Part 3 — Brother Curtis Calling
The number the bank read out was saved in my phone under Brother Curtis. Lyles younger brother, who had once borrowed our truck and brought it back with an empty tank, and who knew his mothers maiden name because it was also his own.
I sat in the parking lot for ten minutes with my hands in my lap. Then I did what I should have done a month before. I drove straight to the Natchez police department with both hearing aids in my purse and asked for the detective who handled fraud.
Detective Boudreaux had worked a dozen cases of the same kind. A relative moves in, makes the older person hard of hearing or confused, and then handles the money. The sealed microphones, the missed bank calls, and the cloned phone number all fit the pattern.
The bank had recordings of the Thursday call, and Detective Boudreaux played one for me. It was Curtis, doing his best to sound like Lyle, a little too slow and a little too gravelly, and he answered every security question without a hitch.
Rusty had started it. The phone records showed he had told Curtis about the account in August, and they had agreed to split everything. Rusty sealed the aids at night with a tiny dot of glue, and Curtis made the calls. They called it, in their messages, the quiet plan.
We did the next part with great care. The bank put a hold on every transfer, and the detective asked me to carry on as normal at home for two days. I washed Lyles shirts, made supper, and set the hearing aids on the nightstand every night, empty of any batteries.
Rusty was picked up at breakfast on Wednesday, in my kitchen, with a mug of my coffee in his hand. Curtis was stopped on the highway that afternoon with his phone on the dashboard and Lyles account number on a sticky note.
When the detective told Lyle everything, he sat for a long time with his chin on his hand. He could not hear half of it. I wrote it all on a notepad and held it up. When he read the last line, he said, in the loud voice of a man who cannot hear himself, They took my ears.
Dr. Pham gave us the best news. The aids were not damaged. She cleaned out the glue under her magnifier and refitted both of them that same afternoon, at no charge. When Lyle heard the birds again, he reached for my hand before he said a word.
Curtis and Rusty were charged with bank fraud, identity theft, and exploitation of an elderly person. The bank restored the thirty-one thousand dollars in full, then collected what it could from the accounts the two men had opened out of state.
Rusty took a plea and testified against his uncle. He will spend time away, and he wrote a letter from jail to apologize to us. I read it twice, and I wrote back once, and that was enough.
That Sunday Lyle sat on the porch with a new cup of coffee, his hearing aids glowing in his ears. A mockingbird started up in the pecan tree, and he looked at me and said, Judy, I forgot how loud the world is. I told him it was a good loud.