On her porch stood a sheriffs deputy and a woman with a county badge, and the woman was holding a folder.
The question my husband had asked the caseworkers at the door was simple. He asked whether an anonymous report could stay anonymous if it turned out to be knowingly false. The senior caseworker said that was a question for the county attorney, but that false reports were a crime in Indiana, and that their office took them seriously, because every hour spent on one was an hour taken from a child who actually needed help.
Then she asked him, carefully, whether he had reason to believe he knew who made the call.
He told her about the road trip. He told her about the hung-up phone and the words, You will regret this. He told her that the report described the color of our childrens bedsheets, and that exactly one person outside our household had been in those bedrooms in the past year, because she had insisted on tucking them in during her last visit.
The caseworker wrote all of it down. She did not promise anything. She said that was not how it worked. But she said that if the report turned out to have come from a relative with a stated grievance, the county would want to know.
Three days later they knew. The call had not been as anonymous as my mother-in-law believed. She had used her own cell phone.
The deputy on her porch was not there to arrest her. The woman with the folder was there to interview her, and to explain to her, in plain language, what a false report of child neglect is under state law and what it carries. My mother-in-law, I am told, started with outrage, moved to tears, and finished by saying she had only been worried about the children.
The county attorney declined to charge her. We were told it was a first offense and the children were unharmed, and that she had been formally warned, which means that if she ever does it again, the first time will count.
But there was something else in that folder, and that is the part that mattered to us.
She had wanted a record of our family in the system, and she got one, except the record was about her.
When she filed for grandparents visitation six weeks later, which she had been threatening to do since we moved, her attorney discovered that the county had already opened a file with her name on it. A documented false report against the very parents she was asking a judge to override. Our attorney did not have to say much. The judge read the file, asked my mother-in-law one question about the phone call, listened to her answer, and denied the petition from the bench.
My son still asks sometimes whether the ladies are coming back. We tell him no. We tell him they came to make sure he was safe, and they saw that he was, and that is the end of it. He has stopped asking as often.
My husband has not spoken to his mother since the hearing. She sends cards on the childrens birthdays. We let the kids open them, because the cards are not the problem, and we put them in a drawer, because the cards are not the solution either.
The bedsheets, by the way, are still blue. We did not change a thing. There was nothing to change.