Ruth Ann answered in under a minute, and what she wrote was this. “Peggy, is he asking you to marry him? Do not eat anything he cooks. Do not take any vitamins from him. Call me right now.” I called. She answered on the first ring, and she was weeping so hard that for a moment I could only hear breathing. Then she said, “I have waited six years for somebody to call me about that man. I have a box in my closet. I have been keeping it for you, and I did not even know your name.”
What was in the box she could not describe on the phone. She said I had to see it. She drove the three hours to Fort Smith that same night, in the rain, in an old Buick with a bad wiper, and she was on my doorstep by nine o clock with a banker box tied up with twine. We sat at my dining table with the lamp on. She laid out photographs of Marilyn, lovely and plump in 2015, then slim in 2018, then gaunt as a bird in 2019. Under them lay a stack of lab papers, and a letter from the Tulsa police that said only that the matter was under review.
Marilyn had loved the man too, Ruth Ann said. He made her tea every night. He told everyone her stomach was weak. When she died, the doctor wrote down heart failure, and Clifton had her cremated within three days, and by the end of the month he was gone from Tulsa with the cash from her savings. Ruth Ann had saved the cup. A tea cup, in a plastic bag, with the dregs in the bottom, the last one she ever drank from, which Ruth Ann had taken from the sink at the funeral because something in her gut told her to.
A woman who has turned down a thousand liars across a loan desk will recognize the thousand and first, once somebody finally tells her where to look.
The next morning we took everything to a detective in Fort Smith named Marcus Tolliver, a calm man with a gray crew cut who listened without writing a word until we were done. Then he picked up the telephone and called his friend in Tulsa. By Tuesday there was a joint file, a lab in Oklahoma City had opened the cup, and a judge had signed an order to look at the grave of Marilyn. The detective asked me one more thing, very carefully. He asked whether I could stand to go on being engaged for a few more weeks. I said I had stood worse.
I will not tell you it was easy. For nineteen days, I smiled at the man across my dining table. I let him kiss my cheek. I let him choose the flowers. A small recorder sat in my purse, and another one sat in the lamp, and every evening Detective Tolliver collected them from me in the church parking lot like a priest taking confession. Clifton never suspected, because he had been believed for so long. He told me about Marilyn once, with tears, and I held his hand, and I felt the dry steady skin of it, and I did not flinch.
The lab report came back on a Thursday. A slow poison, the detective told me, in a voice so soft that it hurt to hear. Not a single dose but a patient, steady one, over eleven months. In the bones of Marilyn, in the cup, in the hair that Ruth Ann had saved from the funeral. I put my hand over my mouth. A week later they found the same thing in the records of a woman in Wichita, a widow who had died in 2012 after seven months of marriage to a gentleman called Cliff Ashby, who had sung bass in her church.
On the ninth of May, Clifton came to my house at eleven in the morning in a black suit and a rose in his lapel. I had told him I wanted to celebrate with a lunch at the Golden Corral on Rogers Avenue before we drove to the church, because it was where we had been so happy. He laughed and said I was a sentimental old gal. We parked beside my Lincoln, in the very same space. I got out, and I walked around the pickup truck that was parked next to us, and I stood by the side door with my purse held against my chest.
He had only taken three steps toward me when the doors of four cars opened at once. Detective Tolliver walked up without hurrying and said, “Clifton Reece, also known as Cliff Ashby, you are under arrest for the murder of Marilyn Ashcraft Reece.” For a moment the smile stayed on his face like paint. Then it slid off, and what was under it was a small gray tired creature I had never met. He looked at me. “You were behind the truck,” he said. “That day.” I said I had been a loan officer for thirty years. I knew what a lie sounded like.
He was tried the following winter in Tulsa. Ruth Ann sat in the front row every day, and so did I, in my church hat, with my daughter on the other side holding my hand. My daughter had cried for an hour when I told her, and said she was sorry for every unkind thing. I said she had been right, and that being right was never the same as being unkind. The jury was out for under two hours. The sentence was life, with no parole. Ruth Ann put her head on my shoulder in the hall and said, “Thank you for making that call.”
On the ninth of May the next year, we held a lunch, the two of us, at my house, on my porch. Ruth Ann brought a cake and I made peach cobbler. We toasted Marilyn with sweet tea. We have gone to Branson twice since, and to the Smoky Mountains, and we are planning a trip to see the redwoods in the spring. She calls me her sister, and I call her mine. The little scratched diamond ring went to the police evidence room, and I never asked for it back. At seventy, I wear only the plain gold band of Hal, and it fits just fine.