I stood in my kitchen in Beaumont, holding the phone against my ear, until the voicemail ended and the robot voice asked if I wanted to save the message or delete it. I pressed save. Then I pressed it again, to be sure. Then I sat on the floor with my back against the refrigerator and played it a third time, and a fourth, and by the fifth my hands had stopped shaking and my mind had turned very clear and cold, the way it does when a column of numbers refuses to add up and I know exactly which line is wrong.
I did not call Ricky. I did not call anybody. I got into my car at ten that night and drove to Port Arthur through the refinery lights, past the flare stacks burning orange against the sky, to the little house on Procter Street where I was born. Ricky had taken his truck. The house was dark. I used the key under the flowerpot. In the bedroom of my mother, the bed was made, the pillow plump and white, and on the nightstand the beige phone with the long curly cord sat in its cradle, exactly where she had left it.
The sewing box was in the closet, on the top shelf, behind the hat boxes. Red metal, with a hinged lid and a handle that had been worn smooth by sixty years of her hands. I carried it to the bed and opened the tray. Under the spools of thread and the pin cushion, flat against the bottom, lay a folded sheet of blue lined paper. My mother had written on both sides, in the careful, shaking cursive of a woman who once taught Sunday school. At the top it said: For Debbie. Do not show Ricky. I sat down on the bed and began to read.
A mother who whispers into a telephone under her pillow has already forgiven the child she is trying to save.
She had known since the spring. She wrote that Ricky had asked her to sign a form from an insurance man in May, and that the man had read only the last page aloud. She wrote that Tonya had begun to cook for her, and that the food had tasted odd, and she had stopped eating it. She wrote the date she heard Ricky on the telephone saying the word policy. She wrote that she was not afraid, only sad. And at the bottom of the second page, in letters a little larger than the rest: Debbie, do not hate your brother. He is weak, not wicked. When it is over, help him do right.
I read that last line eleven times. Then I put the letter in my purse, the voicemail on my phone in three safe places, and at seven the next morning I walked into the Port Arthur Police Department and asked for a detective. The woman who came out to meet me was named Carla Meaux, a tall, tired officer of fifty with a long gray braid. She took me into an interview room with a cup of coffee, and she listened to the voicemail without moving, with her eyes on the table, from the first breath to the last click. When it was over, she took off her reading glasses and said, “Ms. Lowry, I am so sorry.”
“We cannot do much with a voicemail alone,” Detective Meaux went on, “and the death certificate says natural causes. But we can ask a judge to let us examine your mother.” I said yes before she finished the sentence. They exhumed her on a Monday in August, in the heat, at the cemetery on Gulfway Drive. The medical examiner found what the first doctor never had a reason to look for: fibers of cotton deep in her airway, and bruising on the inside of her lip. A pillow. “She did not die in her sleep,” said the examiner. “Someone held her down.”
Ricky was the easy one. Detective Meaux brought him in on Tuesday morning, and he sat in the same chair that I had, with his hands between his knees. He was fifty nine years old, and he looked eighty. She played him the voicemail. He listened to the first minute and then he put both hands over his face, and a sound came out of him that I had not heard since he was a boy of seven and our daddy died. “I went to the truck,” he sobbed. “I swear to God. I went to the truck and I turned on the radio. I did not stay. I did not stay to watch.”
He told them everything. Dutch was Clarence Boudreaux, a man from Cameron, Louisiana, who ran dice games on the boats and had lent Ricky eighty thousand dollars. The plan was to pay off the debt with the insurance money, two hundred fifty thousand dollars, of which Tonya would get all, and Dutch half. Ricky wore a wire to a bar in Cameron on Thursday night and got Dutch to say the whole thing again, with the spider on the back of his hand wrapped round a glass of beer. They arrested him at the bar. He did not even finish his drink.
Dutch Boudreaux was convicted of murder and sentenced to life. Tonya was convicted of conspiracy and fraud and got twelve years. Ricky pleaded guilty to conspiracy and was sentenced to twenty five, with a recommendation of mercy from the judge, because of what the judge called the extraordinary courage of the sister of the defendant in asking for it. I had asked. I stood in the courtroom and said that my mother had left me a letter, and I read it aloud, the last line twice. Ricky, in his orange jumpsuit, cried so hard that the bailiff brought him a box of tissues.
I visit him on the first Sunday of every month, in a prison outside Huntsville, with a bag of sewing in my lap, because the red box is mine now, and I am slowly learning to use it. We sit at a metal table under a fluorescent light. He tells me what he has read. I tell him about his daughter, Amber, who writes to him every week. And in the evenings, back in Beaumont, I dial the old number, the cell phone of my mother, and wait to hear her small, stern voice. “This is Frances. I do not know how to use this thing. Call the house.” I say, “I am calling, Mama.”
