Frank Delahunt carried the brass clock out of my house in a pillowcase at nine that night, and I stood on the porch my husband painted every third spring and watched the taillights go down Lincoln Avenue. Michael put his arm around me. He did not say anything. The two of us had just spent an hour in the kitchen, taking every dish out of the cupboards and every photograph off the walls, looking for anything Dale might have touched. My son found a little black button under the rim of the dining table. He held it between two fingers like a dead insect and began to shake.
The next morning Frank came back with a gray briefcase and a pot of coffee. He sat at my table and told me the rest, patiently, the way a good teacher gives a hard lesson. The car dealerships belonged to Dale, and Dale belonged to a man in Chicago. Cash came in from selling drugs, cash went through the dealerships as car sales, and cash came out clean. For five years my husband had quietly built the case, one tax return at a time, inside a locked drawer of his study, and the FBI had been waiting for the day the books were ready.
I asked the question I was afraid of. “Frank, did Dale have anything to do with the stroke?” He took a long breath. “Mrs. Garner, I have asked myself that every night since October. The doctors say Walter had a stroke. I believe them. But the clock was in his office, and the batteries were new, and Dale heard every word he said on the telephone for ten months. Two days before he died, your husband told me that Dale had come by the house and asked him how the filing was going. Walter said he sat there sweating for an hour.”
A man who keeps honest books will one day balance the whole account on behalf of those he loved.
The microphone had been recording to a small card hidden inside the base of the clock. Frank held the card up to the window. “Everything Walter said at that desk,” he said. “And everything Dale said back to whoever he reported to. It is sitting right here, Mrs. Garner. We did not even need to break in. Dale gave us the evidence himself.” He sounded almost cheerful, and a little ashamed to be. Then he looked at me, and the cheer went out of his face. “I will need you to do something very hard,” he said. “I will need you to go to church on Sunday.”
I did. I wore my navy dress and the pearl earrings Walter gave me for our fortieth anniversary, and I sat in the third pew from the front with Michael on my right. Dale and his wife Sandra sat across the aisle. During the passing of the peace, Dale came over, his big warm hands held out, and said, “Evie, I miss him every single day.” I took his hands. I looked straight into his kind blue eyes, the eyes that had stood beside my son at the altar. I said, “I know you do, Dale.” And I smiled the way you smile at a student who has not yet read the ending.
The agents came into the parking lot while the choir was still singing the last hymn. Eleven of them, in navy jackets, quiet as shadows. Dale walked out of the church into the sunshine with Sandra on his arm, and he saw them, and he stopped. He turned slowly and found me on the church steps. I will never forget his face. It was not anger. It was confusion, the plain bewilderment of a man who cannot understand how the quiet accountant managed to reach out of the grave and put a hand on his shoulder.
He pleaded guilty in August to racketeering, money laundering, and obstruction. The man in Chicago was arrested three weeks later at the wedding rehearsal of his daughter, and the dealerships were put into the hands of a trustee. Dale was sentenced to twenty two years. Sandra came to my door the night before he went in. She was gray and small and shaking. She said she had not known, and I believed her. I let her in and made tea, and the two of us sat at my kitchen table not speaking for a long time, two women who had been given the same sorrow from opposite ends.
Frank settled the estate in November. Six hundred and twelve thousand dollars, and a letter from my husband to be opened on the day the case closed. Walter wrote that he was sorry for the secrets, that he had hated every minute of them, and that he had kept going only because he could not bear to let a man like Dale poison a town he loved. He ended it with a line about my grading. “Evie, you were right about the collars,” he wrote. “I was just too proud to say so.” I laughed so hard I had to put the paper down.
I gave a hundred thousand dollars to the school where I taught, for a scholarship in the name of my husband that sends a quiet boy or girl with a good head for numbers to college every year. Michael moved back to Evansville in the spring. He sells software from the spare bedroom now, and he comes down for supper three nights a week. He sits where his father sat. Sometimes he irons a shirt for me, on purpose, and does the collars wrong, and we both pretend not to notice.
On the first anniversary of the day Walter died, I took the brass clock out of the evidence bag, which the FBI had kindly returned, and I set it on the mantel with the microphone removed. It still ticks. It is a handsome clock, whatever it was used for. I wound it that evening and listened to it count the minutes, and I said, out loud, to the quiet room: “You were the bravest accountant I ever met, Walter. And I never once had to check your arithmetic.”