I kept my hand on the folder and did not turn around. Behind me, two tables away, a chair scraped back softly on the carpet, and a tall man in a gray sport coat walked up to our table with a basket of Cheddar Bay biscuits in his hand, as casual as a waiter. “Ms. Holcomb, I am Detective Marcus Hale of the Horry County Sheriff Financial Crimes Unit,” he said, in a voice so quiet that only our table could hear. “Yolanda called me on Monday. I have been waiting for you to open that page.” He set the biscuits down. “Whenever you are ready, Madam. Take your time.”
I opened the last page. It was a letter on the stationery of the office of the detective, and the date at the top was nine days old. It said that a fraud investigation had been opened into the slot machine application on my iPad, that the parent company of the app had cooperated, and that the notary stamp on my condo title belonged to no one on the roster of South Carolina. Under that was a list of three names. At the bottom stood a line I read twice. “Subject Jason Reid is a witness and potential victim of coercion.” I turned to my sister, and she was staring at the page, gripping the edge of the table.
Connie began to talk, and she could not stop. A man named Dewey had been calling Jason for a year, she said, a man who ran an illegal betting ring out of Florence, who lent money at four times the rate of any bank and who sent pictures of the house of Jason to prove he knew where he slept. “He said he would burn it,” she said, sobbing. “He said he would burn the basement with Jason in it.” She grabbed my hand. “Barb, I was so scared. I took your passwords. I had a friend sign the notary. I thought I could pay them back before you ever woke up.”
A pair of Italian shears laid beside a chocolate cake gave one aunt the weekend to bring her sister back to the beauty chair in Myrtle Beach.
Detective Hale looked at me, and I nodded. “Ms. Holcomb, we are going to take Mr. Dewey into custody tonight,” he said. “We have been building the case for six months. With the cooperation of your sister, we can close it.” I gave my terms right there, with the biscuits cooling. The title on my condo was void, and my lawyer would file the paperwork Monday. The charges on the iPad would be disputed as fraud, and the app company had already promised to refund them. Jason would go into a treatment program for gambling in Columbia, and I would pay for it, as long as he stayed. Connie would give her full statement to the detective in the morning.
Jason, who had been sitting stiff as a fence post since the first page, put his face down on the table, between the cake and the biscuit basket, and wept. He is thirty eight years old, and he cried like a boy. “Aunt Barb, I did not know what to do,” he said. “They kept calling. They kept saying I owed them more. I played to win it back. I know how stupid that sounds.” I stroked his hair, the way I used to when he was small and I cut it in my kitchen for free. “Jason, it does not sound stupid,” I said. “It sounds like every person I have ever loved who got caught in a trap.”
The bridge ladies, all six of them, sat in a stunned half circle. Dolores, the oldest, a retired schoolteacher in a lavender cardigan, was the first to speak. “Barbara Jean, we should have known,” she said. “We should have asked you, instead of her.” One of the others reached over and squeezed my arm, and then another, until I was surrounded by a ring of soft, old, perfumed hands. A waiter appeared with a tray and set a fresh slice of chocolate wave cake in front of me, with a candle in it. “On the house, Madam,” he said, and he lit the candle. I blew it out.
That night, Detective Hale and four deputies took Dewey from a motel off Highway 501, with a laptop, a notebook full of names and sixty one thousand dollars in a duffel bag. By morning, Connie had given a full statement, nine pages long, and the detective told me the State Attorney would not charge her if she testified. She came to my condo at noon, pale and gray, and stood in my doorway holding a paper sack. Inside was a small pair of shears. They were my Italian shears, the ones I had owned since 1974, which she had pawned in March. She had gone and bought them back with her own money.
The money consequences were handled in an orderly way. The condo title was voided, and the app company returned ninety six thousand dollars once the fraud was documented. Jason completed ninety days in Columbia, and when he came home, he got a job at an auto parts store. On the first of every month, a money order for two hundred dollars arrived at my condo, with a card that said, For Aunt Barb, From the family that owes you. I kept every one of them in a hatbox.
In the name of my first stylist, Yolanda, who has worked the first chair of my first shop since 1985 and who saved me with a phone call, I started the Yolanda Chair Fund. It pays for treatment, counseling and legal help for older women and men on the Grand Strand who are being quietly robbed by their own family. In the first year, we helped forty one people. A manicurist of seventy one, with polish on her thumbs and a worried face, sat in the office and said, “I thought only crazy people got into this kind of trouble. I did not know it was just people.”
On a bright Saturday in June, I stood behind the first chair of the original Barbara Jean salon on Kings Highway, which the franchise had kept open. Yolanda was beside me, and between us, in the chair, sat Connie, in a smock. I held the Italian shears in my right hand. “Sister, I have not cut your hair since 1998,” I said. “Hold still.” She closed her eyes. I combed it out with my fingers and made the first snip, and a gray lock fell to the floor. The shoulders of Connie dropped for the first time in a year. In the mirror, we looked at each other, two old women, and we started to laugh.