The first thing I saw when I pulled into the driveway of the sister of my daughter in Warrensburg was Renee herself, standing on the front step in her bathrobe with a cup of coffee in both hands, as pale as milk. She looked at me through the windshield of her own car. Then she looked at the car, and then at me again, and she set the cup down on the porch rail with exquisite care. I had not even parked. I got out and stood there in my church coat, with the papers from the lawyer pressed against my chest, and neither of us said a word.
“Mama,” Renee said at last, “how did you get here?” I told her I had borrowed her car, and that it was an emergency. Her sister Carol came to the door behind her with a dish towel, saw my face, and went absolutely still. “Let us go inside,” I said. We sat around a kitchen table covered in a plastic cloth with roosters on it, the three of us, and I laid the papers in front of Renee. I told her I would speak plainly, because there was no time to speak otherwise. Then I told her everything I had heard the night before on the telephone.
I watched her face as I talked. She did not interrupt. She did not deny a thing. When I reached the part about the basement stairs, she stood up so suddenly that her chair fell over backward, and she walked to the sink and gripped the edge with both hands. Her shoulders shook. I realized that she was not surprised. She was only ashamed. “Mama,” she whispered, “I did not know about the stairs. I swear to you on the grave of Daddy. But I knew about the house. I knew he wanted it.”
She turned around and her face was wet. She said she had known for three months that Clint was in trouble. A gambling debt, she had thought, a few thousand dollars. He had asked her to talk to me about the deed, and she had agreed, because she was tired and frightened and believed what he told her, that it was only about taxes. She had sent him to the lawyer in Jefferson City because he promised it was routine. She had never looked at the policies. She had never asked who the man on the telephone was. She had not wanted to know.
The hardest betrayals are the ones we allow ourselves, by looking the other way until the road gives out beneath us.
I put a hand over hers. I told her I did not blame her for not knowing what she could not imagine, and that the only thing that mattered now was what she did next. Carol, who had said nothing, stood up and fetched the telephone from the wall. “Renee,” she said, “you tell them. Right now.” Renee took the receiver in her shaking hand. She dialed a number I did not recognize. A moment later she was speaking in a low, steady voice to a detective of the Missouri State Highway Patrol.
The name of the witness on the quitclaim deed was the key. It belonged to a man called Walter Dunn, the Pettis County coroner, a man whose face had been in the Sedalia Democrat a dozen times that year, handing out checks at the high school and cutting ribbons at the new fire station. Detective Marsh told us on the telephone that Mr. Dunn had signed as witness on a document he never saw, in exchange for a sum that Clint had borrowed. He also said the coroner had signed the death certificates of two other elderly women, in the same county, in the last two years.
By noon, the state police had a warrant. They picked up Clint at his job at the grain elevator, in his gloves and his orange vest, and he went quietly, they said, as if he had been expecting it for a long time. The man with the smoker voice was named Roy Pruitt, a cousin of the coroner, and he was found at a motel in Boonville with a bag of cash and a map of my farm. By evening, Walter Dunn had resigned. By the end of the week, the news was on every channel in central Missouri.
Renee came home with me that afternoon. We drove back in two cars, her sister following, along the long gravel road to the old farmhouse. In the kitchen, she stood looking at the green telephone on the wall, with its curly cord hanging down. “I used to love that phone,” she said in a small voice. “Daddy let me ring the number of the operator when I was four years old.” I told her the phone was not to blame. It had only been brave enough to listen.
Clint pled guilty in August to conspiracy and a list of other charges. The judge gave him twenty two years. He did not look at Renee at the sentencing, and she did not look away. She divorced him in the fall, with the help of a kind young lawyer from Sedalia who charged her nothing. We sold the second car, paid off the insurance company, and tore out the carpet in the basement stairs and replaced it with a good solid rail. I gave Renee the new railing as a Christmas present. She cried and hugged me hard.
The coroner went to prison for fifteen years. The other two families, whose mothers had died in falls in their own homes, asked the state to reopen their cases. I sat in a courtroom in Jefferson City in the spring, in my church dress, and watched a daughter weep when the judge ordered an exhumation. Afterward, in the corridor, she took my hand and said, “You saved her, you know. By picking up that telephone.” I told her that I only did what a mother does, which is listen at a door.
We still have the green phone. Renee had it rewired last year by an old man in Warrensburg who knows how to fix them. On Tuesday nights, when I call my sister in Kansas City, I stand at the kitchen wall with the curly cord stretched across the room, and Renee sits at the table with her tea. She never goes to bed until I have hung up. Sometimes I catch her looking at the phone with a small smile, like a girl who has just remembered something that Lloyd once said.