The note taped to the post of the stall was written in blue ballpoint on a page torn from a logbook, in a hurried and shaky hand, and I read it by the light of the flashlight of the trooper with my breath making clouds in the cold. Mrs. Fritz, I am sorry. My name is not Tom.
They were following me, and I did not know where else to leave it. Please do not touch the bag. Call the Nebraska State Patrol, and tell them Eddie Lansing is turning himself in at the truck stop in Sidney. You were kind to me, and I will not forget it.
I handed the page to the trooper, who read it twice. He was a young man with red cheeks and a bandage on his thumb, and he looked at me with what I can only call respect. “Mrs. Fritz,” he said, “you have just given us the break we have been waiting on for six months.” The blue heeler pushed her cold nose into my hand. I stood in the barn coat of my late husband among the boxes, in a stall that smelled of hay and diesel, and I did not know whether to laugh or sit down in the straw.
The trooper called for backup on his radio. Within an hour my farmyard was full of patrol cars with blue lights turning in the dazzling snow, and two men in dark jackets from the Drug Enforcement office in Denver stepped out of a gray sedan. They set up a table in my kitchen. I made coffee for eleven people, and I served the rest of the beef stew. Nobody had told me that an old cafeteria cook could be of such use to the law.
A stranger who knocks in a blizzard may be running from something far worse than the cold, and the supper you give him may be the first kindness he has had in months.
They found Eddie Lansing at the truck stop in Sidney at eleven that morning, sitting alone in a booth with a cold cup of coffee and an empty plate. He did not run. He put out his wrists when the officers came in, and he said, “I have been waiting for you.” By evening, he had told everything. He was a long haul driver from Iowa, forty four years old, deep in debt, and a group in Omaha had threatened his daughter unless he moved a trailer for them. He had been sick with fear for two days.
The trailer had held two million dollars in prescription medicine, and the gang had meant to sell it across three states. Eddie had planned to disappear in the blizzard, to hide the cargo and the cash in the first quiet place he could find, and then call the authorities. My farm had been the only light on the whole dark road. The agents told me he had put the duffel bag in my barn on purpose, because he wanted whoever found it to be an honest person, and he said I was the sort who would call.
I was asked to testify at the trial in Lincoln. I wore my navy suit and the old tie pin of Werner, and I told the jury about the stew and the bread, and the way the young man had said please and thank you. A defense lawyer asked me whether I was not a little foolish to feed a stranger at night. I said, “Sir, I have been feeding strangers for thirty years in a school cafeteria. None of them ever gave me a reason to stop.” The jury smiled. The judge hid his own behind his hand.
Eddie testified against the ring from Omaha, and the whole operation was dismantled. He received a reduced sentence, eighteen months, and he served it at a federal camp in Colorado, where he learned to cook. His daughter, a shy girl of fifteen named Chloe, wrote me a letter on lined paper in her careful print. She said her father had told her about the woman with the blue heeler and the beef stew. She asked if she could send me something. I wrote back and said a letter would do.
They came together the following winter. A battered pickup pulled into my yard on a Sunday afternoon in January, with snow falling softly, and a man stepped out in a clean coat with a pie box in his hands. He stood at the foot of my steps, hat in hand, and could not seem to climb them. Chloe went up first and knocked. I opened the door, and he said, in a voice that trembled, “Mrs. Fritz, I owe you a supper.”
I let them in, and we sat around my kitchen table, three of us and the old heeler under it. The pie was apple, with a lattice top, and it was good. Chloe told me about her new school, and Eddie told me about his job as a short order cook in a diner in Cheyenne. When it was time to leave, he shook my hand and held it a moment. “Next January,” he said, “when the storm comes, you call me. I will bring the stew.” I said it was a deal.