Part 3 — Not Called Vince
Detective Ruiz finished his sentence on the phone, and the kitchen at Sherrys house went very quiet. His name was Raymond Teague, he said. He was sixty-eight years old, not seventy-three. And he was still, at that moment, legally married to a woman in Toledo.
Her name was Marjorie. Aunt Louise had found her through the Ohio mail, a postcard with an address in the lining of his coat pocket, and then she had done what she always did with a hard problem. She sat down with a pen and worked it out. In May she took the bus to Midland Police and asked for Detective Ruiz.
The detective told us the rest, with Sherrys notepad in front of him. Raymond Teague had married Marjorie in 1998. Twelve years later he left with a good deal of her savings, and he had gone on to marry two more women under three more names. Louise was the fourth.
When he told Louise that his first wife had fallen, he meant it as a lie to end the conversation. Marjorie was very much alive. She lived in a tidy apartment in Toledo, and she had spent fourteen years waiting for someone to believe her. She cried when the detective called.
The detective had been building his case since Louises visit, quietly, with the help of Ohio authorities. A warrant for bigamy and fraud had been sitting in his drawer for three months. He had been waiting for one more thing, a second witness, and Louise had given him one in the form of a crossword.
Vince, as we knew him, did not get far. He drove my aunts car south on Route 10 and was stopped at a motel near the Ohio line by two state troopers who had been alerted by Ruiz before I finished the phone call. He had my aunts mothers ruby ring on his pinky and a suitcase full of papers with four different names.
He was charged with bigamy, fraud, identity theft, and exploitation of a vulnerable adult. The lab tested the cup of tea Louise had kept in a sealed jar in her sewing room, and found only a crushed over-the-counter sleep aid. It had not harmed her. Her heart had simply stopped in August, as the doctor said.
I held that fact in both hands for a long time. Aunt Louise did not die of a trick, she died in her sleep after leaving behind the one clue that could not be thrown away. She had solved him, square by square.
The ruby ring came back to me in a small plastic bag. So did the pension card, the car, and the bank accounts, which a judge unfroze the same week. The thirty-one boxes of crossword books were harder. Detective Ruiz and Sherry spent two weekends driving to every yard sale buyer in the county.
They found all of them but two. The neighbors had read about the case in the paper, and they brought the books back to the porch, one box at a time, with notes like, We did not know. Please keep them safe. A woman from the library put the stack on the table and refused a dollar.
Marjorie came to Midland in October. She sat with me in Louises sewing room, among the boxes, and told me she wished she had known my aunt. I said Louise would have loved her. We shook hands, and then we hugged for a long time.
That night I opened the last puzzle book to the very final clue, one Aunt Louise had not circled. Seven letters, a Greek island. She had left it blank. I picked up her pen and wrote the answer in, slowly, in ink. CORFU.