The man in the cowboy hat took one slow step forward, and I saw Rick stop dead on the planks of the dock as if he had run into a glass wall. “Hello, Richie,” the stranger said again. “You sold my daddy a boat too. Right before he went into the Lakeview Care Center. You remember the boat, do you not? A twenty two foot runabout with a blue stripe. Daddy was eighty four years old. He paid for it with the money in his grandson college fund.” He spoke without heat, in the voice of a man who had said it to himself in the bathroom mirror a thousand times.
His name was Wade Pruitt. He was a county investigator with the Taney County prosecuting attorney, and he took out a leather folder and flashed a badge to nobody in particular. He said, “Mr. Hollis,” and nodded at me, “Ms. Pratt at the bank has been working with my office since June. She told us you were planning to come here today. I hope you do not mind that we came along.” He lifted two fingers. From behind the bait shop, from between the parked cars, from the shade of the boathouse, four deputies in tan uniforms stepped out onto the dock.
Sixty people stood frozen with their beer cans in their hands. Rick looked around like a man waking from a dream. He said, “Hey, hey now. This is a family event.” Wade Pruitt said, “It is, Richie. That is why I thought you might like to explain the matter in front of the family.” A deputy took Rick by the arm, politely, and turned him around, and another put on the handcuffs with a small metallic click that carried over the water as clearly as the voice on the telephone had done.
The mail carrier who walks eleven miles a day in all weather does not forget a debt, and he does not forgive a lie, but he can always teach a daughter to pay attention.
My daughter had not moved. Tammy was still looking at me from beside the cooler with her mouth open. I could see the questions going through her face, one after another, like cards. Where did the money go? Who is that man? What did Rick do? She came across the dock, slowly, with her flip flops slapping, and she stood in front of me. She said, “Daddy. Did he take all of it?” I said, “He took what you gave him.” She said, “Daddy, I signed the form. I signed because he told me he was going to put it in a better account.”
I looked at her. She was forty seven years old, with the eyes of her mother, and her lip was trembling. I said, “Tammy, you believed your husband.” She said, “I did.” I said, “That is not a crime.” She said, “It should be.” She laughed and cried at the same moment. Over her shoulder I saw my granddaughters watching us from the edge of the dock, holding on to one another. I opened my arms. Tammy walked into them, and I held her, a grown woman, like a small girl, while the boat rocked at its moorings.
The investigation took six weeks. Ms. Pratt and Mr. Pruitt, working together, assembled a case against Richard Hollis that included eleven victims in three counties, all of them elderly, all of them parted from their savings by the same smooth patter and the same promise of a better account. The boat was the thing that undid him. It was still in his name. It was still on the books. The county seized it from the dock at the marina, the very next morning, and sold it at auction for thirty one thousand dollars.
He pleaded guilty. The judge in Camden County gave him eleven years. Tammy filed for divorce the same week, and then, to my surprise, she moved into my house with the girls for the winter. She slept in her old room, under a poster of a band she had loved at sixteen. We ate supper together every night at the kitchen table. In February she told me that she had been angry at the wrong person, and that she wished she had been angry at herself sooner.
The bank restored the fund. It took three months, and most of the money came from the sale of the boat and from a restitution order. I wrote the check to the University of Missouri in my own hand, in August, for the first year tuition of Emily. She read the letter from the nursing school aloud to me in the kitchen. She said, “Grandpa, I am going to be a nurse like Grandma wanted.” She said it with the eyes of her mother full of tears. Hannah, who is a year behind, squeezed my arm and said she would go to Mizzou too.
Wade Pruitt came to my house that evening with a casserole from his wife and sat on my porch. He said his father had died believing he was a fool. He said he had spent three years wishing that someone would stand up on a dock and say it out loud. I told him I had only played a voicemail. He said, “Mr. Hollis, that is how it is done.” We drank iced tea until the stars came out over the street.
I kept the gold letters. The man from the auction house sent them to me in a cardboard tube, carefully peeled from the stern, with a note that said, These belong to you. They hang in my kitchen now over the sink. GRANDPAS GIFT. On Fridays I still put fifty dollars into a new account, in the names of the girls, with a bank manager I trust. Tammy goes with me to the window. We hand over the envelope together, and we watch the teller count it, bill by bill, and we do not say a single word.