The black pickup with the Tennessee plates rolled slowly past my house a second time, and I stood at the kitchen window with a dish towel in my hands and my heart pounding like a drum. I could see the driver clearly now. He was not old at all. Under the cap and the gray wig and the heavy makeup, I saw the clean jaw of a man in his fifties. He turned his head and looked straight at my window, and then he gave a small, slow wave.
Keith Spradlin was still in my kitchen. He did not move fast, but he did not waste a second. He picked up his phone and said four words, and then he told me to step away from the window and sit down in the hall. Within three minutes there was a state police cruiser at each end of my street, and two plain cars came in from behind. The black pickup slowed at the stop sign, and I thought it might run. Instead it sat there with the engine idling.
They took him without a struggle. I watched from behind the curtain as four troopers stepped out of their cars with their hands on their holsters, and a young officer rapped on the window of the truck. The door opened. The man climbed out and stood in my street with his hands raised, wearing a wig and a corduroy jacket, looking suddenly small. Keith turned to me. “Mrs. Coomer,” he said quietly, “you are the first person who ever saw him and lived to say so.”
A stranger who pays eighty four dollars for a trembling old man on a Monday has no idea she is also buying a witness for a terrible crime.
His name was Lyle Garrison, fifty three years old, a former pharmacy technician from Crossville, Tennessee, who had lost his license in 2016. He had spent two years learning how to impersonate the dying. He read obituaries, found the widows, and collected the cards, the numbers, the names of men who could no longer object. He dressed as the old man he would one day be. The pills he sold on the highway between Somerset and Knoxville brought him four thousand dollars a week.
The state police found sixty one pill bottles in the cab of the truck and a notebook in the glove box, written in a neat tidy hand, listing eleven names. Six of them belonged to the dead men. Five belonged to the widows who were still alive. At the bottom of the page, he had written, Coomer, Rita Mae, Somerset. Beside it, a small question mark. I read the line over the shoulder of a trooper and had to sit down on my own hall floor.
Lyle had asked my name twice because he had been planning to use mine. He thought a woman who paid for a stranger might be a woman with a soft heart, and a soft heart is easy to fool. But I had looked at his face, and he had seen that I would remember it. That was why he drove past my house. He could not decide whether to run or to ask me to stay quiet. In the end, he did neither. He simply made a mistake.
The medical examiner reopened the files of the two widows that same week. I will not repeat everything that was found, but it was enough that the district attorney in Pulaski County stood on the courthouse steps with a reporter and said that the man in custody would face the most serious charges the commonwealth allowed. The families of the six dead men wrote letters to the judge. I wrote one too, and I mailed it with a stamp, and I felt a little better for having done it.
Keith Spradlin came to my house on a Sunday in April with a pecan pie and an envelope. In the envelope were eighty four dollars, in twenties and a five and some ones. I would not take it. He pressed it into my hand, and I pressed it back, and we went at it for ten minutes, like two old women at a church supper. At last he said, “Then let me do something else with it.” And I said, “That is a fine idea.”
We drove to the middle school, the one where I had worked in the lunchroom for twenty six years, and we gave the envelope to the principal. It went into a fund for children who could not pay for their meals. The principal, a tall woman named Mrs. Ballard, wept when she opened it. She said the fund was empty. She asked if she could name it. I said yes, and Keith said yes, and she wrote on a sheet of paper in marker.
The sign hangs now over the cash register in the cafeteria, where I used to stand and make change faster than the machine. It says, The Rita Mae Fund. No Child Goes Hungry Here. On Mondays I go back and sit at a table in the corner, and the children bring their trays over and tell me about their weekends. Last week a little girl in a purple coat told me I looked like her grandmother. I told her I would be honored.