The man who stepped out of the white county SUV was Deputy Wes Kimball, a thick, red faced fellow in his forties with a mustache he groomed like a pet. I had typed his name in court documents for years, a name that appeared on affidavits and arrest reports, always smiling in photographs with the sheriff. He came toward the shop door at an easy pace, thumbs hooked in his belt. Bonnie turned off the lamp. I slid the letter inside a stack of church bulletins and put the chair cushion on top, and I told her very quietly to stay behind the register.
“Afternoon, ladies,” Kimball said, and he gave a pleasant, practiced smile. “I am looking for a recliner. A young man dropped one off here last week, and the family has changed its mind. The grandson is a little confused. He took it by mistake.” I told him that we had dozens of recliners and asked him to describe it. He said brown corduroy. I said I would have to check the back. He nodded, and his eyes drifted past me to the workbench, where a pile of bread bags lay half hidden under a quilt.
I had been a deputy court clerk for twenty five years. I knew exactly what a man looks like when he is deciding something. I said, “Deputy, I am so glad you came. I have been trying to reach the family all week.” I reached under the counter, took out my phone, and pressed the button for a number I had never dialed in my life. It rang twice. “Captain Ortega,” said a voice from the Missouri State Highway Patrol, a woman I had known as a rookie, who had once told me to call her if I ever found anything wrong.
A frightened old man can still do a brave thing; he can hide a letter in the one place a good person will eventually look.
“Nina,” I said, loudly and pleasantly, “I have Deputy Kimball in my shop. He has come for a chair that holds forty one thousand three hundred dollars and a letter with his name in it.” I put the phone on the counter, speaker on. The silence in my shop was perfect. The hand of Kimball did not go to his gun. It dropped to his side. His face, which a moment ago had been red, went the color of a candle. From the phone Nina Ortega said, in a calm, level voice, “Deputy Kimball, step away from the counter. I have a unit four minutes out.”
He left. He did not run, exactly. He turned and walked to his SUV like a man leaving a church service, and he pulled out of the gravel lot, and four minutes later a patrol car turned in from the highway with its lights going. They stopped him at the end of Highway 61, two miles down the road. Bonnie and I stood in the front window of the shop with our arms around each other, and I discovered that I was shaking so hard I could not hold my coffee. Captain Ortega arrived twenty minutes later, with two detectives and an evidence bag.
It took the rest of the day to explain. The letter was authentic. Lyle Ferris had died, three weeks after writing it, at the bottom of his own basement stairs. The county called it an accident. The man he had named was Kimball, who had been taking a share of the money from Kyle, in exchange for looking away from the thefts, and then from the pills. The life insurance policy was real. Kimball had been listed as the contact, under a forged signature. The detectives said the plan had been for Kyle to inherit and for Kimball to collect.
Kyle was found that same night, sleeping in his truck behind a gas station in Pevely. I was told later that he cried when the detectives woke him. He confessed to everything, and I mean everything: the pills, the pension, the pawned guns, and the night in March when he stood at the top of the basement stairs and did not catch the arm of his grandfather. “I did not push him,” he sobbed. “But I heard him fall. And I did not go down.” He agreed to testify against Kimball, and he asked, through his lawyer, whether he could write a letter.
I read that letter at my desk in the shop. It was addressed to his grandfather, and it was crooked and wet in places, and it said that Kyle wanted to be the man Lyle had thought he was. The judge in Jefferson County gave him a hard sentence and a hard chance, a year in a secure treatment center followed by four of probation. Deputy Kimball received fifteen years. Two other men from the office of the sheriff resigned, and a new sheriff was elected the following spring on a platform of nothing but plain honesty.
The money presented a puzzle. It belonged to the estate of Lyle, which meant, by law, to Kyle. But Captain Ortega, who had a way of looking at things sideways, said the court would honor the stated wish of the dead man. We took the question to a judge. The judge asked for the letter and read it twice. Then she ordered that the money be placed in a trust to pay for the treatment and education of Kyle, with the remainder to Second Blessings and the shelter for women, “in the name of Lyle Ferris.”
The recliner sits in the front window of my shop now. It has never been for sale. I had the spring fixed, and the bottom sewn up with strong thread, and Bonnie embroidered a small patch on the arm that says: Lyle. People come in and ask what the story is, and I tell them. Some sit in it for a moment, and close their eyes. Last Christmas a young man in a clean flannel shirt came into the shop, thin but steady, and sat in the chair for ten minutes without a word. When he stood up, I recognized Kyle. He left a hundred dollar bill in the donation jar.