“Peoria,” Michelle finished, and she set down the printer proof on the workbench with a hand that trembled. “Mrs. Wendt, the first wife of Todd did not die in a car accident. That is a story. She is alive. There was a sheriff in Peoria who put it in writing. She left him after he broke her arm, and he told everyone she died, so no one would come looking.” In the doorway, Emma and Josh, my two youngest grandchildren, stood with their backs to the wall, not understanding, only sensing that the grown ups were afraid.
The red ink list lay in front of us, still damp where the old letterpress had stamped it. Harold made it in the last month of his life, the way he made everything, with a steady hand and a fine eye for margins. Six names. Six women. Each with a date and a town in Illinois. At the top, in capitals: THE WIVES OF TODD. I had assumed it was a joke, or a mistake. I had never imagined that my husband, a retired printer who spent his weekends polishing type, had been quietly investigating our son in law.
Todd had joined the family eleven years ago. He was handsome and attentive, and he called me Mama Wendt in a way that made me feel young. He sold insurance, he said, and later land. Michelle was his third wife by the count of the list, or his fifth. The first, the one who was supposed to have died on a county road outside Peoria, was named Dana. The second had vanished in Missouri. The sixth name on the list was blank. Next to it, Harold had written, in smaller red letters, Michelle? I sat down on a stool of the shop and read it three times, as one reads a diagnosis.
A husband who prints a warning in red ink has already decided what kind of ending he wants.
I looked at my daughter. She was forty one, with the square jaw of Harold, and she was ashen. “Mom, he told me she died,” she said. “He cried when he told me. I held him.” I took her hand and found it ice cold. Then I picked up the telephone and called the number written at the bottom of the proof. It rang four times. A woman answered, with the flat Illinois voice of a person who has been waiting a long time for a call. “This is Dana,” she said. “Is this about Todd?”
She told us everything, in forty minutes, on the phone from a trailer in Pekin. She had left him in 2009, after the arm. He told her family she was dead, and at her own funeral, which she heard about later, he cried in the front pew. She hid for six years under another name. The sheriff of Peoria County, an old friend of Harold from a newspaper job, kept the file. “Mrs. Wendt,” she said, “your husband called me last spring. He said he wanted to be ready.”
I had not known. Harold had mentioned an old acquaintance from the Peoria Journal, nothing more. I now understood that for six months he had been quietly compiling a case: a courthouse file here, a marriage license there, a signed statement from a woman who had every reason to be afraid. He made it all into a printed proof because he knew that Michelle would not believe a story, only a page. He wanted her to hold it in her hands. And then he died, before he could tell her. That is the kind of man he was. He believed in proofs, in corrections, in the plain evidence of a page held to the light.
Todd came home from work that evening, whistling. He walked into the print shop and found the four of us, plus the proof, plus the two children. He stopped. Josh ran to him and he swept the boy up automatically, and I saw the scar on his wrist, where a woman once fought back. “Todd,” Michelle said, in a voice like a bell, “put my son down.” He laughed. She said it again. And something in her face must have told him that the game was over, because he set the boy down very carefully.
The Peoria sheriff, Detective Wills, had been waiting in my kitchen with two deputies. They took Todd quietly. There were charges in two counties, including aggravated battery, and fraud in a third state, and a long file about a land company that did not exist. He went to trial in March. Dana came from Pekin to testify, in a gray suit, with her hands folded, and when she took the oath she looked straight at him and did not look away for an hour. He received twelve years.
The proof is framed now, in the living room of Michelle. The red ink on the glass has gone a little brown. Emma and Josh sleep in my guest room on Fridays, and in the morning I let them stamp their names on paper with the old press, thump, thump, in blue. Michelle goes to a support group on Tuesdays, and one evening in April she brought Dana to dinner. The two of them sat at my table, strangers and sisters, passing the potatoes. Dana laughed at something Josh said, a real laugh, startled out of her like a bird from a hedge, and Michelle reached across and squeezed her wrist, and I turned to the stove so they would not see my face.
I closed the shop for good at the end of the year. But I kept the press, and the last type tray, and a single sheet of paper I had printed myself, in red, on the final night of December. It says only: THE LIST IS FINISHED. Harold would have liked the margins. I hung it where he used to hang his apron. Sometimes, when the shop is quiet, I swear I hear the press go thump, once, as though a man were nodding from the next room.
