My father reached into the pocket of his cardigan a second time. His hand was shaking so badly that the object he drew out fell from his fingers onto the tablecloth and rolled. It was a small spiral notebook with a blue cover and a rubber band around it. “I found this in the purse of Denise last month,” he said, in a dry, careful voice that I had not heard for eleven years. “I did not understand it. I put it back. And then I took it again, because I could not sleep. Laura, I should have shown this to the police the day I found it.”
He unwrapped the band and opened it to the first page. The room had gone completely silent. In the neat handwriting of Denise, in columns, were four names. Under each was a date of marriage, an amount of money, and a date of death. The first three were men I had never heard of, from towns in Idaho and Oregon. The fourth line read, “Robert Kincaid. Married Nov. 2013. Retirement account, $412,000. House. Pending.” There was a blank space for the date of death. A pencil mark, not yet erased, hovered beside it.
Denise had stopped moving. She stood beside his chair in her red dress with the champagne flute still in her hand, but she was looking at nothing, the way an animal looks at the sky when it hears the first sound of the trap. “Robert,” she said in a small voice. “That is not what it looks like.” My father lifted his head. His eyes, rheumy and gray and tender, held steady on her. “Denise,” he said, “you are not my wife. I do not know who you are. But I am going to find out.”
A mourning man can be fooled by a stranger with a casserole, but he will never be fooled by his own daughter coming home.
At the back of the banquet room, two people rose quietly from the last table. One was a woman in a navy blazer, Alicia Marsh, the investigator from the bank in Boise, whom I had met by phone and at the airport that morning. The other was a Spokane County detective in a brown suit, a tall man named Orlando Reyes, whom she had brought along. They crossed the carpet without hurry. “Mrs. Kincaid,” said Detective Reyes politely, “or whatever name you prefer. I would like you to come with us.” Denise dropped the champagne glass. It shattered on the tile, and no one laughed.
She did not make a scene. In my experience, the truly dangerous people never do. She straightened her red dress, set her purse on the table, and walked out between the detective and the bank investigator with her chin up, like a woman leaving a meeting that had run too long. Behind her, a guest began to cry, and someone said a prayer. My father sat very still in his wheelchair, with the notebook in his lap. I knelt in front of him and put my hands on his knees, and for a moment neither of us knew what to say.
“Laura,” he said at last. His voice broke on my name. “I believed her. I believed every word. She said you wanted me in a home. She said you had taken the jewelry of your mother. And I let myself believe it, because I was so tired, and so lonely, and she was there with a casserole every night.” I took his hands. They were thin and papery and warm. “Dad,” I said, “I know. Grief makes the best people easy to fool. It is not a crime to want to be loved.” He bent forward and put his forehead against mine.
The case against Denise, whose real name was Doreen Pratt, took fourteen months. The prosecutors found two more husbands, one in Montana and one in Washington, both dead, both with changed wills. She pleaded guilty to forgery, theft by deception, and exploitation of a vulnerable adult, and she was sentenced to nineteen years. The deed that she had filed to put the house in her own name was a forgery, the court said, and was voided in a hearing that lasted six minutes. My father cried in the courtroom, and I held his hand through the whole thing.
I brought him to Spokane in a rented van in February, with a neck pillow, a thermos of soup, and his old recliner strapped to a luggage rack. My husband had converted the den into a bedroom with a ramp and a window facing the pines. My two boys, Ben, eighteen, and Sam, sixteen, whom my father had met only in photographs, stood in the front hall in their school sweatshirts, uncertain. Dad looked at them for a very long time. Then he put out both his arms. “Come here,” he said. “I have been owing you hugs for years.”
The ring was in the box of my father the whole time. When he took it from his pocket at the party, I could not breathe. It was the plain gold band that my mother wore for thirty one years, worn thin on the inner side from dishwater and gardening. He pressed it into my palm in the courthouse hallway, after the verdict, and closed my fingers around it. “It was always yours,” he said. “Wear it, will you? Your mother would want that.” I slid it on my right hand, next to my own wedding band, and it fit.
In June we took him to a cabin on a lake in northern Idaho for a week. My father sat at the end of the dock in a folding chair with a hat pulled low and a fishing rod in his hand, and he taught the boys how to bait a hook. He caught a bass the size of a loaf of bread, and the whole lake heard him whoop. That evening he told me, quietly, over the grill, that he had thought for eleven years that he had lost his daughter. I told him he had not. He had only been waiting for me to come home.