I looked at my father across the white blanket of the hospital bed, and I said, as gently as I could, “Daddy, tell me about the papers.” He turned his face to the window. Outside, the sun was coming up over the Pascagoula River, gold on the water. “I signed them, baby,” he said. “I did not have my glasses. The man said they were for the insurance. And Tammy sat right beside me and said, Go ahead, Daddy.” He pressed his fist against his mouth. “My own daughter held the pen.”
I did not cry. Nineteen years in intensive care teaches you to move straight through the worst moment in the life of someone else. I took his hand, I told him he had done nothing wrong, and I called the one person I trusted in that county. Judge Harold Bell, retired, a deacon at Eastlawn, who had taught the Sunday school class of my father for thirty years. He answered at seven in the morning, and he listened, and he said, “Lisa, do not let that man out of your sight. I am coming.”
He arrived with a lawyer, a young woman named Denise Carter from the Mississippi Center for Justice, who carried a battered leather bag and a legal pad. In the hospital cafeteria, she spread out the paper from the jacket of my father. It was a lease, but behind it, stapled, was a copy of a quitclaim deed. Roy Fortner to a company called Gulf Coast Property Partners. Filed at the office of the chancery clerk in July. The notary stamp on the bottom belonged to a woman who, Denise discovered by noon, had been dead for four years.
A father who builds ships for forty years can still be rescued by a daughter who simply came home early.
“That is not a mistake,” Denise said, tapping the stamp with her pen. “That is a forgery of a forgery. It voids the deed on its face.” She looked up at me with a hard, bright look. “Mrs. Fortner, I have seen this pattern in forty one cases across two counties. Your father is the first victim anyone has found alive, in a hospital, with a daughter who is a nurse and who also took photographs. The man who opened the door of the house yesterday is the best witness I could have asked for.”
I handed over my phone. On it were the pictures I had taken on the porch of Daddy, the six men, the beer cans, and in the doorway, in an undershirt, the face of Dwayne Kittrell. Denise sent them to the office of the Attorney General that morning. By afternoon, an investigator named Cole Burrell was sitting in the room of my father with a recorder on the tray table, listening to a frail old man in a hospital gown explain exactly what he remembered. He remembered everything. He even remembered the cologne of the man.
It was Tammy who broke. They found her at the motel in Gautier on Friday, with a suitcase and a bus ticket. She sat in a small gray room for two hours, and at the end she told them the truth in a thin broken voice. Wade had owed Kittrell money. Kittrell had promised her five thousand dollars and a clean slate on her debts for finding an old man with a house and no one watching. She had chosen Daddy. She said, “I told myself he would never notice.”
When she was brought into the hospital room in handcuffs for a short supervised visit, she could not lift her eyes. My father looked at her for a long time. Then he said, in the steady voice that had once called out orders on a shipyard, “Tammy Jean. I forgive you. I do. But you will tell the truth in that courtroom, every word, and you will not stop.” She put her face against the cold railing of the bed and sobbed like a child. I stood in the corner and could not breathe.
Dwayne Kittrell was arrested outside a casino in Biloxi on the twelfth of November, with eleven thousand dollars in a gym bag. The chancery court voided the deed within the month. Gulf Coast Property Partners was shut down, its accounts frozen, and the investigators found nineteen more deeds with the same dead notary. By Christmas, thirty families across the Gulf Coast had their houses back. Judge Bell stood on the steps of the courthouse in the rain and shook my hand and said nothing at all.
On the Saturday before Thanksgiving, my father walked into his own house on a cane, past the empty driveway and the swept porch. The roofers had left it filthy, but he stood in the kitchen and breathed it in. The table was still there. The Bible, which I had retrieved from the car, went back in its place on the shelf. Then he sat down heavily in the chair by the window, put on a brand new pair of glasses, and read the entire newspaper from front to back.
I cancelled my next contract. Eastlawn gave me the Sunday school class of Daddy, to start, which I do badly, with a flannel board. At the hospital, they offered me a job in the cardiac unit, three miles from his kitchen. Tammy took a plea and will be home in two years. Every Sunday I take Daddy to the church parking lot, only to the front steps, and we sit together in the sunshine. He signs nothing now. He reads everything first, twice.
