Darnell watched Ricks hand slide toward his jacket pocket and told him, very clearly, to take it out slow and empty. Rick did. It was a folding knife and a set of car keys, and that was the end of his smile.
Amy pried the two-by-fours off the back door while a locksmith cut the padlock off the front, and they got Earl Dupree out of the house he had lived in since 1962. His arm was bruised and swollen where it had been grabbed. Otherwise the old railroad man was exactly as sharp as he had always been.
Ask him about the papers, Earl kept saying. Ask him what he made me sign.
They found the papers in Ricks van. A deed transfer and a power of attorney, signed under threat, handing Earls yellow house and everything in it over to his son-in-law. The FOR SALE sign the neighbor had seen was meant to go up the moment the ink was dry.
A man who handed out full-size candy bars every Halloween for sixty years had been boarded into his own home like something to be thrown away.
Rick Holloway was arrested for false imprisonment, elder abuse, and fraud. The documents, signed under duress, were worth nothing, and a judge said so plainly.
Earls daughter drove back from Tampa through the night. When she learned what the man she had trusted with her father had really done, she wept on the old mans shoulder and asked how she could ever have missed it. Earl just patted her hand and said the only thing that mattered was that she knew now.
The boards came off for good. The padlock went in the trash. And this past Halloween, Earl Dupree sat on his own front porch in the yellow house on Myrtle Street, handing out full-size candy bars, with his daughter beside him and not a single lock on the door he did not hold the key to himself.