“Died,” I finished aloud, my voice small in the front hall. “And that old woman died, Lorrie, eleven days after the policy was issued. Her name was Mrs. Eunice Pate, of Brazil, Indiana. Rich arranged the paperwork. The woman in the picture, Crystal, was the beneficiary, and she collected two hundred thousand dollars. I could not prove it. The sheriff would not listen to a retired electrician. But I kept the picture, and the clipping, and the name, and I put them here.” Andre stood in the doorway with his cap in his hand, saying nothing.
I sat down on the hall bench, under the mirror of Lou, and read the letter a third time. The date was the month before his surgery. He had written, in his plain careful hand, that Rich asked him to sign a policy on my life for two hundred thousand dollars, with Rich as beneficiary, and that Lou had refused, and that Rich had laughed and called it insurance for final expenses. Lou had gone to the library the next morning and found the clipping about the arrest. Lorrie, watch every paper. Count your pills. Do not sign anything in your own kitchen without a lawyer present.
Tammy had come downstairs. I heard her on the steps before I saw her, her slippers slapping the wood. She stood at the foot of the stairs in her bathrobe with a cup of coffee in her hand, and when she saw the letter, and the clipping, and the young stranger with his cap in his hands, the cup began to tremble so that coffee slopped on her wrist. “Mom,” she said, “what is that?” I held it up. “This is what your husband did to a woman in Brazil, Indiana,” I said. “And what he meant to do to me.”
A letter taped behind a mirror can protect a woman better than a lock on the door.
Rich came in from the garage in his work boots, whistling. He stopped whistling when he saw the three of us in the hall. I will say this for him: he was quick. In the space of one breath he had his smile back on and his hands spread. “Lorraine, whatever you think you have there, it is a misunderstanding. That clipping is an old matter. I was a witness, not a defendant.” I said, “Rich, that is a fine way to say it.” He glanced at the mirror, then at me, then at Andre. Then he turned and went out the back door and did not return.
I called Detective Hargis that same afternoon. He was a stocky man with a gray mustache who had led the elder fraud unit for ten years, and he sat in my front hall with the letter on his knee and read it twice, slowly, from beginning to end. When he finished, he removed his glasses. “Mrs. Fisk,” he said, “your husband gave us the one thing we never had. A date. A name. A signed refusal. We can reopen the Pate case.” He added, softer, “He must have loved you very much.”
They found Rich at a casino in French Lick two days later, with Crystal and a suitcase containing eleven thousand dollars in cash and three blank policy forms. The investigation took nine months. In the end there were four old women in four counties whose policies he had arranged, and two who had died with suspicious haste. A grand jury indicted him on fraud and conspiracy and, in one case, on a second charge so serious that I will not write it. He is in prison. I did not attend the trial. I could not bear to see his face.
Tammy came to me at the end. She sat at my kitchen table with her hands clasped between her knees, thin and gray, a woman who had just spent a year of her life discovering she did not know her husband. “Mom,” she said, “I knew about the casinos. I did not know about the rest. I want you to believe that.” I said I believed her. “I want to move out,” she said. “I want to find my own place. I think I must find out who I am without him.” I took her hand. “Then go and find out,” I said. “The door will be open.”
Andre came by a week later with a paper bag. Inside were two hamburgers and a paper cup of coffee. He explained shyly that he had thought an old woman living alone might like some company. I told him that was very kind. We sat in the kitchen eating burgers like truant children, and he told me about his mother, who had died of a stroke the year before. I told him about Lou. By the end, he had cleaned my gutters and fixed the porch step, and I had given him two pieces of pie.
He labors for me now, two afternoons a week, for fair pay. He is twenty two, studying to be an electrician, like Lou, and sometimes he brings a textbook and does his homework at the kitchen table while I knit. One day he held up a wire stripper and asked whether I wished to learn. I said I was seventy seven years old. He said that was the perfect age. I learned to wire a lamp in forty minutes, with a great deal of laughing, and I plugged it in myself, and it lit.
Every morning, before I go to the garden, I stand in the front hall in front of the mirror of Lou. I touch up my lipstick. I fix my hair. And then I stand a moment longer, gazing into the silver at the place behind my left shoulder where my husband used to stand. “Lou,” I say, “fix my collar.” And I raise my chin, and I feel the faintest touch of a thumb at the nape of my neck, steady as it always was, and I smile, and I go out into the day.