The voice from the pulpit belonged to the Reverend Walter Haugen, who had baptized my daughter, buried my father, and said the blessing before the pie auction at every 4 H banquet in Plymouth County for thirty years. I sat on the edge of my bed with the phone in my lap and listened to him say it a second time: ten percent. I felt something I had not felt since the day my mother died. It was not grief. It was anger so cold and so clear that I could see through it. I got up and dressed, and I went out to my car, and at one in the morning I drove to the house of my grandson.
Caleb opened the door in his pajamas, rubbing his eyes, and I held up the phone. He listened to the recordings sitting on the stairs with his elbows on his knees and his big, gentle face going gray. When the last one ended, he said, “Grandma, do not touch anything. Do not delete anything. I am going to copy every file to three places.” He is nineteen and studying computer science at Western Iowa Tech, and I have never been so grateful for a young man in my life. By three in the morning there were copies on two computers and a memory stick in my purse.
At eight I drove to the sheriff department in Le Mars, a low brick building behind the courthouse, and asked for Sheriff Jim Dvorak, whom I had known since he showed a calf at the fair in 1989. He took us into his office, sat us down, and listened to the first recording with his hand over his eyes. When it ended he did not say anything for a minute. Then he said, “Linda, I am so sorry. Your mother was a fine woman. I will call the state. Do not tell your daughter, and do not go back to that farm until I say.”
The people who throw away the smallest witness in the house never remember that it was listening all along.
The agents of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation moved faster than I would have dreamed. They came to my kitchen that afternoon, a woman and two men in windbreakers, and they sat at the table with a laptop, taking notes. They obtained a court order to exhume my mother and a warrant to search the farm. And Caleb, with the patience of a boy who has taken apart every machine in the house, taught the agents how to retrieve the recordings with a time stamp and a record of the account, so that no lawyer in the state of Iowa could say they had been altered.
They exhumed my mother on a gray Tuesday in October. I stood at the fence of the little country cemetery outside Le Mars with the wind in my coat, and I held a lily from her own garden, and I did not cry. The state pathologist telephoned me on Friday. Ingrid Sorensen had a lethal dose of a sedative in her body, the same drug that was found in the truck of Brett, in a bottle with a label from a pharmacy in Omaha, and bruising on her face that her doctor had never seen. “It was not heart failure,” she told me. “I am so sorry.”
On Monday morning the agents drove up to the farm with two cars and a van. Brett was in the barn, working on his tractor, and he did not even turn around until a hand touched his shoulder. Kristy was in the kitchen, washing dishes, and she dropped a plate. She put both hands over her face. She did not run, and she did not ask what it was about. She only said, in a thin, dead voice, “I knew it. I knew it was coming.” My daughter. I had held her as a baby in that same kitchen, with Mama singing a Norwegian lullaby beside us.
Kristy gave a statement that lasted nine hours. She told the agents that she had known about the pills, but not the pillow. She told them she had been afraid of her husband for two years. She told them of the night of the twenty ninth, when she heard her grandmother scream, and went down the stairs, and found Brett standing over the bed with a cushion in his hands. “I did not stop him,” she whispered. “I went to the truck for the bottle, because he said to. I will hear her voice for the rest of my life.”
The Reverend Haugen was arrested on a Sunday, in the parking lot of his church, in his black robe, between the early service and the late. His brother, the vice president of the bank, was arrested the same afternoon at his desk. Doc Larsen, who had signed a certificate of heart failure for a woman whose heart had been strong as a drum, surrendered his license and cried in the courtroom. The sale of the farm was voided. The three hundred twenty thousand dollars from the co op was frozen, and then, a month after the trial, handed over to my family.
Brett was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. The jury needed ninety minutes. Kristy pleaded guilty to conspiracy and obstruction and agreed to testify, and the judge, who had listened to her for two hours without moving, gave her fifteen years. I did not go to the sentencing. I could not. I sat on the porch of the farmhouse of my mother, with a cup of coffee going cold, and I watched the sun come up over the forty acres of corn stubble, and I forgave my daughter, a little, every morning, until I could do it without crying.
In December, Caleb drove out to the county dump with a flashlight and a pair of gloves and, after two hours in the cold, came back with a cardboard box. Inside was the small round speaker of my mother, scratched and dusty, with its cord wound tight. We set it on the kitchen counter of the farm, by the window, and Caleb plugged it in. The ring of light turned blue. I stood in the doorway of the kitchen in my coat. “Computer,” I said, and my voice broke. “Play Lawrence Welk.” And the whole old house filled with the sound of a polka band.
