said Rabbinowitz, who immediately turned to the back of the general ledger. “But notice, in the trial balance sheet for that year, stockholder equity didn’t rise even though sales had actually improved.”

“Interesting,” I said.

Rabbinowitz brought out the disbursement journal for 1899 and dropped it on top of the other books, dust rising when it fell. I sneezed and then sneezed again. Morris handed me a tissue while Rabbinowitz showed me the disbursement entries, month by month, for 1899. Everything seemed stable until we got to June. Rabbinowitz tried to turn the page to find July but I grabbed hold of his wrist.

“What’s that?” I asked

“I told you he’d notice it,” said Morris. “He’s no yutz.”

“An unexplained jump in the amount paid to this Anderson,” said Rabbinowitz with a flourish, as if we had discovered a great scientific secret. “Fifteen hundred dollars more than you would expect to see for that month.”

“Any supplier decrease its payable in a similar amount?” I asked.

“Good question,” said Rabbinowitz. “And the answer, it is no.” He took me through the book page by page, showing that the increase was maintained for every month through the whole of the year. “Almost ten thousand dollars by year’s end. Now I want to show you two things in the general ledger.” He brought out another volume and paged to the trial balance at the end of the book. “First, shareholder equity dropped by about ten thousand dollars at year’s end, approximately twenty percent.”

“Almost the exact amount of the unexplained bonus paid to Anderson.”

“Exactly right,” said Rabbinowitz. “And look at this in the stock register. Eighteen ninety-nine was the first time Reddman started buying shares of stock from Poole. He bought five shares, or five percent of the company, for six thousand dollars.”

“Where did a tin cutter with a pittance of a salary get six thousand dollars?” I asked, even though by then I figured I knew the answer.

“What we guess, Victor,” said Morris, “is that this Reddman, he volunteered to take control of the books so that he could slip his friend Anderson a little bonus and get for himself a kickback. For some reason he figured he could get away with even more and then he hit on the idea of using the money to buy the company outright, so he raised the payoff and started buying stock. The beauty of it for him was that while he was stealing from the company, the company was losing profits and its value was decreasing, making the price he was to pay less and less. I bet he was able to convince Poole that he was doing him such a favor because of how terrible the company, it was doing.”

“So, in effect,” I said, “Reddman was stealing from Poole and using the money to buy Poole’s company. Very clever.”

“Clever, yes,” said Rabbinowitz. “For a thief.”

The other volumes showed the same thing, inexplicably large payments to Anderson, weakening shareholder equity, increasingly large purchases of stock by Reddman that would have been impossible on the salary he was listed as receiving in the books. By 1904, Reddman owned forty-five percent of the stock.

“How did he get the rest?” I asked.

“He apparently took out a loan, mortgaging his stock holdings and the stock he was going to purchase,” said Morris. “He used the money to buy the remaining shares held by Poole in 1905.”

“A leveraged buyout,” said Rabbinowitz. “Like something out of the eighties, the nineteen-eighties. This Reddman he was a thief, yes, but a thief ahead of his time.”

“And listen to this, Victor,” said Morris. “Right after Reddman, he bought all the stock, the sale of pickles it went meshugge, more than tripling in one year. Almost as if someone was keeping production low to maintain unprofitability until the entire stock of the company could be bought at a bargain price.”

“So that’s it,” I said. “Poole was right all along. Reddman stole the company right out from under him.”

“So it would seem,” said Morris.

“If it was so easy for us to see it, how come Poole didn’t figure it out?”

“That’s a mystery,” said Morris. “To solve such a mystery it will take more than looking in books.”

We sat for a moment in silence, the three of us. There were still questions to be answered, of course, and there was nothing in the books that would convince a jury of anything beyond a reasonable doubt, but it was pretty clear to me. Everything about the Reddmans was based on a crime and it was as if that crime, instead of disappearing into the mists of history, had remained alive and virulent and had infected the Reddman house and the Reddman family and the Reddman legacy with a crippling rot.

“Two more things you should know, Victor,” said Morris. “First, I tried, as soon as Yitzhak started growing suspicious, I tried to find out if there might be records from this farmer Anderson for us to look at. A farm he owned, in New Jersey, in Cumberland County. Through old newspapers I had Sheldon look until he found it. Very disturbing.”

“What?” I asked.

“The farmhouse it burned down in 1907, with three dead, including this Anderson.”

“My God,” I said.

“And something else, Victor,” said Rabbinowitz. “We are not the first to go through these records and discover what it is we have discovered. I could see traces of another’s journey through the same books, old pencil marks, old notations, old notes stuck in the pages. Someone else, they took the very same route we took through the numbers. Your friend Morris, he thinks he knows,” said Rabbinowitz.

I turned and looked at Morris.

“One of the notes,” he said. “The writing it matches.”

“Matches what?”

“I’m no handwriting expert,” said Morris, “but the letters ‘s’ and ‘t,’ they are very close and the ‘g,’ it is identical.”

“Matches what?”

“The pages of the diary we found in the box,” said Morris. “She who wrote the diary, she too knew about what this Reddman had done. He was her father, no? What it must have been like for her to find out that everything she had was purchased by a crime. I shudder, Victor, shudder to even think about it.”