Part 3 — The Cardinal Feeder
The screen went black on a creak in the hallway, and the pastor stepped in front of the projector before anyone else moved. He said quietly, Sharon, I think we know where your mother was looking. Then he asked the ushers to stand by the doors and called the Binghamton police from the church office.
I had watched Ediths Tuesday Show for two years. Every episode started with the cardinal feeder outside her kitchen window, the red one on the green pole. In her last video she had glanced at the window while she whispered, and I had been so busy looking at the African violet that I missed it.
Rollie sat in the front pew with his head down, and the detective, a kind woman named Sergeant Cho, asked him to wait while I explained. We drove to Moms house together, with two officers, and walked out into the backyard where the cardinals were feeding in the late light.
The feeder pole was hollow steel with a little cap at the bottom. Mom had told me, years ago, that she kept spare seed down there. Sergeant Cho knelt in the grass and unscrewed the cap. A mason jar slid out, wrapped in a plastic bag, and behind it was a tight roll of paper bound with a rubber band.
The jar held a half inch of cold tea gone dark and cloudy. The paper was a calendar page torn from the church bulletin. On it, in her round teacher-like hand, were thirty-one dates and times, each with a note, Signed a paper. Signed another. Rollie said it was for the taxes.
The lab results came back in four days. The tea contained a crushed prescription sleep medication, enough to leave an elderly woman unsteady and groggy for most of a day. It had not caused her death. The medical examiner confirmed her heart simply stopped in the night, just as the doctor had said.
That was a mercy I had not dared hope for. She was not taken from us, she was robbed of her afternoons, and she recorded the whole thing so that I could take them back. I read the dates on the bulletin page again and again.
The signed papers were also found. Rollie had been moving money from her account into his own and into an online poker site, a few thousand at a time. The bank traced eleven transfers. He had done it under her signature and, when she refused, under a signature he had practiced.
He was arrested that evening at the church, still in his gray funeral suit, and he did not say a word. The charges were administering medication without consent, forgery, theft, and elder financial exploitation. He later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to supervised probation, mandatory counseling, and full restitution.
The bank returned the stolen funds, and the court added the proceeds from the sale of Rollies car. Moms jewelry came back from his trunk, her Buick from his driveway, and her checkbook from his jacket. I took everything to the credit union and opened a scholarship in her name for lunch-line workers.
The African violet recovered. I took it home, trimmed the black leaves, and repotted it in fresh soil, and by the spring it bloomed purple on my kitchen sill. I sent the family a picture and wrote, Mom would be thrilled.
Last Tuesday my granddaughter and I filmed our own episode. We stood at the window and watched the cardinals, then we rolled out Moms pie crust, step by step, with flour on our noses. At the end, my granddaughter waved at the camera and said, That is all for today, Great-Gram.