Part 3 — The Tip Line
Delia held the little slip of paper where only I could see it, and I put on my reading glasses.
Under the line that says Tip, in Brents slanting hand, he had written four lines. “Dee. Keep this between us. I will make it right. $2,000 Friday. B.K.”
Underneath the words was his signature and the date, the eleventh of October, the same night as the collision.
I read it aloud for the pastor, who was standing three feet away with his hand on the folding table.
Brent started to laugh and could not finish. Crystal had gone gray in the face, and she stood with her hands hanging.
“Brent,” she said, so quietly I barely heard, “you told me it was a deer.”
The man who could not spell proof had signed his own name to it on a bar napkin at one in the morning, and then tried to buy the only witness for two thousand dollars.
The deputy cousin was in the second row of the fellowship hall, and he stood up red to the ears. He said that the Kentucky State Police would take over the case, because he would be a witness himself. The pastor thanked him for that.
Two troopers came by the church an hour later and took Delia statement at the back table. She cried while she told it, and I held her hand. It was the first time anyone had heard her all the way through.
Brent was charged with leaving the scene and driving under the influence. A private deal could not undo a thing. The prosecutor was clear that the court, and only the court, would decide.
The eighteen thousand dollar check was returned to Crystal uncashed. She came to my house the next morning, in her bathrobe, with swollen eyes and a pie.
She told me she had signed the lawyer paper because she was afraid. She told me she had been afraid for eight years, and not just that night.
I made her a cup of coffee, and we sat at my kitchen table for two hours.
Brents truck insurance, once the trooper report was filed, paid for the hip and the Buick. The hospital wrote the forty-one thousand nine hundred dollar bill down to nothing.
The following Friday I rolled out yeast dough on my counter and wrapped two extra rolls in a napkin for Delia, the way I always had.