Part 3 — The Warning Letter
Ed Wojcik read the name in a voice that did not rise or fall. “Lorraine Pike.” In the third row, a gray-haired woman in a lavender cardigan, who had been serving Jell-O salad all afternoon and who ran the grief group in the basement of our church, set her spoon down very gently on the tray. Rhonda closed her eyes. “My sister,” she said.
Ed laid out the whole scheme in order. Lorraine Pike ran a free grief support group in Ashtabula, and later in Erie, and she kept the notes: who had lost a spouse, who lived alone, who had a pension or a paid-off house. She introduced a lonely man to her sister. The sister married him, and within a year the accounts began to open. The two earlier husbands in Ohio had been found that way, and so had I.
The letter from the second husband, Gordon Pell, was dated three weeks before he fell from his fishing boat in 2016. Ed read the most important line aloud. “If anything happens, do not blame Rhonda alone. Look at her sister, who keeps the notes. I think she is the one who decides.” The coroner at the time had ruled the drowning an accident, and Ed said plainly that nothing in thirty years of detective work, nor in the review he had just completed, had changed that. It had been a cold day on the lake, and Gordon was not a young man.
I let out a breath I did not know I was holding. I had spent a week imagining things about my wife that no husband should imagine, and the truth, when it came, was smaller and sadder and cleaner. She had not harmed a man in that way. She had harmed a great many of them anyway, in the ordinary manner of a person who is good with a smile and a clipboard. The letter had not been a warning of murder. It had been a warning of exactly what had happened to me.
Rhonda opened her eyes. “Hal, I was going to tell you,” she said. “I wanted to stop after Gordon. Lorraine said we had come too far.” I looked at the woman who had cooked my supper for three years, who had smelled of vanilla and tucked a blanket over my knees. “You could have stopped on any day of the three years,” I said. “You had a thousand of them.” She nodded. She did not say anything else.
Pastor Lindgren stepped forward and asked, very gently, that everyone remain in the fellowship hall until the officers arrived, and that no one say anything more to the sisters that they could not say in front of a judge. Mark came to my side, white to the lips. “Dad, I told you to keep quiet.” “You did,” I said. “I did it for three months. That is long enough for one lifetime.”
Two detectives from the Erie County district attorney came for Rhonda and Lorraine at the end of the supper. They did not use handcuffs in the hall, out of respect for the Polish ladies and the pierogies. The sisters were charged with identity theft, forgery and theft from an older person in two states, and the case of Ohio was added to it by agreement. Ed Wojcik had spent two years of his retirement building it, and he stood by the coffee urn and ate a piece of ham loaf, which he said was the best he had had since 1992.
The money came back in stages. The credit accounts were declared fraudulent and wiped clean in my name, and the bank that had opened them was fined for failing to look at a signature. The $41,500 taken from the pension account, which Ed said had been frozen in a single transfer account in Cleveland, was returned within the month. The rest was recovered from the sale of a condo that Lorraine owned in Florida. I put it back in the college fund for the grandchildren, where Joyce and I had meant it to be.
The sentences were handed down in the spring. Lorraine, who had planned everything, received a long term in federal custody. Rhonda received a shorter one, because she had told the whole story to the prosecutor in the first week and had identified fourteen other victims by name. Two of those men are in their eighties and were happy to be telephoned. One of them drove up from Youngstown to shake the hand of Ed and said he thought he had been going soft in the head.
Mark came to my house the Saturday after the potluck, and stayed. He fixed the rail on the back steps, put a new bulb in the garage, and finally said, with his hands in his pockets, “Dad, I should have asked you what happened instead of telling you what to do.” I said that was the oldest mistake in the family and that I had made it myself, many times, with him. We had a cup of coffee on the steps. It was a small peace, but it was real.
The folder with rubber bands was only paper, but every sheet in it was a person who had been told to keep quiet and had finally been heard. I wrote to each of the fourteen men. Some wrote back. We have a Christmas list now, a sort of club that nobody wanted to join and everyone is glad to have.
On the first of October I went down to the garage and opened the old green tackle box. Under the spinner lures was the letter from the bank, folded small, and the back of the receipt from the bait shop with every date and dollar in my own pencil. I did not throw them away. I put them in a drawer of the workbench, with a note on top that said: HAL, YOU WERE RIGHT TO WRITE IT DOWN. Then I went upstairs and made my own supper, and it was a good one.