Deacon Moreau told me what he had found in the kitchen of Mrs. Brandt in a voice so low that I had to press the receiver against my ear. “Miss Tasha,” he said, “she is sitting at her table in her church hat. Her wrists are fine, and her mind is fine. But somebody locked her in the pantry this morning, and she banged on the door with her cane for four hours. Her granddaughter told her it was for her safety.” I stood at my window in the Citizens Bank on Front Street, fifty four years old, smiling at a woman in sunglasses, with my free hand flat on the counter to keep it from shaking.
I said, “Thank you, sir, I understand,” the way I say it to any customer, and I hung up. Then I smiled at Kristen. “Madam, the manager will be with you in just a moment, and I need to make a copy of your identification. May I see your license?” She dug into her bag. I could see her hands. The nails were bitten raw, and a small tremor ran through the fingers. In the back of the bank, I heard the soft click of the door of the manager, Mr. Rousseau, and the quiet shuffle of two sheriff deputies coming in from the side entrance.
The deacon had called 911 from the kitchen telephone of Mrs. Brandt, and the dispatcher had called the sheriff, and the sheriff had called Mr. Rousseau, who had pushed the silent alarm that my knee had already pressed. In the parking lot, a man in a gray truck was waiting at the curb with the engine running, thirty one years old, with a ball cap pulled low. He was the boyfriend of Kristen, and he had made her sign the power of attorney and then forged the rest. I kept the smile on my face and the license in my hand.
A power of attorney slid across a bank counter gave one teller the afternoon to bring a granddaughter back to her grandmother in Natchitoches.
I gave my terms across the counter, in the soft voice that I use for a customer who is about to have a very bad day. “Kristen, I want you to look at me. I know you are not a bad girl. I have known your grandmother for twenty seven years, and she talks about you every first Tuesday, even when she does not say your name. The deputies are going to walk you to the back room, and you are going to tell them about the man in the truck. Mrs. Brandt is safe. She is sitting at her kitchen table with a cup of coffee. Nobody is going to hurt you.”
Kristen took off her sunglasses. Her eyes were gray and swollen. “I did not lock her in,” she whispered. “Jimmy did. He said it was only for an hour, only until we had the money. I stood outside the pantry door the whole time, and I could hear her tapping, and I could not make myself open it.” Her face crumpled. “I have been clean eleven days. He told me if I did not do this, he would put me back on the street. I did not know how to say no to anyone.”
Then the panic took her. Kristen snatched the power of attorney off my counter, spun around, and sprinted across the lobby for the front doors of the bank, with the paper crumpled in her fist. She might have made it, but Mr. Leblanc, our security guard of twenty two years, seventy one years old and still built like a barrel, had been standing in the vestibule since the alarm. He stepped across the glass doors with both arms out and said, in his deep Creole voice, “Not that way, cher. Come sit by me.”
Kristen stopped short. Her chest heaved. Mr. Leblanc did not touch her. He pointed to the leather chair by the safe deposit window, and she walked to it and sat. The deputies came out of the back, and one of them knelt beside her and spoke quietly. Outside, two more cruisers pulled up behind the gray truck, and the man in the ball cap was out of it before he could put it in gear. Through the plate glass, I watched them lead him across the lot in handcuffs.
The money consequences were simple. Jimmy Doucet was charged with forgery, false imprisonment and exploitation of an elderly person, and the power of attorney was voided by a judge within the week. Not one dollar of the three hundred eighty thousand was released. Mrs. Brandt declined to press charges against her granddaughter, and she asked only that Kristen go to the program in Alexandria, which she paid for from her own savings. The bank gave me a plaque, and I put it in a drawer.
Mrs. Brandt started the Emile Brandt Fund, in the name of her husband who passed in 2008, and I sit on its board. It pays for training for bank tellers to spot elder fraud, and for treatment and respite for families, in Natchitoches, Sabine and Winn parishes. In the first year we trained one hundred and twelve tellers and placed twenty six people in treatment. One teller in Many stopped a withdrawal of sixty thousand dollars, and the old farmer whose money it was came into the bank the next day with a pecan pie.
On the first Tuesday of December, Mrs. Brandt came to my window in her white gloves and her church hat, and Kristen stood beside her, ninety days clean, in a plain blue dress. The old woman slid a deposit slip across the counter, in her fishhook handwriting, and Kristen slid a small wax paper packet beside it. “It is a praline,” she said, shyly. “I made it. Grandmother taught me.” I looked at the signature on the slip. The T had a little hook on the end, and so did the one beside it.