“Now,” Kristen finished, and she swallowed hard. “Until now, Mama. He wrote that he saw Josh with his own eyes at the Branson campground, and he did not tell us because he did not want to be wrong. He was afraid of breaking our family on a hunch.” She held out the letter. Her hand was trembling so badly that the page rattled. The handwriting was unmistakable, the neat block printing of a man who had spent thirty years filling out railroad logbooks. I took it, and I put on my glasses, and I read the last message of Lloyd to the people he loved most.
“Kristen,” it began, “you are going to want my camper, because Josh is going to tell you to. I want you to read this before you say yes. Last July, when your mother and I took the trailer to the Pine Hollow campground in Branson, we spent a week in the back lot. In the evenings, I walked to the office to buy ice. On the Thursday, I saw your husband in the office at nine at night with the cash box of the owner open and a notebook. He was writing down names. He did not see me. I stood outside and listened. He was selling something he called a lifetime membership to retired couples. Eight thousand dollars each.”
I stopped reading and looked up. Arlene, who was sitting at the end of my table in a borrowed cardigan, had put her hand over the hand of her husband. “Go on, Mrs. Garrison,” she said gently. “We would like to hear.” I read. “There is no such thing, Kristen. The campground does not offer it. He had made up a brochure and a pretty receipt and signed the name of the owner. I counted twenty seven names in his notebook. That is two hundred sixteen thousand dollars. I think he means to leave the state when the people come to claim their sites. I think he wants the camper to live in, because it is the only home he can move in a night.”
A letter hidden in a bell speaks the clearest when the wind blows right.
The kitchen went silent. A fly buzzed against the window over the sink. Kristen sat down hard, and I thought for a moment that she might faint. “Mama,” she whispered, “he told me he was working on a new business. He said we would have enough for a house by Christmas.” She stared at the hands of her mother. “There were people at the campground, Mama. Old people. They hugged him. They brought him pies.” She began to cry in a harsh, soundless way, her shoulders heaving, and she put her face on her arms. I came around the table and put my arms around her, and held her like a child.
It was Bill Stokes who got up to make the telephone call. He is a retired deputy, it turns out, from a county in Oklahoma, a slow, careful man of seventy five who had been reading the letter over my shoulder and had not said a word. He asked me for the number of the sheriff in Taney County. He spoke to a detective for twenty minutes in a low voice. When he hung up, he said, “Mrs. Garrison, they have had eleven complaints this summer about a membership scam at that campground. They did not have a name. They do now.”
They arrested Josh at a gas station in Neosho on a Tuesday at dawn, with a duffel bag in the back seat and a road atlas open on the dashboard. Kristen had told them where he would be. She had called her husband the night before, calm as a stone, and asked him whether he needed any help packing. Josh had laughed with relief. “I was hoping you would come around,” he said. He confessed in the car. There were forty one victims in the end, and the total was four hundred thousand dollars, and most of it was gone.
The campground owner, an old man named Mr. Pruitt, turned out to be as much a victim as any of them, since his signature had been forged on every receipt. He sold part of his land to repay the memberships. A fund was raised by the church and the Elks Lodge and the Branson Chamber of Commerce, and by the last week of the year, every one of the couples got back at least half of their money. Josh pleaded guilty and was sentenced to eleven years. Kristen sat in the front row and did not cry.
She moved back into my house with her two boys that winter, into the room that used to be hers, with the bunk beds that Lloyd had built. She got a job at the credit union. She said she would never forgive herself for being so blind. I told her that blindness is what love does to a person, and that her father had also been blind to a good many things, and that it was one of the reasons I married him. She laughed, and then she sobbed, and then she let me make her a cup of tea.
Bill and Arlene, meanwhile, did not move into the camper at once. I suggested they park it in my backyard, where the old oak makes a shade. They said they could not impose. I said Lloyd would be offended if his camper sat unused in a lot. So they parked it by the fence, and Arlene hung her curtains, and Bill planted a row of tomatoes. In March, a check arrived from the insurance company, late, and they bought a lot a mile from my house and began to build a small cottage on it.
They moved out in September. On the day they left, Arlene came to my door in a yellow dress and handed me the little brass bell, polished and shining, with the clapper restored. “Mrs. Garrison,” she said, “this belongs on your porch.” I hung it from the porch beam, where Lloyd always wanted it. When the wind caught it that evening, it rang as clear as a church. Kristen came out onto the porch and stood next to me, and her boys came out behind her, and we all stood listening.
“Mama,” Kristen said, “do you think Daddy can hear it?” I looked up at the sky. “Honey,” I said, “I think he rang it himself.” The bell sounded once more, softly, as if in agreement. Then it was still. We stood in the failing light, the four of us, and for the first time since May, I felt the spare cot in the camper of my heart fold itself into a place that fit us all.