Part 3 — The Humidor Crock
The last line of the letter said, I hid it where she will never go, because she says it smells like a cigar bar. I knew the exact spot before I finished reading it. Dads garage shop, and the big stoneware crock where he kept his pipe tobacco, with the damp sponge and the cherry leaf.
Carla had already left through the side door, headed for the house. Dads friend Amos took my arm and said, Mitch, she will tear the house apart. A state trooper who had come to pay respects overheard him and turned to the funeral director. Within two minutes there were two patrol cars on Dads street.
They arrived before she did. Trooper Daniels stood in the driveway, politely asking her to stop at the porch steps, and Carla backed away with her purse held to her chest. She said she was only getting her things. He said that was fine, but she would have to wait for a search order.
The order took forty minutes. I stood in Dads garage with the trooper and a county detective while Amos held the door. The crock sat on its shelf by the pegboard, with the lid on and a layer of dust the shape of a hand.
Under the damp sponge, packed in cherry leaf and wrapped in one of Dads old flannel dish towels, was a small canning jar with a tight lid. It held a dark residue at the bottom. Beside it was a spiral notebook in Dads careful block letters.
The notebook recorded every night for four months. What time the nightcap arrived, how he felt in the morning, and which pills were missing from his dresser. He ended each page with the same sentence, Not yet. I am watching. A brakeman keeps a log, and Dad kept his to the very end.
The state lab tested the jar the next day. The residue was a prescription sleeping medication, not any poison, ground fine and stirred into a small glass of bourbon. It would never have been dangerous in a single dose, but it explained the weakness and the numb hands. Dad did not leave behind a suspicion, he left behind a sealed jar and a four-month log.
The medical examiner took a second look at his heart, as the detective requested, and confirmed that it had simply failed, as hearts of seventy-nine do. The sedative had not killed him. It had been used to wear him down so he would sign what Carla wanted signed, and he had signed nothing.
Carla was arrested at her sisters house that night and charged with elder abuse, administering medication without consent, fraud, and theft. The cremation was cancelled by the funeral director, who had asked for a medical hold the moment the trooper called.
The authorities in Chemung County, New York, reopened the file on her first husband. They found a transfer of his house three days after he died, signed by a notary who had since lost her license. The matter is in the hands of prosecutors there, and I leave it to them.
My wife Pam and I changed all the locks again, then carried Dads Buick home from the sisters driveway. The coins came back from a pawn shop in Jersey Shore, every one, with the receipts attached. We buried him on Monday morning, in his flannel coat, with the railroad crew in the front row.
That evening I filled the old blue tin with fresh cherry tobacco, set it on the back porch rail, and sat there in the dusk. I do not smoke, but I sat there until the smell of cherry floated off across the yard and the porch light came on.