The drugstore on Main Street smelled of peppermint and old floor wax. A clerk named Tim took the camera into the back with a look of polite doubt, because nobody had asked for film in years. We waited on a bench by the greeting cards, Carter and Grace and I, saying nothing. The clock over the pharmacy counter said four minutes past five. At a quarter to six, Tim came out with a flat paper envelope, and his face had changed.
There were eleven pictures. The first nine were of ducks, a dock, and Grace holding a sunfish by the lip. The tenth was Melissa at the table on the screened porch of the lake house, in sunglasses, with a stack of papers in front of her. Across from her sat a heavy man in a polo shirt, holding a pen over a page. Behind them on the counter, in plain view, was a prescription bottle with its label turned toward the camera. Dick had taken it from the yard, through the screen.
The eleventh picture was closer, the page itself. Dick had zoomed in as far as the lens would go. It was the power of attorney. Beneath the line for his signature, on the notary line, was a stamp reading Brent Sollis, Notary Public. The man in the polo shirt, whose name I would learn was the boyfriend of Melissa for six years, was no notary at all. The commission number on that stamp belonged to a dead man in Fort Wayne.
A careful man leaves his proof in a hollow place, and trusts a child to carry it out.
Then I opened the letter. Dick had written it in pencil, in his square capitals. Jo, if you are reading this, the children trust you and Melissa is at it again. I have kept my lunches. Second shelf of the chest freezer in the garage, three plastic bags with dates. Take them to Dr. Rao at Goshen Hospital. I changed my will in July with Wendell Fisk. The lake house is yours and was never hers. I should have been braver. I never once regretted you.
The bags were exactly where he said, behind a frozen bass, wrapped in foil like leftover casserole. Dr. Rao found a sedative in all three, a drug that Melissa had no reason to possess unless she had a reason. It was also the drug named on the bottle in the tenth photograph. Detective Ruth Landry sat in my kitchen with her notebook and said, “Mrs. Hartman, I have not seen evidence kept so carefully in twenty years.” I told her that Dick taught shop. He measured twice, and he cut once, and he never in his life trusted a lock he had not tested himself.
Melissa was arrested at the facility in Elkhart, of all places, on the very day she had scheduled my move. She had brought a pen, a folder, and a van with a wheelchair lift. A deputy took the pen from her hand. The director of the facility, who had watched me finish the crossword in ink that morning and known at once that I was no more confused than he was, shook my hand in the lobby and apologized for having taken her call.
The prosecutor charged her with forgery, fraud, and neglect of a dependent adult, and with administering a controlled substance without consent, five counts of it. She pleaded guilty in the spring, to avoid a trial that would have put her children on the witness stand. The judge gave her six years. Melissa looked at me once from the defense table. I looked back. There was nothing in my face that I needed to hide, and I think she saw that, and understood it at last.
The father of Carter and Grace, a quiet engineer named Paul, drove up from Fort Wayne the week of the arrest. He sat on my porch with his hat in his hands. He said Melissa had kept him from the children for two years, and that he had never known the half of it. He asked whether the children might live with him, and whether I might still be their grandmother. I said that Grace had asked for me before anything else. We worked out the rest in an hour, over coffee.
The ashes of Dick had been in the trunk of the car of Melissa all that time. The police returned the walnut box in a paper bag, and I carried it home as though it were a sleeping child. In June, on a clear blue morning, the two grandchildren and I took the rowboat out to the middle of the lake. Carter held the oars. Grace sang a hymn, flat and loud. I opened the box and let the wind take what it wanted.
The mallard drake sits on my mantel now, with the plug of wood glued back, and the three notebooks stand beside it in a row. Every August the children come to the lake, taller each year, and Carter carves while Grace fishes. Last summer he finished his first wood duck and gave it to me without a word. On the bottom, very small, he had burned a line with a hot nail. It said, For Grandma Jo, who was never confused.