I did not wait for morning. I put on the old fishing boots of Frank, took the big flashlight from the kitchen drawer, and walked down the wooden dock in the dark, with the lake slapping gently against the pilings and the frogs going quiet ahead of me. Twenty six years we had sat at the end of that dock with our iced tea. I knelt on the boards where the chair of Frank always stood. I counted the planks from the end, the way Mr. Odom had told me, and the fourth one from the bench came up with a little pry of the screwdriver, as if it had been waiting.
Under the plank, wrapped in a feed sack and then in a sheet of heavy plastic, was a green metal box with a rusty latch, the kind that Frank used for his fishing lures. Inside were seventy three prescription forms. I counted them twice in the light of the flashlight. Each was clipped to a photocopy of a pharmacy log, with a date, a pill count, and a red circle, in the neat hand of Frank. On the first one, at the top, in the margin: Keith. Right thumb. And on the back, a very clear thumbprint in blue ink.
At the bottom of the box was a cassette tape, with a label in the handwriting of Frank: Atlanta man. April 2021. And a small envelope with a note: Sandy. If you are reading this, I could not do the right thing while I lived. Please do it for me. Mr. Odom will help. I have loved you every day. F. I sat on the dock in the dark with the box on my knees and the wet planks under me. I did not cry. I was too angry to cry. I was angry for him, and for the eleven months, and for the man who had made him sign.
A husband who cannot speak the truth aloud may still hide it under the boards where his wife will one day sit and find it.
On Monday morning I walked into the office of an elder law attorney in Anderson named Ellen Marsh, a brisk woman of fifty with silver hair, and put the box on her desk. She went through it for an hour without saying a word. When she looked up, she said, “Mrs. Gilley, this is not only a case about a house. This is a case about a federal crime. I will call the SLED agent I trust and a diversion investigator at the DEA. And I want you to promise me that you will go nowhere near your stepson.” I promised. I would have promised anything.
The tape was the worst of it. We played it in the conference room, on a machine that Ellen found in the back of a closet. First the voice of Frank, calm and tired. Then the man from Atlanta, smooth as butter: “Mr. Gilley, your son is a good boy who made a mistake. You will give him the house, and the pills will be forgotten. If you go to the police, I cannot answer for what happens to your wife at that lake. It is so isolated out there.” I put my hand on the table to keep it from shaking. Ellen turned off the machine and sat very still.
His name was Marcus Dyer. He ran a small pain clinic in Atlanta that was, as the agents explained to me, a pill mill with a waiting room. He had been under investigation for three years. What he lacked was a witness, and a voice on a tape, and a trail of forged prescriptions that led back to the supply. Frank had given them all three. The agents asked me to do one more thing. They asked me to do nothing at all. They told me to let the thirty days run, and let Keith come back.
He came on the thirtieth day, at ten in the morning, in the same yellow truck, with Dale and two other men and a flatbed trailer. I stood on my porch in my good blue dress with a glass of iced tea. Keith walked up the gravel with a smile on his face and a stack of papers in his hand. “Time is up, Sandra,” he said. “I hope you have your things packed.” I took a sip. “I do not,” I said. “But there are some people here who would like to talk with you.” He looked past me. The screen door opened.
Four agents in windbreakers came out of my house, where they had been sitting since dawn on my sofa, eating my banana bread. Keith dropped the papers. He did not run. He turned very white, and he began to talk in a high, cracked voice, to nobody in particular: “It was not me, it was Dyer, I only printed the scripts, my father let me, he knew, he said it was fine.” An agent took his arm. “Mr. Gilley, you have the right to remain silent,” she said. “I strongly advise you to use it.”
Keith pleaded guilty to conspiracy, forgery, and diversion of controlled substances, and in exchange for his testimony against Dyer he was given six years. The quitclaim deed of 2021 was voided by a judge in Oconee County in a hearing that lasted eleven minutes. Duress, fraud, and a conspiracy to deprive a vulnerable man of his property: the judge used all three words. The thirty eight thousand dollars that Frank had paid out of his own pocket was returned to me from the account of Keith, every cent, with interest. I put it in a savings account in the name of Frank.
In the evening of the first warm day in May, I carried two glasses of iced tea down to the end of the dock and set one down on the boards beside the empty chair. The sun was going down red behind the pines on the far shore. The bug zapper fizzed on the porch, and a heron stood on one leg in the shallows. I sat, and I put my feet up on the rail the way he used to, and I raised my glass to the lake. “Frank,” I said, “we kept the house.” And the water was very calm, and the light went gold, and I think he heard me.
