The man in the picture was Walter Hesch, the lawyer who had handled every paper of Leon and me since 1989. He drew up our wills. He filed the deed on our house. He sat in the front pew at the service for Leon and held my hand afterward. Nadine set her phone on the table between the saltines and the padlock. “Mrs. Albrecht, in March of 2019 Mr. Hesch brought a woman into my emergency room named Dolores Fiske. She was ninety years old and weighed seventy one pounds. He told us she had fallen. She had not fallen. She was starved, and she had marks on her wrists from a rope. He had her power of attorney, her bank accounts and her house.”
I sat down hard in my kitchen chair. Nadine kept going, gently, like a nurse who has said hard things many times. “I filed a report that night. Mr. Hesch showed up with signed papers and a note from a doctor friend, and the county closed the case in a week. Mrs. Fiske passed away that spring. Her house was sold in June. I never forgot his face, and I told myself that if I ever saw it again near an old person, I would not stay quiet.” She tapped the phone. “He took an envelope from your son in your driveway. Mrs. Albrecht, what exactly did you sign for Curtis in January?”
I told her about the papers for the bank, and the pen Curtis had put in my hand, and the man from the notary desk who had come to the house and never looked up. Nadine did not waste one minute. She called Detective Marcy Lindqvist of the Erie Police elder abuse unit, whom she had known since her nursing days, and then a caseworker at the Area Agency on Aging named Paul Danforth. Then she opened her trunk, brought in a pair of red handled bolt cutters, and said, “Mrs. Albrecht, would you like to do the honors?”
An eighty four year old widow in Erie, locked out of her own refrigerator by her son, is rescued by a Meals on Wheels driver who exposes the crooked family lawyer behind the scheme.
My hands were too weak, so Nadine held the cutters and I put both of mine over hers. The padlock fell on the linoleum with a clank I can still hear. Inside that refrigerator were a gallon of milk, two packs of bologna, a pizza box and half a lemon cake. Nadine heated a can of chicken noodle soup, the last one in my cupboard, and set a spoon in front of me. I ate it slowly. It was the best thing I have put in my mouth in eighty four years, and I cried right into the bowl, and Nadine cried too.
Shawna came down the stairs at noon in a bathrobe, saw the lock on the floor and two strangers at my table, and tried that car alarm laugh one more time. It did not work. Detective Lindqvist asked her very politely to sit down. Paul Danforth asked to see the paper I had signed. Within an hour they had found it in the dresser of Curtis: a durable power of attorney and a deed transferring my house on West 26th Street to my son, both notarized by Walter Hesch, both dated the same day I thought I was signing a bank card.
Curtis walked in at three with a pharmacy bag and stopped in the doorway. For a long moment he looked at the cut lock, then at me, then at the soup bowl. “Mom,” he said, and his voice cracked like it did when he was twelve and missed a note on the trumpet. “Walter said it was only until spring. He said you would be taken care of.” Detective Lindqvist said, “Mr. Albrecht, he took three hundred dollars a month from your mother as his fee, and he planned to sell this house in June.” Curtis sank onto the bottom stair and put his face in his hands.
They arrested Walter Hesch the next morning at his office on State Street, with his notary journal open on the desk. It turned out there were eleven other clients over seventy, from Millcreek to Harborcreek, with the same papers and the same bank arrangement. A federal grand jury charged him with forgery, theft from the elderly and fraud. The bank froze his accounts. By the first of May my Social Security was back in my own hands, along with seven thousand seven hundred sixty dollars that the county recovered for me, the full four months that had been taken.
The boy next door, Tyler Brandt, who had carried me soup cans for two dollars apiece, came over that evening with his mother and a grocery bag. He had saved the same two dollars in a jar all winter and wanted to give them back. I would not take a penny. I baked him a plate of oatmeal cookies instead, the first baking I had done in my own kitchen in months, and Paul Danforth signed me up for the food pantry at St. Andrew and a visiting nurse who came on Tuesdays. Nobody in Erie was going to count my crackers again.
Shawna was gone by the weekend with two garbage bags and no forwarding address. Curtis pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, and the judge, a woman named Patricia Gallagher, offered him a choice: county jail or a year in the drug treatment court program on Peach Street, with weekly checks and a job at the tire plant warehouse. Curtis took the program. I did not ask for punishment. I asked for my son back, and I told the judge so, and she looked at me over her glasses and said, “Mrs. Albrecht, that is the best sentence I have heard all year.”
That summer I gained eleven pounds. Nadine still stops by on Thursdays, no longer as a driver but as a friend, with a pie from the Giant Eagle and a folding chair for the porch. I hemmed the wedding gown of her niece Adaeze in July, my first dress in twenty years. The padlock hangs on a nail beside my back door, and I use it to hold the gate. Curtis called last Sunday, ninety days clean, and asked if he could come for supper. I told him the refrigerator is open, and it always will be.