Part 3 — Above Miss Tolbert
Miss Tolbert read the name beside the circled Tuesday, grabbed the kitchen counter and whispered, That is Candice. That is my hairdresser.
The deputy raised an eyebrow, and Miss Tolbert explained. Candice had cut her hair every Tuesday morning for six years. She also knew when the house would be empty, because Miss Tolbert had told her all about it, chatting under the dryer the way you do with someone you trust.
The man who had been living in the attic was named Dalton Reece. He was twenty nine, the polite young man who had knocked in June and said he was in her fourth grade class. He knew every name on her old roster because Candices mother had kept a copy from the school yearbook.
He had not been getting in through the front door. The attic had a gable vent behind the carport roof, and the old screening had rotted. Dalton had slipped through it each night after Miss Tolbert went to bed and stayed up there like a tenant in a very cold hotel.
His plan was small and mean. On Tuesdays, while Candice kept Miss Tolbert busy at the salon for two hours, he would let himself into the house and take her purse, her checkbook and her late husbands watch. The four numbers on the calendar were a PIN he had read over her shoulder.
An old teacher knows when a child is fibbing, but even Miss Tolbert never guessed that her own hairdresser was in on the roll call.
Deputies waited in the hallway closet on Tuesday morning. Dalton came down the pull down stairs at ten past nine with a pillowcase in his hand and walked straight into the sheriff. Candice was arrested at the salon an hour later, mid blow dry.
Both were charged with burglary, conspiracy and exploitation of a vulnerable adult. Dalton pleaded guilty. The judge gave him a prison term and ordered him to repay every dollar he had taken from three other women on Candices client list.
I finished the roof that week and sealed the gable vent with new steel mesh. I also put a deadbolt on the attic hatch, with the only key on Miss Tolberts own ring, and I knocked fifteen hundred dollars off the bill without telling her.
Her former students heard about it and filled her kitchen that Saturday with casseroles, cards and one very good hairdresser from the next town over. Miss Tolbert got her Tuesday appointment back, with a new stylist and a deputy who drives past twice.