Part 3 — The Voice On Tape
The voice on the tape belonged to Faye. My sister. Every soul in my front yard had known it in the first three words, because Faye had sung alto at the Old Mud Creek church for fifty years and had called most of them by their first names on the telephone. Nobody gasped. A thermos rolled across the gravel and came to rest against the wheel of the hay wagon, and somebody picked it up, and that was the only sound.
Faye stood at the edge of the crowd with her purse in both hands. She did not run. At seventy-nine she had no running left in her. “Odell,” she said, “it was never to hurt you. Rusty said we only had to make the heater trip the alarm. The fire marshal would come, and the house would be red-tagged, and you would have to go to the home in Prestonsburg, and the sale could go on in peace. I swear to you on our mother. I swear it.”
The detective, whose name was Mr. Caudill, said quietly that he believed she believed it. “Faye,” he said, “a leak in a propane line does not call the fire marshal first. It calls everything in the house.” I wish I could say she had a good answer. She had only a long, wet breath and a sound like a hinge turning in the wind.
He turned to me, and he told me what I most needed to hear, which was that I had never been in danger. I had given him the tackle box on Friday morning, and by two o clock that afternoon a technician from the propane company and a deputy of the fire marshal had been through my house. The heater in the bedroom had been checked, the line tested, the valve replaced, and a detector installed on the wall. “You were safe before you got home,” he said. “The old lineman saved himself.”
I sat down on the porch step. Nadine had planted marigolds along that step in 1981, and they were gone to seed. I had spent a week thinking about a Thursday I might not wake up, and it turned out the Thursday had been prevented by a pencil on the lid of a tackle box. The dates, one by one, written by an old man with one earbud in his ear. There is a special kind of laughter that comes when you are too tired to be afraid. I laughed.
Rusty did not laugh. He stood by the hay wagon with his Carhartt jacket open and the coffee still on his boots, and when the detective said his name, he put out both hands in front of him, the way you do for a thing you have seen on television. A second cruiser had come up the drive behind the first. Nobody touched him roughly. He was read his rights beside the auctioneer, who held his Stetson against his chest throughout, out of respect or embarrassment.
The law took the better part of a year. Rusty was charged with forgery of a power of attorney, attempted theft of the real property, conspiracy, and tampering with a gas appliance, and the court found the tapes admissible because they were made in my own home by the owner. He pleaded guilty. The judge, a woman from Martin County whose father had worked the lines, listened to the tapes all the way through, and she took her glasses off at the end. He was sentenced to a long term in a state prison, with a restitution order for the $28,500 and the cost of the sale.
The land was never in danger after that morning. The court voided the power of attorney and restored full control to me, and the clerk at the county courthouse, a man who had known my father, stamped the document with such force that the stamp nearly came out of his hand. The sixty-four acres up Barnett Creek, and the house, and the shop, and the marigolds of my wife went on exactly as they were. Hoss, the man who had called at midnight, was identified and charged separately with extortion.
Faye pleaded guilty to conspiracy and was given a short term, followed by a longer period of supervision and a ruling that she could not hold any power of attorney again. I drove to see her the Sunday before she went in. She sat on her porch in Paintsville with her feet in a pan of water, and she did not look up. “I wanted him to have a good life, Odell,” she said. “He was blood.” I said that was true. “So are you,” I said. “That is why I came.” She cried, and I held the pan steady with my boot.
The Buick of Nadine had been sold for scrap, but a salvage yard in Pikeville, run by a man I once trained on the poles, found the hood ornament and the keys in a drawer, and he mailed them to me in a coffee can with a note that said, My respects. I set the ornament on the mantel. It faces the window, the way she liked to park, so she could see the creek.
Forty-one years of listening for the hum of a bad line taught me to hear a lie when it came through the wall. I still have the little Radio Shack transmitter, rebuilt in the smoke detector. The detective asked if he could borrow the plans for a class at the academy. I wrote them out in pencil, with the dates in the margin, and I told him he could keep them.
This morning I drank my coffee on the porch with one earbud in my ear, out of habit, listening to nothing. The creek was loud from the rain. A neighbor boy came up the drive on a bicycle with a question about how to splice a wire. I set down the cup, took out a pair of old gloves, and showed him. He did it right the second time. The sun came over the ridge and lit the whole yard, and not one soul was bidding on it.