The woman in the photograph was my sister Delphine. I recognized her at once, though the last time I had seen her she was twenty seven and carrying a suitcase down the steps of the house of our father in Florence. She had the same long jaw, the same direct stare, and she wore a navy blazer with a gold pin I remembered from the jewelry box of our mother. “She told my secretary her name was Mrs. Delphine Voss,” Raymond said. “I knew her face from the family album. Harold, did you know she was alive?” I did not. For forty five years I had assumed she was gone.
I looked at the picture for a long time. It was still Delphine. In 1979 she had walked out of the house the week after our father passed, and an envelope of cash from the family safe had gone with her. I was twenty two and had just opened my first office. I reported nothing to the police. I told myself she would send word. She never did. Now she was standing in the office of my lawyer with a power of attorney carrying my signature, asking after an account that did not exist until six weeks ago, in a bank that knew nothing about her.
“How did she learn about Charleston?” I asked. Raymond rubbed his temple. “Someone at the national firm talked. There was a short notice in a trade newsletter about the sale. And someone fed her the number.” He did not need to say who. I thought of the sticky note in the handwriting of Kyle. D. says he trusts the lawyer of Pop. D. had never been Denise. It was Delphine, who had found my son in law, a boat salesman in debt up to his sunglasses, and offered him half of whatever she could squeeze out of an old man who trusted his family.
A tax man who never cheated anyone recognizes the woman in a photograph, and quietly outsmarts the scheme built around his own signature.
That night I sat in the kitchen with the wedding picture of Gloria propped against the sugar bowl and thought about the way a family can lose a person without anyone saying so. I had told myself, all those years, that Delphine chose to go. It had never occurred to me that I might have gone looking. I was a young man proud of his own small office, with no time for a sister who made a mess. I do not think I was a bad brother. But I was a busy one, and busy can look a great deal like cold from the outside.
My first impulse was to pick up the telephone. My second was to sit still, which has always been the better one. Gloria used to say a tax man learns from other people returns that the loudest liar is the one who never checks his own math. I called the Florence county sheriff, an old customer of mine named Wade Hollis, and I told him the whole story. He listened quietly and said, “Harold, let us not scare her. Let us give her enough rope to walk right into the bank.” I liked that. I liked it very much.
On Wednesday I called Kyle and asked him to meet me at the Charleston branch, with Denise, to discuss the folder. He said he would be there at ten. I arrived at nine and sat in a leather chair in the office of the branch manager, a sharp woman named Mrs. Goodwin who had agreed to cooperate. Sheriff Hollis stood by the window with a deputy. Raymond sat beside me with a legal pad on his knee. At ten, Kyle came in with Denise. And a minute later, in the doorway behind them, a tall woman with silver hair and a gold pin stepped into the room.
Delphine saw me and stopped as if she had hit glass. She was seventy five years old, and she still carried herself like a duchess. “Harold,” she said. Her voice was low and steady. I stood up from the leather chair. “Hello, Delphi. You always did arrive exactly when the money did.” Denise gasped. Kyle took a step backward and bumped the doorframe. The sheriff came forward, calm as a postmaster, and asked politely if anyone cared to explain the power of attorney with a notary stamp from Myrtle Beach that nobody in Florence had authorized.
Denise looked at her husband. “Kyle?” she said. “Who is this woman?” Kyle turned the color of an old dishrag. It took less than ten minutes for him to confess everything, the loan from Delphine to pay his boat debt, the promise of a hundred thousand dollars, the way he had taken photographs in my bedroom while I was out. Denise listened, her hands clenched around the strap of her purse. Then she took off her wedding ring and set it on the desk of the manager. “I am going home, Daddy,” she said quietly. “I am so sorry.”
I did not press charges against my sister. That was my choice, and Raymond did not like it. But Delphine sat across from me at the conference table, small and tired under the fluorescent light, and told me about her forty five years. Three marriages, two bankruptcies, a bad heart and a rented room in Savannah. She had seen the sale in a newsletter and thought, my brother owes me something. I told her that our father had left her a share, in a letter she never opened, and I wrote her a check that day for the amount of that share, with interest. She wept.
Kyle took a plea and left the state. Denise filed for divorce and moved in with me for a spring, and we planted peas in the garden and talked about her mother. Delphine lives in a small apartment in Florence now, three blocks from my house, and she comes to supper on Sundays. She still has the gold pin. Last month I found her sitting in the kitchen with a stack of returns that I had left on the table, circling the deductions in red pencil. “You missed one, Harold,” she said, and she was right.