Part 3 — Room Twelve
The deputy ran her finger down the page of the motel register and read the name out loud, evenly, as if she were reading a grocery list. “Room 12, Starlite Motor Court, Central Avenue, Hot Springs. Registered to Troy Maddox. Second guest, one adult female.” Brandi made a small sound, and her wine glass slipped out of her fingers and broke on the porch boards.
It was Cody who spoke. He had come up from the dock slowly, and he was holding his bottle by the neck like something he had forgotten how to put down. “Troy is your brother,” he said to his wife. “You told me he was in Texas.” Brandi did not answer. Her face had gone as white as the porch rail I welded out of drill pipe and painted myself.
The deputy explained it with great patience. Troy Maddox had been released from a county jail in the spring, where he had served time for using the identities of other people. He had been sleeping in the cabin on weeknights when no guests were booked, and he was the one who reopened the old Visa of Junie. The information needed to do it, the Social Security number and the maiden name of my wife, had been written on the power of attorney that Brandi put in front of me on a gurney.
I had thought for months that I was a foolish old man who had signed the wrong paper. Now I understood that the paper had been chosen for a purpose. “Mr. Rainwater,” the deputy said, “I am sorry. That is a hard thing to learn on your own porch.” “I have learned harder things on this lake,” I said, and it was true, though it did not feel like it.
The locksmith, who had said nothing all this time, quietly set a new brass key into my palm and asked if I wanted the old deadbolt kept for evidence. The deputy bagged it herself. The realtor, whose white jeans were stained with spilled wine, apologized to me three times, and she meant it each time, and then she pulled the sign out of the yard with her own hands.
Troy was found that same evening, in Room 12, watching a ball game with a woman who had no idea whose card had paid for the room. He gave his name without argument. The deputy told me later that he seemed relieved to be found, which is not a thing you hear often. The woman was released after she gave a statement, and she went home to Malvern.
The courts moved the way they do. The county voided the listing and every rental since July. Brandi had collected $41,000 from guests who thought they were renting from the owner, and the state treated that as theft by deception. The money she still had was frozen, and the bass boat she had bought, a thing of fiberglass and vanity, was sold to pay back the guests. A few of them wrote me kind letters. One from Dallas apologized for her review about the weird old welding stuff.
Brandi pleaded guilty, and the judge sentenced her to supervised release, repayment of every dollar, and community service. Troy received the sentence the law gave him for the fraud on the card. Brandi asked to speak at the end of the hearing. She did not look at me. She said that she had thought of the cabin as a number and never as a place where a man had loved his wife, and she asked the court to be as hard on her as the law allowed. The judge said it would be plenty hard.
Cody drove up to the cabin the next Saturday in his own truck. He stood at the bottom of the porch steps for a long time before he asked if he could come up. “Dad, I let her do it. I did not read what I signed either.” “You signed a lot of things when you were small,” I said. “Mostly crayon.” He laughed, and then he did not, and I held out my arm and he came up the steps.
We spent the weekend replacing what had been taken. He sanded the porch rail where a stranger had stuck a hook for a wet towel. I found the recipe cards of Junie in a kitchen drawer, in her own handwriting, and set them where she used to keep them. The green shutters, which she painted herself, had faded to the shade of old money, and Cody said, “Let me do those, Dad.” He did, in a day and a half, with a little brush.
A cabin built with your own hands cannot be taken by anyone who has not carried the lumber. I said that out loud on the dock on Sunday evening, and Cody, with the last of the paint on his hands, said it was the best thing he had heard all year.
I no longer lend my power of attorney to anyone, and the paper at the courthouse says so in black ink. The new brass key hangs from the mirror of my truck next to the fishing hook Cody tied when he was eight. The lake was still and the sky went orange behind the pines. My boy sat down beside me on the dock, our feet over the water, and we watched the sun go all the way down together.