I called the Roanoke police department at nine the next morning with the pharmacy receipt in a plastic sleeve on the seat beside me. A detective named Sandra Reyes met me at the front desk. She was in her fifties, with a tired face and a steady voice, and she listened to the final tape in a conference room with the door shut. When it ended, she took off her glasses and set them on the table. “Mrs. Pennington,” she said, “I have been in this job twenty six years. I have heard a lot of confessions. I have never heard a victim describe her own death in advance.”
It took four months to get the order for the exhumation. A judge had to be convinced, a pharmacist had to certify that the dose on the receipt could stop the heart of a woman of seventy three, and a pathologist had to promise that the evidence would still be there after sixteen years. Dr. Anita Osei, a forensic specialist from Richmond, explained to me with great kindness that digoxin does not disappear from the body, that it lingers in the tissue and the hair for a very long time. “If she was given it,” she said, “we will find it.”
They opened the grave of my mother on a gray morning in November. I did not watch. I sat in my car at the edge of the cemetery with the thrift store cassette player on my lap and the headphones around my neck and listened to a different tape, one from 1991, about her tomato plants and the new principal at her school. For two hours she complained cheerfully about the rain. When the car door opened and Detective Reyes touched my arm, I realized I had been smiling.
A woman who whispers her last words into a cassette has trusted that one day, somebody who loves her will press play.
The results came back in three weeks. Digoxin, at a level that Dr. Osei described in a single, careful word. Toxic. Detective Reyes came to my house in person to tell me. We sat in my kitchen with the yellow sugar canister between us on the counter, and I made her a cup of tea, and neither of us said anything for a long time. When I finally spoke, I asked her about my stepsister. She looked at me with real sympathy. “Pamela Dunn has asked to speak with you first,” she said. “Before we speak with her.”
We met at a coffee shop in Salem. Pam had gained weight and lost color, and her hands moved constantly on the table, folding and unfolding a napkin. She said she had been waiting sixteen years to say this. Ray had asked her to pick up a prescription for Mae, she said, because he could not leave work. She had signed for it without looking at the name. A month later, at the kitchen sink of her own house, she had read the label of the bottle in her memory and understood. “I held your hand at the funeral and I knew,” she whispered. “And I said nothing. I told myself I could not be sure.”
I did not forgive her in that coffee shop, and I did not scream at her either. I was a hospice social worker for thirty years, and I had sat with a great many people at the exact moment they discovered what they had done. I told her only that she would have to tell it again, to the detective, and to a jury if it came to that. She nodded and covered her mouth. When she stood to go, she turned to me and said, “Your mother was the kindest person I ever met.” I said, “I know. She is still telling me so.”
They arrested Ray at his retirement community in Salem on a Wednesday afternoon, between lunch and the bingo game. He was eighty three, in a cardigan, and his second wife was holding his arm. He denied everything for two hours. Then Detective Reyes set a small tape player on the table and pressed play, and the room filled with the whisper of my mother. “Dot, I can not talk long. He is home.” Ray lasted nine seconds. “Turn it off,” he said. And then, in a flat voice, “She was going to leave me. She was going to take the house.”
He pleaded guilty to second degree murder in the spring, because he had no other choice. The judge gave him thirty years, which everyone in that courtroom understood to mean the rest of his life. Pam cooperated completely and was not charged. I sat in the second row for the sentencing in a navy dress, with the pharmacy receipt folded in my purse, and when the bailiff led Ray away, he did not look at me once. I looked at him the whole way. I wanted to remember that he was only a small, ordinary man.
The life insurance policy, which had paid Ray two hundred thousand dollars in 2009, was forfeited by order of the court. I used it to start a scholarship in the name of my mother for future teachers at Radford University, and the first recipient, a shy young woman named Danielle who wants to teach second grade, wrote me a letter that I keep in the drawer with the tapes. Cousin Bill and I took the four hundred cassettes to the Roanoke public library. A young archivist named Marcus spent six months turning them into digital files with the care of a surgeon.
The Sunday Tapes collection opened in October, on the anniversary of the day that my mother mailed her first one. The library hall was full. The children of her old students came, and the grandchildren of Dot, and a retired mailman who had carried the packages for twenty years. The archivist pressed a button, and the voice of my mother filled the room, strong and warm and a little bit bossy, describing a church supper in 1983. People laughed. I stood at the back by the door, and I did not try to stop my own tears.
Now on Sundays after church, my granddaughter Emma, who is nine, sits down with me at the kitchen table with a small cassette recorder that I bought for her at the thrift store. We talk for an hour about the week. Then we put the tape in an envelope, and she writes the address of Cousin Bill in her careful round handwriting, and we walk it to the mailbox together. “Why do we send it, Grandma?” she asked me last week. I said, “Because somebody is always listening, honey. Even when you think they are not.” She nodded, as if that were obvious.
