I heard it all in pieces, as dispatchers do. The radio crackled with the voice of Trooper Esh as he stood in the farmhouse kitchen, counting aloud, the way a farmer counts cattle. Sixty one checks on the table. Sixty one, all in the same blue ink. “Deborah, the first one is dated the second of June,” he said. “That is two weeks before Mr. Brubaker passed. The last is dated yesterday. The total is two hundred and twelve thousand dollars.” I wrote it on my pad with a hand that would not keep still. Twenty five years on the board, and I had never wanted so badly to reach through a radio.
Mabel was still on the old cordless phone, pressed against her ear, as the trooper carried her down the stairs like a child. “Deborah, are you still there?” she whispered. I told her I was. I told her she was safe, and that the trooper had her under one arm. She asked about her quilts, and her reading glasses, and whether somebody could feed the cat. I told her I would see to the cat myself, and I wrote it on my pad, to the amusement of my supervisor. Then I heard the voice of Crystal in the kitchen, shrill and quick. “She gave me permission. She told me to sign.”
Mark Esh did not argue. He picked up the top check, turned it to the light, and read the name at the bottom, in the loops of a schoolgirl. Then he reached into the open purse of Crystal on the chair and drew out what was inside. A small blue fountain pen with a gold clip. “Madam, this belonged to Amos Brubaker,” he said, in the flat voice of a man reading a charge. “He used it for fifty eight years. His widow says it vanished from his nightstand the week he was failing. And here it is, in your purse, with the ink still wet.” Crystal opened her mouth. Nothing came out.
A small blue fountain pen found in a purse gave one dispatcher the evening to bring a grandmother safely home to a farmhouse in Lancaster County.
Mark gave the terms in the kitchen, and I heard each one on the open channel. Crystal would put both hands flat on the table. She would give him the checkbook, the legal paper and the purse. She would not touch the telephone, or the stairs, or the pen. And she would tell him, now, who had cashed the checks, and where the money was. “Madam, you can make this easier or harder,” he said. “That is the only choice you have left.” Crystal laughed, a high, strange laugh. “You do not understand,” she said. “Dale left me with nothing in that house. I earned that money.”
Then she ran. She snatched the keys from the counter and bolted out the kitchen door, across the porch and down the steps toward her white SUV, with the purse bumping at her side. The trooper was only ten steps behind. But at the end of the lane, a buggy had turned in, drawn by a big bay horse, with a bearded young man in a black hat holding the reins. He was Elam Stoltzfus from the next farm, who had seen the lights of the ambulance. His horse stopped short across the drive, as horses will, and would not move. Crystal slammed the SUV into reverse and into the fence post, and sat there, the horn blaring over the hayfield.
They took Mabel to Lancaster General, and she called me from the ambulance on the cordless phone, which she would not let anyone take. Her voice was thin, and she sounded very old. “Deborah, I am not sad she took money,” she said. “Money is paper. I am sad she took the pen of Amos. He wrote the first letter to me with that pen, in 1965, and every letter after.” I listened with a lump in my throat. I told her I was holding my phone just as tightly. I told her that Trooper Esh had the pen in an evidence bag, and that it would come home.
Dale got off a plane in Philadelphia at eleven that night and drove straight to the hospital in his work boots, a big man with a sunburned neck. I was off shift by then, but the nurse on the floor was my cousin, and she called me afterward. He stood at the foot of the bed with his cap in his hands. “Mamm, I should have called,” he said. “I should have come home when you did not answer.” She held out her arms, and the grown man went down on his knees by the bed and put his face in the blanket. “Dale, you did not know,” she said. “Now you do. That is enough.”
The money consequences came fast. Crystal was charged with forgery, theft, and abuse of a care dependent adult, and she pleaded guilty in the spring to the full list, with a sentence of seven years. The bank in Lititz flagged the account within the day, and between the returned checks and the seized account of Crystal, Mabel recovered all but eleven thousand dollars of the two hundred and twelve thousand. She put the rest of the savings into a trust, with her granddaughter Rachel, a bank teller, as the watcher on the account. Dale sold his place in Florida and moved home to the farm.
In the name of my father, Jacob Yoder, who passed in 2015 and who taught me to talk quiet when someone needs to be heard, I started the Quiet Voice Fund. It pays for legal help, bank monitoring and counseling for older people in Lancaster, Lebanon and Chester counties who are being isolated by relatives. In the first year, we helped forty seven people. A woman of eighty three, in a bonnet, telephoned our office and whispered, “My nephew is downstairs.” I kept her talking, and I sent a trooper, and I never hung up.
In October, Mabel invited me to the farm for shoofly pie, and I drove the whole way with the windows down, past the stone houses older than the Constitution. She was waiting on the porch with Dale and Rachel. Trooper Esh stood at the rail with his hat in his hands. She gave me a slice, and a cup of coffee, and a card in an envelope. I opened it. Inside, in blue ink, in the steady hand of an old woman, she had written four words. Thank you for talking quiet. Then she held up the little fountain pen, with its gold clip, which had come home.
