The signature at the bottom of the guardianship order belonged to the Honorable Harold T. Mabry, Judge of the Nineteenth District Court of McLennan County. I knew it at once, because I had taught the daughter of that man to type in 1983. I also knew that Judge Mabry had died of a stroke in the spring of 2009 and was buried at Oakwood Cemetery under a gray stone I had visited myself. The clerk at window six, a young woman with a nameplate that said Gloria, looked at the paper again, and then she looked at the date.
“Mrs. Purcell,” she said to me, very quietly, “this order was signed last Thursday.” I put my folder on the counter and slid my shorthand notes under the glass. I said that I had taken down every word the man said, from the moment he sat down to the moment he left, and that she could have the pages, and that I would be glad to read them aloud. Gloria did not answer. She was already reaching under the counter, and I heard a small click, and in a minute the manager of the office was standing beside her.
The manager was a stout man named Mr. Alvarado, with a tie as wide as a dinner plate. He listened to Gloria in a whisper, and then he read my notes line by line with a finger on the page, moving his lips. When he reached the end, he took off his glasses and cleaned them on his tie. He said, “Mrs. Purcell, I would like to invite you into my office, and I would like to call a friend of mine at the Office of the Inspector General. May I offer you a cup of coffee?”
A woman who has spent thirty years teaching young people to write down exactly what they hear is the most dangerous witness a liar can sit beside.
The agent from the Inspector General arrived within the hour. Her name was Special Agent Delaney Park, a small woman in a navy suit who carried a worn leather briefcase. She sat across from me and read all eleven pages of my notes twice. She asked if I would sign each page and date it. Then she told me what I had not known. Over the last eighteen months, a ring of men had been stealing the identities of the recently dead, reading the obituaries in the newspaper and collecting the benefits of widows who were too grieved to notice.
They had a name for it, she said, a tidy word. They called it harvesting. A man would visit a funeral home, copy the records, and then move to the next county. The man at window six was called Wendell Rusk, a sixty three year old former insurance clerk, and he had worked in eleven states. “He told you he was your husband,” Agent Park said. “He told the clerk you were suffering from dementia. Mrs. Purcell, you were the next account on his list.” I felt the cold go all the way down to my knees.
They arrested Wendell Rusk in the parking lot of the Social Security office before he could start his car. He had a hatchback with Oklahoma plates, a briefcase of folders, and a cellular phone that rang with the voice of a woman in Tulsa asking, repeatedly, whether the transfer had gone through. I watched through the glass door of the office of the manager as two agents in windbreakers led him away. He did not look back at me. He walked like a man who had always known he would be caught.
The checks of Dwayne had kept coming, I learned, because the funeral home had filed the death record under the wrong digit, a single transposed number. It had nothing to do with the thief. It was only a clerical error, the kind that happens when one person in a long chain of people is tired. I returned every penny of the extra money by cashier check, with a letter. Mr. Alvarado framed my letter and put it on the wall behind window six. I told him that was entirely unnecessary. He said he knew it.
The trial was in September. They put me on the stand for two hours, and I read my shorthand aloud to a courtroom full of strangers, word for word, in the same flat voice I had used to dictate to sixteen year olds. The defense lawyer, a young man with slick hair, tried to rattle me. He asked how I could be certain I had heard every word. I held up the pages. I said, “Young man, I am sure of what I wrote, and I wrote what he said.”
The jury was out for ninety minutes. Wendell Rusk was convicted on all counts and sentenced to nineteen years in federal prison, and the judge told him, from the bench, that he had met his match in a retired typing teacher. In the hallway, Agent Park shook my hand and asked if I would be willing to speak to a group of seniors. She said I had a gift for explaining how this kind of thing happens. I said I would think about it. I thought about it for a full eleven minutes.
Every second Tuesday now, in the community room of the Waco public library, I teach a class called Know Your Number. Forty or fifty older people come, with their folders and their glasses, and I show them how to read their statements and guard their digits and take notes when anyone asks them for anything. I tell them the story of the man at window six. I always end the same way. I hold up my steno pad, and I say, “Write it down. Write it all down.”