The man with the notebook was named Gary Lasko, and Ms. Holloway had him by noon on Friday. He was sixty three, a retired insurance claims adjuster from Cheyenne, and he was sitting in a diner on Yellowstone Highway eating a patty melt when two deputies stood on either side of the booth. He had the notebook in his jacket. He did not even try to hide it. A man who has spent his life among the paperwork of the accidents of other people does not believe that paper can accuse him.
The notebook was worse than the attic. Page after page, in a neat engineer hand, were dates, readings of the temperature up there, the weight of my mother, the water left in the jug, the saltines gone, the times of her fevers. At the top of every page was the same heading: Estimated time to natural causes. Beneath it, in the last entry, Lasko had written a number of days, and the number was nine.
Ms. Holloway told me in the kitchen, standing, with her hand on the back of a chair. Tonya had taken out a life insurance policy on my mother in June, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, using my signature on a form I had never read, and naming herself as the beneficiary. Lasko, who owed money to the boyfriend of Brandi, had told her how long a frail woman of eighty one would last in summer heat without relief. He had been paid to come and check. He had been paid to watch.
A son who works far from home must still be able to read the face of the woman who raised him.
I do not remember much of the next minute. I know that I walked out to the garage and put my fist through the drywall, and that Ms. Holloway let me. Then I came back in and called my brothers. Wade is a lineman in Billings, and Travis teaches school in Rapid City. They drove all night. By seven in the morning, three grown men who had been raised by one small woman in a trailer were sitting on her bed, holding her hands, and she was scolding us for not eating the toast, and asking whether any of us had remembered to bring a coat.
Tonya was arrested at the house of her mother in Cheyenne two days later, after she cashed a check from the account where the pension of my mother had gone. Brandi was arrested at a motel in Rawlins with the rifles of my father in the trunk. The boyfriend, whose name was Dusty Kincaid, turned himself in on Monday, being the kind of man who always runs out of road. Each of them said it had been the idea of somebody else.
The county attorney charged them all. Conspiracy to commit murder was the heaviest count, and it stood, because of the notebook and the temperature logs and the policy. Tonya pleaded guilty to conspiracy, forgery, and exploitation of a vulnerable adult, and the judge in Casper gave her fourteen years. Brandi received eight. Lasko, who had been in no hurry to speak, was talking before the end of the week. He gave up two more cases in Wyoming and one in Utah.
I stood in front of that judge and read a statement I had written on the rig, on the back of a safety form. I said that my wife and I had been married nineteen years and that I did not recognize her. I said the only thing I would ask was that she never be allowed near my mother again. The judge looked over her glasses and said, “Mr. Dahl, that is the easiest request I have granted this year.”
The house had to be sold, because of the loan, and I let it go without a pang. The bank cleared the ninety thousand dollars once the forgery was proven, but the stink of that attic was in every board. I bought a small ranch on the south side of Casper, one story, with a ramp, and a bedroom for Mom that faces the mountain at sunrise. I carried the camping mattress to the dump myself. I did not look back at it.
I quit the Bakken in January. The company offered me a foreman job at the Casper yard, nights, and I took it, because it meant I could sleep under the same roof as my mother and cook her breakfast. Her blood pressure came down. The color came back to her cheeks. She began to garden, in a pair of old gloves, in a raised bed that my brother Wade built on his weekend, and she grew tomatoes the size of softballs.
On the first hot day of summer, the temperature reached ninety seven again. I came home from the yard at six in the morning, and she was sitting on the porch in a lawn chair, in the shade of a big maple I had planted that spring, with a glass of lemonade in each hand. She held one out to me. She said, “Sit, sweetheart. It is nice to be cool.” I sat. We stayed there until the sun climbed over the mountain, saying almost nothing, listening to the sprinkler in the garden and to a mourning dove somewhere in the maple. It was the quietest morning of my life, and I did not want it to end.