I did not sleep, and I did not call the police that night. I sat in the kitchen with the picture of the man in the tan jacket until the sun came up over Madison Street. His name was Raymond Teague. He was the older brother of my Loretta. In the spring of 1984 he came to our door, thin and shaking, and asked to see the ring of his mother. It was a small diamond that the mother of Loretta had worn for fifty years, and it sat in the jewelry box on our dresser. Loretta said yes. Raymond walked out with the ring and a bag full of gambling debt, and she never saw either again.
“Why did you swear never to say his name?” people would have asked me, if I had ever told anyone. The truth is that Loretta was ashamed for him. She said a brother can fall, and a family can still choose to keep the door cracked open. She forgave him in her heart but could not bear to hear his name. So I kept my promise for forty one years. Now I picked up the phone and called Mrs. Odom at the bank. “Patrice,” I said, “do not call the police on that man yet. Let me find him first.” She was quiet a moment. “Cliff, I already pulled the stills. He left a phone number on the withdrawal slip.”
I drove to the Starlite Motel on the east side of Muncie, where the number belonged. The man who opened the door was seventy nine years old and thin as a fence rail. He saw me and sat down hard on the bed, and the first thing he said was, “Cliff, I have not spent a dime.” Beside him on the bedspread sat a gym bag. He unzipped it. It was full of banded cash, thirty eight thousand, two hundred dollars exactly, and on top of it lay a tiny velvet pouch. “Brielle called me three weeks ago,” Raymond said. “She found my letters in the jewelry box of Loretta. She said you wanted to see me before it was too late.”
An eighty one year old man from Muncie finds the long lost brother of his late wife, who returns his stolen money and her mother ring, while the granddaughter who exploited him faces the law.
Raymond told it slowly. He had quit gambling in 1993 and had been sober thirty years, working as a janitor at a school in Terre Haute. Every Christmas he wrote Loretta a letter, and every Christmas she wrote back on the same blue paper and told no one. Brielle had found them in the false bottom of the jewelry box, the very one my hands could never open. She called Raymond with a deal. “She said she would give me a share if I picked up the family money at the bank, with your ID,” he said. “I took the cash because I knew something was wrong. I wanted to put it in your hand myself.” Then he opened the velvet pouch. It held the ring of his mother.
“I bought it back in 1991 from a pawnbroker in Gary,” Raymond whispered. “It took me seven years of saving. I never found the courage to bring it to her.” I could not speak. I took the ring and closed my fist around it, and for the first time since Loretta passed I cried in front of another person, with no camera in the room. Raymond cried too. When we were done he pulled out an old phone and played me a recording. It was the voice of Brielle, clear as a bell, telling him exactly how to use my license and how to keep me from finding out. “That is every word she said,” he told me.
We took the bag and the recording to Detective Sergeant Dana Whitlow at the Muncie police station that afternoon. Mrs. Odom met us there with a folder, and she brought a forensic document examiner from Indianapolis, who looked at my signature on the LLC papers and said flatly that it was traced. The notary stamp belonged to a woman who had never met me. By supper time a patrol car was parked outside my brick house. Brielle came home from her friend with a bag of takeout and a ring light under her arm, and she walked straight into the kitchen where Raymond and I were sitting side by side.
She tried every excuse she had. She said it was all legal, that I had been confused, that Raymond was a stranger who would steal from me. Then my son Dale walked in behind her. I had called him from the motel and told him to drive down from Indianapolis. He listened to the recording on the speaker with his jaw tight and his face turning white. “Brielle,” he said, “you told me Dad was losing his mind.” She said nothing. Detective Whitlow read her rights in my own kitchen while the refrigerator hummed, and Dale held the door as she walked out, and he did not look at her once.
Mrs. Odom did one more kindness. She had the bank return every dollar from the withdrawal to a new account in my name only, with Dale and Raymond as witnesses.
It took four months. Brielle pleaded to forgery and fraud, got two years of probation, and was ordered to repay every cent plus the legal fees, forty one thousand dollars in all. I told her lawyer she could start by taking down all three hundred videos. She did, with a judge watching. The video company shut the account, and four million views vanished in an afternoon. Dale drove down on a Sunday and stood on my porch with his hat in his hands. “Dad, I was a fool,” he said. “I believed her over you.” I told him I knew. Then I handed him a coffee.
Raymond lives in my spare room now. We sit at the kitchen table every morning with two cups of coffee and two cups for the ones we miss. On the first Saturday of spring we drove out to the cemetery plot, and Raymond set a blue envelope beside the stone of Loretta, the last letter he never got to send. Last week I pressed the latch of the jewelry box, and for once my fingers held still, and the false bottom clicked open. I laid the ring of his mother inside beside the reading glasses. “Loretta,” I said to the empty room, “your brother came home, and I never said his name until I got to say it to his face.”