“Slipper,” the officer finished, and he paused the video on his own tiny screen and turned it toward Brenda. “A woman purple slipper. Fuzzy. With a little gold bow on the toe.” Nobody in that hospital corridor said a word. On the frozen picture, a foot in the shadow of the garage stood by the wall switch, and the slipper on it was unmistakable. Brenda wore a pair just like it every evening. She had worn them to the hospital that very night. They were on her feet. She looked down, as if she had only just discovered them, and she pulled her coat over her ankles.
The officer, a tall young man named Pruitt with kind brown eyes, did not raise his voice. He asked Brenda to sit. She sat. He asked her whether she would care to explain why her slipper appeared on the video of the garage at 6:14 in the evening on the same night that her husband was found unconscious. She stared straight ahead. “I went over to check on Frank,” she said at last. “I was only in the doorway.” Officer Pruitt tapped the screen again. In the video, she stood there for eleven minutes. She did not call anyone. She did not step back out.
Dad was awake by morning. He had a headache like a hammer and a voice like gravel, but his eyes were clear, and when I came into the room with a cup of ice chips, he took my hand and squeezed it. “Katydid,” he said, the name he has called me since I was four, “I heard her. I heard the door. I thought it was the wind.” He closed his eyes. “Then I heard the click of the lock on the opener. She does not know I heard it.” I told him he did not need to say any more. He said, “Honey, I want to.”
A woman can hide a purpose behind a smile, but she cannot hide a pair of slippers from a camera.
Detective Okonski came that afternoon with a folder of records. She had done the work in a single night. The policy for three hundred forty thousand dollars had been opened online in September. The signature on the application was a scan of the signature of my father, copied from a check. The address for the confirmation was a post office box that Brenda had rented in July, and the beneficiary, which Brenda had put down as me, was not the real point. The real point was a second policy, a smaller one, with Brenda as the beneficiary, bought two days later.
The plan, as the detective laid it out, was both simple and cruel. Brenda would see to it that my father died of an apparent accident, in the garage, doing what he loved. Then the larger policy would pay me, the daughter who had been fighting with him over money, and the police would look at me. The smaller policy would pay Brenda quietly, without anyone noticing. She was counting on one thing, that the police would never think to check the camera on the workbench. She had forgotten that my father could not figure out the app.
They arrested Brenda that evening at the nurses station, in the purple slippers, while she was holding a get well card. She asked for her lawyer in a cold, even voice. In the interview, the detective played the video for her once more, and Brenda, who had spent four years being gracious to my family, finally lost her composure. “He was seventy nine when I married him,” she said. “He promised me I would be comfortable. He lied.” The detective said, “He gave you his house, his truck, and his name.” Brenda stopped talking.
Brenda was convicted of attempted murder and fraud. The judge, a silver haired woman who had been listening with an expression of increasing weariness, gave her twenty one years. Before the sentence, my father asked to speak. He sat in a wheelchair at the front, in the blue sweater I bought him at Christmas, and he looked at his wife for a very long time. “Brenda,” he said, “I loved you. I do not understand it. But I did.” She did not look at him. He turned to the judge. “Thank you, Your Honor,” he said. “That is all.”
The two insurance companies canceled the policies and apologized. The neighbor who had smelled the exhaust, a retired mailman named Mr. Dwyer, came to the hospital with a bouquet of carnations, and my father hugged him like a long lost son. Mr. Dwyer insisted that he had done nothing. “I smelled gas,” he said. “Anybody would have.” Dad shook his head. “Nobody else did, Walt,” he said. “You were the only one who got off his couch.”
I moved Dad into my house in Lansing, into the room that used to be my daughter. I put up his old pictures and hung his Lions pennant over the bed. I sold the house on Fenner Street, and we kept the truck, though I would not let him run the engine in the garage without the door wide open and a window cracked and me standing there in my robe with my arms folded. He grumbled. He says I have become a worse nag than my mother. I tell him that is the greatest compliment he has ever paid me.
On the first Sunday of the football season, we sat in front of the television with the Lions game on and a bowl of popcorn between us. Dad had his feet up and his slippers on, plain brown, with no bow. When the Lions scored in the third quarter, he leaped out of his chair with a shout and spilled popcorn across the carpet. I laughed until I cried. “Katydid,” he said, sitting back down with a groan, “I almost missed this.” I took his hand. “I know, Dad,” I said. “But you did not.”