I put the old briefcase on my knees and thumbed the new lock. It clicked, and I lifted the lid. The inside smelled of leather and pencil shavings, and it held a thick envelope of papers, a small tape recorder, and a stack of letters tied with a piece of kitchen string. Darla leaned forward. Travis, who had been leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed and a smirk on his face, sat up straight. “Bob,” he said easily, “what is all this? A school project?” I took the string off the letters and fanned them out on the table. They were all on the same pale blue stationery, with the same eagle at the top. Department of the Treasury. Notice of Final Demand.
“There are fourteen,” I said. “Not one is real. The office of the sheriff found them on Thursday in an apartment in Kansas City, in a filing cabinet, under the name of a man called Miller. Fourteen families like ours, in Kansas and Missouri, paying one thousand or fifteen hundred dollars a month to avoid a lien that does not exist.” Darla made a low sound in her chest. “Bob,” she whispered, “fourteen?” “And every one of them,” I said, “has a nephew, or a grandson, or a son of a friend who introduced the man in the nice suit.” I looked at Travis. His face was pale and set. “Your name is on three of the introductions.”
Travis laughed, a little too loud. “Bob, this is ridiculous. You are accusing me of running some kind of ring. I am a financial adviser. I have a license.” “You had a license,” I said. “The state suspended it Friday morning.” I turned the tape recorder toward him and pressed play. His own voice came out of the little speaker, smooth and unhurried. “Mrs. Lindquist, the IRS can seize the farm, but I have a friend inside who can fix it for fifteen hundred a month. Do not tell your husband. He will be too proud to forgive himself.” Darla put her hand over her mouth. She was listening to the voice of her nephew say her name.
An old briefcase with a sheriff sticker opened at a meatloaf supper held fourteen fake IRS letters and a recording that ended a scam.
There was a heavy knock on the front door. It was not a polite knock. I got up and opened it, and two deputies from the Shawnee County Sheriff Office stood on the porch in their brown uniforms, with the cold air behind them. “Mr. Lindquist,” said the older one, a gray haired man named Hollis. “We have the warrant.” Travis came out of his chair so fast that the legs scraped the floor. “You set me up,” he said, in a high, cracked voice. “Uncle Bob, you set me up. We are family.” Darla stood, pushing back her chair slowly. She looked at him for a long time, and when she spoke it was in the quiet tone she uses at funerals.
“Travis, I held you at your baptism,” she said. “I held you when your mother was sick, and you slept in our spare room for a whole winter. I made your lunches. I gave you money for college, and I never asked for it back.” Her voice broke. “I would have given you the savings of my mother if you had asked. All you had to do was ask me. You did not have to lie. You did not have to make me afraid of my husband.” Travis opened his mouth, but no words came. Deputy Hollis took him gently by the elbow and led him out the door. The screen door banged. A dog barked down the road.
The case went to federal court in Topeka. The man who called himself Agent Miller, an old college roommate, pleaded first and named every person he had worked with. Travis followed within the month. In the end, the judge gave him four years in a federal prison in Leavenworth, and ordered restitution to the fourteen families of just over four hundred thousand dollars, a sum that he will never be able to repay.
When he was sentenced, I sat in the third row beside Darla, and she held my hand and did not look away. She is a stronger woman than I knew.
I could not leave it there. After the hearing I called the lawyer in Wichita and asked how much would cover the shortfall. He named a number. I wrote the check that afternoon, at the kitchen table, out of the sale of the elevators, and I had it divided among the families by the court. I wanted no thanks and I asked that my name be kept out of it. But a woman in Salina found out, as they do, and she sent me a card with a drawing of a sunflower on it. Inside she had written, God bless you, Mr. Lindquist. I put the card on the refrigerator next to a photograph of our wedding.
For our fiftieth anniversary, in June, I took Darla to a house on the lake. It is a modest house, two bedrooms and a porch with a view of the water, and I had bought it the week after the sale, and spent three months fixing the dock. I blindfolded her in the Buick, which she hated, and led her down the gravel path by the hand. When I took the blindfold off, she stood for a long time looking at the lake and the dock and the little red canoe I had bought for her, tied at the post. “Bob,” she said finally, “you old fool.” I told her that I had been called worse.
That evening we sat on the porch with glasses of lemonade and watched the sun go down behind the cottonwoods. A heron stalked the shallows. Darla took my hand. “I am so sorry I kept it from you,” she said quietly. “The letter. Paying Travis. I should have told you, Bob.” “I should have told you about the elevators,” I said. “We were both trying to protect the other one.” She laughed softly. “That is the trouble with fifty years,” she said. “You get very good at being kind and very bad at being honest.” We sat in the dusk until the first stars came out, and neither of us said another word.
