“Sister Dorris,” said the voice on the telephone, a man of about fifty with a soft Carolina drawl, “I am Wesley Lybrand, and I have waited fourteen months for somebody to call me about my mother.” I sat on the edge of the hotel bed in Gatlinburg with the little white pill in a Kleenex on the nightstand, and I could hear the cars on the strip outside and the television in the next room. I said that I thought his mother had been murdered. He said, quietly, “So do I.”
He told me that when his mother died, he had gone to the house the very next morning and found the pill bottle on her bedside table. The bottle was labeled with the right name. The pills inside were white. But she had never taken white pills, he said. Her heart medicine was yellow. The doctor had said so for ten years. He had taken the bottle to the sheriff, and the sheriff had told him that grief makes a person see things. He had kept it in a zip bag in his freezer ever since.
“Do not take another pill from that man,” Wesley said. “Do not eat anything he gives you. Do not say a word to anybody, not the ladies on the bus, not the pastor. I am going to call a friend at the state law enforcement division in Columbia, and I am going to call you back in twenty minutes.” I said that I would pretend to be asleep. He said, “Sister Dorris, you are a brave woman.” I said I was a scared one, and that was close enough.
A widow who has hidden pills in her cheek since girlhood knows better than anyone that the people who mean to hurt you often hand you a glass of water.
The friend in Columbia was an agent named Beatrice Moultrie, a tall serious woman with a quiet voice. She arrived in Gatlinburg by ten that night, with two other agents and a state trooper, and she met me in a stairwell of the hotel in a plain cotton dress. I handed her the Kleenex. She held it up to the light, studied the pill, and said that she would send it to the laboratory in the morning. She said there was one more thing she needed, and that it would be hard.
She wanted me to go to Spartanburg on Thursday and sign the will. All of it, just as planned, at the office of the Christian attorney, with Brother Danny in the room. She would be there, hidden, with a wire, and the lawyer would be a state investigator posing as a clerk. They needed to hear him say it. They needed one sentence. I looked at my hands, which were old and spotted and trembling. I said that I had been afraid all my life, and that I was tired of it. I said yes.
On Thursday, we drove to Spartanburg in the church van, Brother Danny at the wheel and the two church ladies in the back seat. Marlene and Twyla were crying and holding hands. They had been told by agents the night before what they had unwittingly said, and they had agreed, white faced, to behave normally. At the office, a pleasant young man brought coffee. Brother Danny put a hand on my shoulder. He said, “The Lord has given you a good long life, Sister Dorris. It is time to leave a legacy.”
I took the pen. I looked at the paper. Then I looked up at him, and I said, in as clear a voice as I have ever used, “Brother Danny, you told Marlene that after Thursday the Lord would call me home quick. Same as Mrs. Lybrand. Same as the widow in Chesnee. I would like to know exactly how He plans to do it.” The room was very quiet. His face did not change at all. Then he smiled slowly and said, “Sister, you must have been dreaming.”
But the wire had heard it all, the whole conversation in the van, the whispers in the hotel hall, the glass of water. The laboratory had found something in the pill that had no business in a heart tablet. Agent Moultrie and the state troopers came through the door of the office of the attorney one second later. Brother Danny Shealy was charged with fraud, exploitation of a vulnerable adult, and two counts of murder. His beautiful wife, who sings in the choir, collapsed in the vestibule when she heard.
The trial lasted a week, and I testified for a day. He was found guilty of everything. The judge gave him two life sentences. Marlene and Twyla both sat in the front row, in navy dresses, and when it was over they came to me in the hall with tears running down their faces and begged my forgiveness. I told them they had done right. I said that two women whispering on a bus had saved my life, and that I would never again be annoyed by gossip.
I changed my will in July. Half of what Herschel and I built went to the little church, for a new roof and a young pastor of good character. The other half went to a fund in the name of Mrs. Lybrand, to pay for the care of widows who have no one. Wesley Lybrand drove down from Union for the signing. On the first Sunday afterward, I sat in the front pew, and the new pastor said a short prayer, and the whole congregation said it with me. So be it, we said together, and I meant every word.