“…on you, Ellen,” Mr. Bell said. “The policy she applied for last week is on you.”
I read the page twice before the words would hold still. Two million dollars. Beneficiary: Sheila Marsh Reese, spouse of the applicant. The applicant was listed as my father. The insured was me. Somewhere in the paperwork was a signature that looked almost exactly like mine.
“I never signed this,” I said.
“I know,” said Mr. Bell. He had kept my father books for thirty one years, and he did not look like a man who frightened easily. He looked frightened. “The insurance company called me for a reference because your father is the policy holder. I told them I would call back. Then I called you.”
He laid a second photograph on the desk. Sheila stood on a courthouse step in a cream suit, holding the arm of a heavy man with a gray ponytail. “That is Curtis Vail. He is not her brother, as she told your father. He is her partner. I have found three earlier marriages, three older husbands, all of them gone within two years of the wedding, and every time the same man waiting on the steps.”
“You think my father is in danger.”
“I think your father is the first part,” he said. “The message said so. Sheila has been working her way through the family in order. First the husband, to secure the house. Then the daughter, to secure the policy, because a signature from you was needed on the estate papers before anything else could happen.”
My knees went soft. I had been asked to sign those papers twice. Both times I had said I wanted my lawyer to look them over, and both times Sheila had smiled and said of course, no rush, dear. The words from her message came back to me. Do not rush.
I did not go to my father house first. I went to the county sheriff, and I asked for Detective Alma Ortega, whom Mr. Bell trusted. She listened for an hour with a legal pad in her lap. Then she said, “Mrs. Hollis, I need you to do something very hard. I need you to go home and act normal for four days.”
Four days is a long time to eat a casserole across from a woman who plans your ending. I did it. I laughed at her stories about the garden club. I even let her refill my coffee, and I watched the pot instead of the cup.
Meanwhile, Detective Ortega pulled the records. Sheila had a different name in each state, a rented post office box in Nevada, and two prior insurance claims that had been closed without charges because the husbands were old and the doctors were tired. The pattern had never been laid on one table before.
On Friday she asked me to come to the house for lunch. My father sat at the head of the table, thin and cheerful, believing he had a second chance at companionship. Sheila had made chicken salad. Beside my plate she had placed a folder with a pen on top.
“Only the last form, honey,” she said. “Then we can all relax.”
I lifted the pen. My father looked at me. I looked at the folder, and I said, “Sheila, who is Curtis Vail?”
She did not drop the fork. She did not gasp. She simply set her napkin on her lap, folded her hands, and smiled the way a woman smiles when she is doing math. “Ellen,” she said, “you are making a mistake.”
The back door opened. Detective Ortega came through the kitchen with two deputies, and a third deputy had already stopped the truck of Curtis at the end of the driveway, with a tray of paperwork and a prepaid phone on the seat.
My father did not say a word while they took her out. He stared at the empty chair for a long time. Then he took my hand and said, “I thought she was kind to me.” I said, “I know, Dad. You were kind to her first.”
The case took eleven months. Sheila and Curtis were convicted of conspiracy, fraud and forgery, and prosecutors reopened the files of her earlier husbands. One family in Arizona wrote to me in tears. They had always thought their father simply wore out.
My father insisted on testifying. He wore his navy suit and told the jury that he had been lonely, and that loneliness was not a crime, but preying on it was. The foreman wiped his eyes when he sat down.
He lives with us now, in the room with the bay window. Every Sunday we play cards and he cheats badly, and I let him win. Last week he looked at me over the top of his glasses and said, “Ellen, the best thing that woman ever did was prove that I already had somebody who loved me.”