“…the man who told me to keep it out was…” Dennis said, and then his voice stopped, and the old projector in the corner of my kitchen ticked as it cooled. He is seventy nine now, a thin, careful man with a hearing aid and a Black Hills Stampede cap, and he had driven all the way from Custer with a reel in a paper sack. He looked down at his hands. “Orrin Pike. He was sheriff of Pennington County for twenty two years. He stood on the shoulder of Highway 16 that night in a camel coat, and he said, Dennis, this stays between us.”
I put down my tea. Orrin Pike, who had handed out my own retirement plaque at the school library. Orrin, who had sat at Gene table every Fourth of July for twenty years, eating my potato salad. Dennis said he had been twenty six, new to the badge, and eager to please. He said Arlene car had been on the wrong side of the road, and there was a second set of tire marks that Orrin had asked him to leave off the report. “He said it was a courtesy to the family,” Dennis said. “I believed him. I have not slept well since.”
I asked him what the second tire marks meant. He said that he did not know, then, and that he had spent thirty seven years trying to learn. After he retired he had quietly pulled the file, and discovered that the sheriff office had never called the highway patrol, never photographed the road, and never interviewed the one person Arlene was driving to see that morning. Her brother. Calvin Dray, who for years had managed the Dray family ranch accounts, and who, according to Gene tape, had been moving the money into his own pocket.
A footlocker sold at a yard sale, a reel marked for the sheriff, and a retired deputy who finally spoke a name.
We sat for a while without speaking. Then I did something I had never done in my life. I called my stepdaughter. Tammy answered on the fourth ring, cheerful and rushed, from the car. I told her I needed to ask her one question, and that I needed her to answer it honestly. Who had bought Gene footlocker? She was quiet. Then she said, in a thinner voice, “Uncle Calvin sent a man. He said Dad stuff was cluttering the house. He said you would not mind.”
I closed my eyes. Gene had known. That was why the label on the reel said what it did. Do not play until I am gone. Then give it to the sheriff. Not to Tammy. He had not been afraid of his daughter, I understood now. He had been afraid for her, afraid that her love for her uncle would put her in the way of what that uncle might do. I told Tammy to drive to my house, and to leave the telephone in the car, and to tell nobody where she was going. She said, “Peggy, you are scaring me.” I said, “Good.”
She arrived within the hour, in her scrubs, white faced, and I sat her down at the table between Dennis and me. We played her father voice from the tape, in the dim light of the kitchen, with the sound a little warped from age. He spoke slowly, in the gentle, dry way I had loved. He said that Arlene had found the ledger. He said she had been on her way to the sheriff, and that he, Gene, had never believed in an accident, and had never been able to prove otherwise. Tammy put her hand over her mouth. Her shoulders began to shake.
Dennis told her what he had told me. He did it kindly. He said that her mother had been a brave woman, and that the last thing she did on this earth was to try to do the right thing. Tammy wept, openly, the way I had not seen her weep since her father service. Then she wiped her face with the sleeve of her scrubs and said, in a voice with iron in it, “Where is the reel going?” I said, “To the sheriff.” She said, “Which one?” And I smiled for the first time that day.
The current sheriff, Dana Whitcomb, was a tall, plain spoken woman of fifty who had joined the department long after Orrin Pike had gone fishing. We drove to her office the next morning, the three of us, with the reel and a copy of the tape. She listened to the whole thing in silence. She asked Dennis to give a sworn statement, which he did, in a steady voice. She said, at last, that she could not promise anything about a case this old, but that she would reopen the file, and that she would start with the ledger.
It took eleven months. The state attorney general sent a team of auditors to the Dray ranch office. They found Calvin ledgers, the true ones, in a safe behind a hunting print. He was charged with fraud and theft, and in his seventy fourth year he stood in a Rapid City courtroom and pleaded guilty to every count. Orrin Pike, by then eighty seven and in a care home, was too frail to stand trial. But Dana Whitcomb drove to see him, and sat with him for two hours, and came away saying that he had wept and had asked to be forgiven.
On the anniversary, Tammy and I drove out to Highway 16 with a bundle of prairie sage and a small cross. A Sheriff deputy, one of Dana, stood by with his lights low. We set the cross on the shoulder, among the wildflowers, and Tammy said her mother name aloud. The wind came off the hills and carried it away across the grass. Then she turned and took my arm, and said, “Peggy, thank you for opening the footlocker.” I said it was not me. I said it was her father, who had waited thirty seven years for someone to turn the key.