The knock came at seven in the morning, three firm raps, and I was already in the hallway with my robe tied tight, because I had not slept. A bank account does not log in from Orlando by accident. Harold had been in the ground five years that spring. I opened the door on the chain. On my porch stood a man in a gray suit with a leather folio, and beside him a uniformed officer of the county sheriff, young and polite, holding his hat. The man in the suit said, “Mrs. Whitcomb? I am Gregory Pell, the fraud investigator for First Prairie Bank. I think you were expecting us.”
I let them in. I did not know what else to do. The kitchen where Harold and I had eaten supper for thirty eight years suddenly seemed too small for three people and a folio. I made coffee because my hands needed something to do. Mr. Pell opened his folder and set out the documents very gently, the way a doctor lays out an X ray. He had pulled the transfer request, the power of attorney, the logins from the last eleven months. “I will be direct,” he said. “The account was accessed on a computer registered to a woman named Gloria Dunmore.”
Gloria Dunmore was the mother of Lauren, my daughter in law. I had known her for eleven years. We had shared Thanksgivings. She had cried at the funeral of Harold and brought a pound cake for a month afterward. I felt the floor tilt. Mr. Pell said that the power of attorney bearing the signature of Harold was a forgery, dated eleven months after the funeral, and that a notary in Kansas City had admitted she signed it in a hurry without checking the identification of the man in front of her. He said that no money had left the account yet. The bank had frozen it in time.
“Where was the money going?” I asked. Mr. Pell turned a page. It was heading to an account in the name of Gloria Dunmore, he said, for the amount of twenty six thousand dollars, which was the entire balance of the savings Harold had set aside for the grandchildren. I stared at the wall. Harold had called it the egg fund. He kept it in a bank an hour away so he would not be tempted to spend it. I had forgotten the account entirely. Gloria had not.
Grief makes some people tender and others careless, and we cannot always tell which until the account is opened.
I asked whether Danny knew. The officer cleared his throat. He said they had spoken to my son at six that morning, at the motel in Orlando where he was staying with his wife and children, and that he had been entirely shocked. He had agreed to fly home at once. And Lauren had asked the officer for a private word, and had told him everything. I had to put my coffee down. Lauren had told? Of all the people in that family, I had thought her the least likely to be brave.
Danny called me from the airport an hour later. His voice was so hoarse I hardly knew him. He said that the Disney trip, the whole thing, the tickets, the resort, the character breakfast, had been paid for with money from the egg fund. Lauren had believed her mother when she said Harold had left it as a gift for the family. She had never seen the power of attorney. When she asked to see something in writing, Gloria had cried and said she did not want to dishonor the memory of Harold by making it official.
“Mom, I swear to you,” Danny said. “We did not know. When Lauren saw the bank text on my phone, from the old account, she went white. She finally asked her mother in the hotel room, and Gloria broke down. She told us she had been drowning in debt. The house, the medical bills for her husband, everything. She said she meant to put it back. I have never seen Lauren so angry. She slammed the door and went to the lobby and called the sheriff herself.” I realized I was crying. I was proud of her. I was so proud of that girl.
They landed at noon. I met them at the airport, and I did not know what to expect. Danny came through the gate with a suitcase in each hand and a child asleep on each shoulder, and behind him, her face blotchy and her eyes swollen, walked Lauren. She stopped three feet from me. She said, “Mrs. Whitcomb, I took your granddaughter to a theme park with money that was not mine to spend. I will pay back every cent. I do not expect you to forgive me today.” I did not answer. I just reached out and pulled her into my arms.
We sat in the car in the parking garage, the four of us, with the children waking up in the back. I told Lauren that I did not blame her. I said her mother had made a choice, and it was hers to answer for, and Lauren had made a better one by calling the police. Danny put his hand over his eyes. The littlest one, Mia, asked in her sleepy voice whether we had missed the fireworks. Nobody could answer, and then everybody laughed, a wet, wobbly laugh that filled the car.
Gloria turned herself in on Thursday. She entered a plea and was ordered to repay everything in monthly payments, with probation and counseling. I went to see her once, in a plain room with a table. She would not meet my eyes. I told her I forgave her, and I meant it, and that she had a granddaughter who still loved her. She cried into her hands. Before I left, I asked her to write a letter to Mia, to be opened at eighteen, explaining what she had learned. She said she would.
The egg fund is back in the bank now, in the name of the children, with a note in the file in my own hand. Lauren took a second job at the library and insists on putting in two hundred dollars a month, though I tell her it is not necessary. Last summer we all went to Orlando again, for real, on a vacation we paid for ourselves. I sat on a bench in front of the castle with a lemon ice, and Mia ran up and said, Grandma, Grandpa would have loved this. I looked at the sky and said, I know he does.