Deputy Harmon met me at a pancake house on the edge of Amarillo on Wednesday morning, a thin man in his seventies with a gray mustache and the longest hands I had ever seen. He ordered coffee and nothing else. He looked at the sticky note I slid across the table. Then he said, in his slow rough voice, “Mrs. Varner, Lyle came to see me in July because he had figured something out. About three years ago, a man named Eugene Pitts died of a heart attack in his own garage. His son in law owed Raymond Toliver a great deal of money. Pitts had a life insurance policy.”
“He was the third father in law in four years,” Harmon went on. “Same pattern. A young man in debt to Toliver. An older man with a policy. A sudden death. And when the insurance paid out, the young man paid Toliver, and the debt was gone. I worked every one of those cases. I could never prove a thing.” He turned his cup. “Lyle was a careful man. He kept a log. He had noticed that Troy asked him a lot of questions about his heart pills. He had noticed that Troy visited every Saturday, for the first time in his life. And he had noticed that his pills tasted different.”
I felt the pancake house tilt. I put my hand on the table. Harmon reached across and steadied it. “Mrs. Varner, I will tell you what I think, and you will tell me if it is too much. I think Lyle went to a doctor in Canyon in July and had his pills tested. I think he knew exactly what he was swallowing. And I think he kept swallowing them, so that Troy would not guess, because he wanted the record to be clean for you.” My eyes filled, and I said, “That stubborn old fool.” Harmon nodded. “Yes, Madam. He was.”
A fence built one paycheck at a time is the only wall that holds when love is finally put to the test.
The pills were in the medicine cabinet, in the orange bottle with the white cap. I had kept them out of habit. Harmon took them away in an evidence bag, and the state crime laboratory in Austin reported in nine days that the capsules had been emptied and refilled with something else, a heart stopping drug that would be hard to find in a tired old body. A judge in Potter County signed an order for the exhumation of my husband that afternoon. I stood at the cemetery gate in my black wool coat with my hands folded and watched them lift my Lyle out of the ground a second time.
The report was brief. The drug was in his blood. Troy had been refilling the capsules at my kitchen table, on Saturdays, while I made coffee in the next room. I had stood in that doorway and brought him cake. My husband had known, and had said nothing, to protect me from knowing. The laboratory called it homicide. Deputy Harmon drove out to the yellow brick house that evening and told me in the front room, his hat in his hand, and then he sat with me until midnight while I wept for the stubborn, loving man who had made me a fence.
I did not tell Shawna. Deputy Harmon asked me not to, and I agreed, though it nearly broke me. The next Tuesday I called her and said, in a calm voice, that I had prayed on it, and I was ready to sign. She squealed. She brought Troy by that evening, grinning, in a pressed shirt, with the papers. He sat in the chair of Lyle at my kitchen table and passed me a pen. A tiny microphone no bigger than a button was sewn into the collar of my cardigan, and four detectives were parked on Bowie Street with the engine running.
I held the pen above the paper for a long time. Then I said, softly, “Troy, how did you know the heart medicine of Lyle was in the orange bottle?” He blinked. He smiled the easy smile that I had watched across two Thanksgiving tables. “Judy, you told me.” I said, “I never told you.” And in the long silence that followed, with the clock ticking on the wall and the cherry pie going soft on the counter, I saw him understand that he had made one single mistake, and that it was the only one that mattered.
They took him out through the back door in handcuffs. He did not fight. Shawna, standing in the driveway in her coat, screamed his name once and then sank onto the concrete step and covered her face with her hands. I went to her. I knelt on the cold cement and put my arms around my daughter, as I had when she was four years old with a skinned knee. She said, “Mom, I did not know.” I said, “I know, baby. I know you did not.” And I held her until the sirens faded.
Troy pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to life. Raymond Toliver was arrested in Durant and charged with racketeering, and the district attorney in Potter County opened the files on the other three fathers. Shawna divorced Troy in a plain courtroom in the spring and moved into my back bedroom with her little boy. She does not say much about it. But last Christmas she put a small box under the tree, and inside it was a ball of blue yarn. “For the scarf,” she said. “The one you never finished.”
I put the three hundred and forty thousand dollars in a trust at the bank on Polk Street, for my grandson, and for the others who come after. I wrote on the paper, in my own hand, the one word Lyle always said: Fence. On quiet Sundays I take the white envelope out of my Bible and read it again, in his blocky railroad print. JUDY. IF SHAWNA ASKS FOR THE CHECK. And I whisper to the empty room, because he cannot hear it any other way: “Nobody climbed it, Lyle. Nobody did.”