“…and his name was…” Royce Tidwell said, and I leaned across the glass counter of the pawn shop, my hands flat on a display of old wedding rings, my heart thundering. He was sixty one, broad and balding, in a flannel shirt, with the look of a man who had carried a secret for a very long time. He said, in a low voice, “Harlan Voss. Deacon Harlan Voss, of Pleasant Hill Baptist. He drove a green Chevrolet. He paid cash for room fourteen, and he told me, a fifteen year old boy, to forget his face. I never did.”
I knew the name. All of Colbert County had known the name. Harlan Voss had been the church treasurer for thirty years, a tall, silver haired, soft spoken man who passed the collection plate every Sunday and smiled at the children. He moved to Texas in 1980, they said, for his health. I stood in the little shop, with the smell of old leather and gun oil in my nose, and I tried to understand why my husband, a gentle man who never raised his voice, had hidden a photograph of that man car inside a guitar for forty five years.
Royce slid the cassette tape across the counter. He said he had a player in the back, an old Panasonic that his daddy had used for dictation. We went into the cramped little office, among shelves of banjos and television sets. He put in the tape, and pressed play. At first there was only hiss. Then a girl voice came out of the speaker, young and quick and frightened. “Earl, it is Bonnie. If you are hearing this, then you did what I asked. Please do not tell Darlene yet. I have to tell you what I found.”
An envelope taped inside a guitar body, a motel room door in a Polaroid, and a voice on a cassette that nobody had heard in forty five years.
I put my hand over my mouth. It was my sister voice. I had not heard it in forty five years. She told Earl, on that scratchy old tape, that she had been keeping the books for the church building fund, as a volunteer, and that she had discovered the deacon was taking money from it. A little each month, for years. Thirty one thousand dollars. She had gone to him quietly, thinking he would explain. He had threatened her. He had told her that no one would ever believe a nineteen year old girl over a deacon with a reputation like his.
She had decided to leave, she said, until she could prove it. She had photographs of the ledger pages, hidden in a hatbox. She did not trust the sheriff, who played golf with Voss on Wednesdays. So she called the one person she trusted, my husband, her sister boyfriend, and asked him to drive her to Memphis, in secret, that very night. “Do not tell Mama,” she whispered. “Do not tell Darlene. I will send word when it is safe. Take care of her. And keep this tape, in case something happens.” The tape clicked. Then the hiss returned.
I sat on a stool in that crowded back room and wept, in a way I had not wept in decades. Royce stood politely at the door with his hat in his hands. I asked him, in a shaking voice, whether the envelope held anything else. He gave it to me. There was a second note, tucked behind the Polaroid, written in Earl small, neat hand, with the date, January 1980. Darlene, I drove her to Memphis that night. She got on a bus to Tupelo. Your daddy made me swear on the Bible not to tell you, because he feared the deacon.
I read on. She is alive, Earl had written. I get a card from her every Christmas, with no return address. She is safe. I did not tell you because I made a promise, and because every year it was harder to find the right moment. If you are reading this, I am gone, and I am sorry. Find her. Tell her that her sister never stopped looking. I read the note three times. Then I closed the envelope, hugged it against my chest, and thanked Royce Tidwell, who was crying openly, and who refused every penny for the guitar.
It took me three weeks to find her. I called the Colbert County Sheriff, who sent me to a young detective named Tamika Reed, who reopened the case with obvious pleasure. She located the Christmas cards in my husband closet, in a shoebox, bound with a rubber band. Every one had a Tupelo postmark. Every one carried a tiny handwritten line. Still safe. Still singing. Love, B. The last one, from the previous December, bore a return address for the first time. Magnolia Court, Apartment Six. Tupelo, Mississippi.
I drove there on a sunny Saturday in October, with the Gibson on the back seat, wrapped in a quilt. The apartment complex was small and pink, with a swimming pool nobody used. I rang the bell of apartment six. The door opened, and an old woman stood there, in a lavender sweater, with silver hair and my mother eyes. She looked at me for a long time. Neither of us spoke. Then she said, in a voice that cracked down the middle, “Darlene. You got old.” And I said, “So did you, Bonnie.”
We sat on her little balcony and talked until the sun went down. She had gone by the name Ann Marie Weaver for forty five years, she said. She had sung in a Methodist choir, worked in a school cafeteria, and never married. She had a cat named Biscuit. She said she had kept the pictures of the ledger in a bank box, and that Detective Reed had already asked for them. Harlan Voss, she learned, had passed away in Texas in 2009, but the church had agreed to a formal reckoning, and to restore the building fund in his name. In November, Bonnie came home to Muscle Shoals for the first time since 1979. We stood together in the front pew of Pleasant Hill Baptist, two white haired sisters, and she sang alto, and I sang harmony, exactly as we had as girls. When the hymn ended, the whole congregation rose and wept. And that Sunday afternoon, I took Earl old Gibson out of its case, tuned it by ear, and put it in my sisters hands. She strummed one chord, soft and clear. She smiled. She said, “Earl never could play in tune.”