Out in the yard the ambulance siren was getting closer, and the woman with the pillowcase whispered, you will never prove he did not sign it. Jolene Mathis looked at the forged will in her hand, dated yesterday, leaving a dying mans whole farm to a woman he had known for a month, and she said, we will see.
They did see. The woman who called herself Cheryl matched a flyer that had been pinned to the station bulletin board for months. Three states. Four widowers. She found lonely old men at grocery stores, moved into their lives and their homes, cut them off from their families, and emptied them out, one casserole at a time.
Bill Harrington had been number five. He never got the chance to be a victim the way the others had, because a six-year-old named Rosie picked up a telephone while a cow mooed in the background and told a dispatcher that Grandpa fell and a lady she did not know was going through Grandmas jewelry box.
The forged will did not hold. Bill was mid-stroke at the very hour it was supposedly signed, witnessed by no one, with his signature traced by a hand that was not his. The forensics people took it apart in an afternoon.
A con artist who had fooled four grieving men across three states was undone by the one witness she never thought to worry about, a little girl on the porch with a barn cat.
Cheryl, whose real name came with a long list of charges, was arrested as the ambulance pulled in. The pillowcase of jewelry and cash went back where it belonged.
Bill Harrington survived his stroke. It was a hard road, but his daughter came home to walk it with him, the daughter Cheryl had been turning away on the phone with Bills napping, honey, week after week.
Rosie still lives on the tobacco farm with her grandfather. She feeds the barn cats and names every one. And Bill, who got lonely once and nearly lost everything for it, keeps the closest eye in the county on anyone who turns up at the Kroger with a casserole and a sad story.