The manager came to the counter quickly, and two officers arrived not long after, and I stood there with that Bible in my hands, not understanding, until the manager explained.
They had not come for me. They had come for Rhonda.
The account the endpaper code opened had belonged to my grandmother, and it was left to me alone, and it carried a warning flag going back weeks.
Because since Grandma died, my aunt Rhonda had come to this bank again and again, trying to claim the account, and when the bank would not let her, she had brought a letter she forged in her mother name, and the bank had flagged the fraud and been waiting for the true heir to appear.
Rhonda called the Bible worthless because she had already flipped through it, found the marked page, taken the code to the bank, and been turned away. She priced it at a quarter hoping the secret would sell off with it. She never dreamed Grandma had pressed the truth flat between the pages of Psalms, for my eyes only.
The account held Grandma real savings, kept safe from the woman who had been bleeding her for years. Because the loans Rhonda took were never loans. They were theft, dressed up in kindness, taken from an old woman who trusted her own kin.
In the safe deposit box the same code opened was Grandma record of all of it. Every loan that was never a loan. Every dollar Rhonda talked her out of. And the forged letter Rhonda had just tried to use, which tied the whole thing up with a bow the police were glad to accept.
Taking from an elderly woman by undue influence is a crime, and forging her name to a bank is another, and Grandma, gentle as she was, had documented every bit of it and left it where only Sarah would look.
Rhonda was arrested. The money she took over the years, the courts are pursuing, and the forgery sealed her fate.
The account is mine now, and the Bible sits on my nightstand, pressed flowers and all. I read it every night, the way Grandma did.
The money went into a fund for my own children, her great-grandchildren, so that a woman who was robbed in her last years still reaches forward with a gift into the lives she never met. That is what she would have wanted, more than any courtroom.
Rhonda is not welcome at family gatherings anymore, and that is a grief of its own, because she is still blood. But blood does not excuse what she did to a trusting old woman, and Grandma, in the end, made certain it would not.
Keep my Bible close, she whispered. Only you. I did. And the Word was in there, just like she always said, and a few other things meant just for me, the things that set the truth free at last.