Part 3 — Tape Number Seven
Daddys voice ran out, and for a moment nobody in Mr. Dobbs office breathed. Then Mr. Dobbs picked up his phone, dialed the Florence police, and said, in the calmest voice I have ever heard, I have a client who needs a detective and a locked room.
Charlene sat with her purse in her lap and her mouth set. A uniformed officer stood just inside the door. I drove home with Stan, who had not said a word since the tape, and who pulled the truck over after two blocks and held my face in both hands.
I knew where to look. Daddy had told me with masking tape under a stuck drawer, and then with his own tired voice. The words he never got to finish were, Look inside the engine. For forty years he kept an old Briggs motor on the shelf above his workbench, the one nobody was allowed to touch.
Stan and Detective Hollis took it down together. The cylinder housing had been hollowed out and fitted with a plastic bag, and in the bag were six small cassette tapes in order, numbered in carpenter pencil. Number seven was already in my hands from the lawyers office, and the label said, For the judge.
We listened to all of them in a conference room at the courthouse, with the district attorney. Charlene on the phone with a man named Gordon Teal, who had a notary license and a nephew in the print shop. Charlene telling him exactly how to type the June will. Charlene counting pills out of the bottle on the kitchen table.
Tape seven was the worst. She said her accomplices name, the amount she expected to get, and the date she meant to have the house on the market. Gordon laughed once and said, Does the old man still know his own name? She said, Only in the mornings.
Daddy had been right about the mornings. On tape after tape you can hear him, slow and careful, setting up the recorder, checking the date, saying a few words to me. He could not stop what was happening to him, but he could make sure somebody would hear it.
Charlene was arrested that afternoon for elder abuse, fraud, and forgery. Gordon Teal was picked up at his print shop the same evening and gave a statement before supper. The June will was thrown out by the probate court, along with every paper signed after March.
The earlier will, from 2015, was still on file with Mr. Dobbs. It left the house and shop to me and a modest sum to Charlene, which the judge reduced to nothing after the conviction. The watch, the wallet, and the truck keys came back to me in a sealed evidence bag.
The medical examiner reviewed Daddys records and found his heart had given out naturally, though the unneeded sedatives had worn him thin for months. That was a comfort and a rage at the same time, and I allowed myself to feel both.
The day the shop reopened, Stan and I plugged the beige answering machine back into the wall. I pulled the old landline out of a box, Daddys cord and all, and the dial tone hummed like it always had.
I recorded the message myself that night, in a voice I hardly recognized. This is Nan. I am in the shop. Talk slow. Then I sat down at the workbench and listened to the whole tape over again, and for the first time I did not cry.