Part 3 — The Second Gate
The man who signed the refusal every time was the foundry plant manager in 1994, a man named Dale Vickery. By the time of my grandfathers funeral he was seventy-nine, retired, living in a lake house, and still sending Uncle Ron a Christmas card.
Ron finally told us the truth in the hallway of the funeral home. Dale had paid him a little money every year to keep quiet about the back gate. Ron never knew why. He had only taken it, and he had been ashamed of it for thirty years, which is why he had spent every holiday running Grandpa down.
The woman by the casket was named Marlene Hoyt, and her sister was Patricia, the young bookkeeper from the payroll office. Marlene opened the lid of a small tin and set Grandpas key on the table in front of us. He had left it with her lawyer in a sealed envelope, along with a tag that read, Gate Two, Lakeside Storage.
Lou, the old foreman, drove us there himself. Behind the key was a metal cabinet, and inside it were Grandpas night logs, every one, thirty-one years of them in neat square capital letters, and a ledger page Patricia had slipped to him two days before the fire.
The ledger page showed that Dale Vickery had been moving payroll money into a dummy vendor for years. Patricia had found it and was going to take it to the auditors. The fire in the payroll office burned the records, and everyone assumed she had burned with her good name, run off with the cash.
But Grandpa had seen something that night that nobody asked him about. He had seen a young woman leave through the back gate at two in the morning, alive and walking, with a man from the lake road waiting in a car. He wrote the time in his log. The next day, someone chained that gate.
Marlene put her hand on the page and cried. Patricia was never lost, she was hidden, and my grandfather was the only person who knew which gate she walked through.
It turned out the man in the car was a retired deputy who helped Patricia leave town under a new name, because she was afraid of the plant manager. He had kept her safe in Tennessee for thirty years and had let Otis send one coded letter a year through Marlene to say she was alive.
That was why Grandpa asked for the gate key every year. He wanted to reopen the case, and Dale kept saying no because the gate was where the truth was.
We took the logs and the ledger page to the state attorney generals office. Patricia drove up from Tennessee the next week, gray braid and all, and gave her statement to the investigators with her sister holding her hand.
Dale Vickery was charged with embezzlement, arson of records, and obstruction. At seventy-nine he could not argue with the paper trail. The foundrys successor company repaid the pension fund that he had drained, and the money went to the families of the old night shift.
Ron came to the second service we held, a proper luncheon in the church hall, and apologized to the whole night shift one by one. Lou shook his hand and said, Your father would have forgiven you before you finished the sentence.
At the end of the day Patricia and I walked out to the old back gate by the water. Somebody had unchained it. She stood in the doorway, and the lake wind came through, and she said, Thank you, Otis, quietly, to nobody.