I closed the hatch, put the padlock back, and stood in the dusty light of the attic holding the spiral notebook against my robe. The last page said it plainly in the careful print of my husband. Gordon knows I know. If anything happens to me, Jolene, call Marshal Ruth Denton, United States Marshals Service, Fort Smith, and below it, a telephone number. Downstairs the doorbell rang a second time. I am Jolene Haskett, sixty eight years old, and I took the telephone out of my pocket and dialed that number with a thumb that would not hold still, and a woman answered on the third ring and said, “Mrs. Haskett, we have been waiting for your call for fifteen years.”
She explained it in four sentences, in the voice of a woman who has told this story to herself many times. In 2006, an armored truck outside a bank in Fort Smith lost three bags of cash, one million one hundred thousand dollars, and the case went cold. In 2007, Dale, who delivered mail on our street, saw Gordon Prewitt carry a duffel bag into his garage. He never said a word to the local police, because the brother in law of Gordon wore a badge. One night in 2009, while Gordon was in the hospital, Dale took the bags from the garage wall and hid them on our roof.
I went down the attic stairs and opened the front door. Deena Prewitt stood on my porch with her hair kit in one hand and her purse in the other, her gray eyes tired and kind. “Jolene,” she said, “I know it is Thursday, but I had a cancellation, and I thought I would come over early.” Her eyes went past me to the open attic ladder at the top of the stairs. I did not speak. The Marshal had told me, on the telephone, to keep calm and keep the door open. And across the street, in the garage of the Prewitt house, a truck engine started up.
A spiral notebook under an attic roof gave one widow the length of a Thursday morning to bring a stolen fortune back to the truth in Fort Smith.
I gave my terms to Deena at my kitchen table, with the Marshal on speaker phone beside the sugar bowl. “Deena, I do not believe you knew about the money. I believe you knew something was wrong, because a woman always knows. Marshal Denton will be here in ten minutes with two deputies. The cash goes back to the bank, every dollar. The reward is ten percent, and I intend to use it for something Dale would have liked. And you will tell her what you know about your husband, and she will protect you and your boy. That is all I ask of you, Deena.”
Deena sat very still, with her hands wrapped around a cup of coffee she had not touched. “Jolene, I have been afraid of Gordon for twenty years,” she said, in a whisper. “He put my son in the car when Wesley was sixteen and let him take the fall. Wesley is in McAlester because of him.” Her voice cracked. “I do your hair every Thursday because you are the only woman in this neighborhood who ever asked how I was, and meant it. I did not know about the roof. I swear to God. But I knew about the garage, and I never said a word.”
The front door banged open. Gordon Prewitt stood in my hall, big as a refrigerator, in a work shirt and a baseball cap, with his keys in his fist. “Deena, we are leaving,” he said. His eyes lifted to the open hatch above the stairs, and I watched him do the arithmetic. He bounded up the steps two at a time, snatched the tackle box from the attic floor, and came crashing down again toward the back door of the kitchen. He reached the porch. Two deputies in tan vests stepped around the corner of the house. Marshal Denton stood in the yard. And my neighbor Mr. Pickett, eighty one years old, was sitting on his porch with a shotgun across his knees, calmly watching.
Gordon froze on the back steps, with the tackle box clasped to his stomach. The morning was bright, and a mockingbird was singing in the pecan tree. Marshal Ruth Denton, a small woman in a tan blazer, raised her badge. “Mr. Prewitt,” she said, “you are standing on a roof of cash that you stole in two thousand and six. Set it down. You can do it easily, or you can do it with these gentlemen.” Gordon looked at the deputies, at the old man with the shotgun, at his wife, who stood in my kitchen door with her hair kit still on her arm. He set the box down on the step.
The consequences were just. Gordon was arrested that morning and later sentenced to nineteen years in federal prison, and Deena testified, gently, with the Marshals beside her. The hatch, the notebook, the binoculars and the tackle box went into an evidence room in Little Rock. Eight hundred and ninety thousand dollars went back to the bank. Deena came to my house the next Thursday, in her own car, to do my hair, and we cried together for an hour, and she did not charge me.
In the name of my husband Dale, who passed in June, I started the Dale Haskett Fund. It pays for scholarships for the children of mail carriers and for help for the families of crime witnesses who have been threatened, in Sebastian, Crawford and Franklin counties. I used the reward of eighty nine thousand dollars to start it. In the first year we sent nine students to college and helped seven families move to safety. One was a boy of fourteen from Van Buren who had testified against a neighbor, and who sat in my kitchen and ate pie in perfect silence.
On a Saturday morning in October, I climbed the ladder to the roof of my house, very slowly, with a thermos in my hand. The flat spot behind the chimney was empty now except for a lawn chair. I sat in it. Across the street, Deena was watering the chrysanthemums on her porch, and she looked up and waved. Beyond the rooftops of Fort Smith, the old frontier courthouse stood in the autumn light, and the river curved away to Oklahoma. “Dale,” I said, aloud, to the wind, “I did what you asked. I called.” And the wind moved the leaves, and I knew that he heard.