Deputy Redbird read the list to me over the radio, slowly, while I wrote each name on my pad. Eight men, all past seventy five, all in Garvin County, all of them landowners or men with money in the bank. Seven names, and then Harlan Pettigrew at the top with a single line drawn through it. After twenty one years at this console, I have learned to feel a case turning in my chest. This one turned like a key in a lock. I asked Shawna to hold the page flat under her flashlight and read me the town beside each man, and I started dialing the sheriff on the other line.
By the time the ambulance reached the farm, I had the other seven men sorted into two groups. Two more names had a line through them, like Harlan. They were Amos Keel, a widower in Lindsay, and Lowell Birdsong, who lived out on the Washita bottom. The other five had no mark at all. That told me what the page really was. It was a schedule. Cross out the man when the money is gone, move on to the next. The sheriff sent units to all seven houses at once, and I coordinated the radio traffic with two night deputies. It was the longest hour of my career.
The handwriting on the page belonged to Kaylee Pettigrew. She had worked part time at the teller window of the bank in Pauls Valley for two years, and she wrote down every old man who came in with a balance over two hundred thousand dollars. She gave the list to her boyfriend, Cody Dunn, a roofer with a record in two counties. Together they chose which man to visit next. For Harlan they did not even need to knock. Kaylee had a key, and her grandfather had raised her from the age of six.
A boot hiding a torn notebook page gave one grandfather the Tuesday to bring his neighbors back to safety in Pauls Valley.
Mr. Pettigrew gave his terms from the stretcher, with the paramedics fussing around his wrists. “Madam, I want those men called before sunrise. Every one of them. Tell them Harlan Pettigrew says to lock the door and stay put until a deputy rings the bell.” He said it in the voice of a man who had run a cattle auction for forty years. Then he asked me one more thing. “And would you call my pastor? I have not talked to him since Edna passed, and I believe I am about to need him.” I wrote it all down.
Kaylee came out of the house with her hands in the air, and Mr. Pettigrew watched her from the ambulance step. She was twenty six, thin, with her hair in a ponytail. She said nothing at first. Then she looked at her grandfather and began to weep, loud, ugly sobs, the sort you do not choose. Shawna told me later that he did not look away for one second. He said, “Kaylee Ann, I carried you out of a house fire when you were six. I would have given you every dime if you had asked.”
Cody Dunn did not stay to hear it. He had been in the back bedroom with a duffel bag full of cash and the gun safe key, and he came out the kitchen door on a full run toward the pasture gate. He made it to the corner of the barn. A neighbor, Bud Tolliver, seventy nine years old, who had come back to check on Harlan after the rag on Sunday, had parked his John Deere tractor crossways in the gap of the fence. “Son,” Bud said, “this tractor does eight miles an hour, and I can do it all day.” Cody stopped and dropped the bag.
Mr. Pettigrew spent four days in the hospital in Pauls Valley, with his wrists wrapped and his pride bruised. I drove up on my day off with a casserole. He sat in the bed in his overalls, and told me what he wanted to say to Kaylee. He wanted to say that he forgave her, and he wanted to say that she would serve every day the judge gave her, and he wanted to say that he loved her all the same. The district attorney read his words aloud at the hearing. Kaylee wept again.
The money consequences came together slowly. The bank in Pauls Valley froze the accounts of Kaylee and flagged every transfer. Of the five hundred ten thousand dollars, all but thirty eight thousand was recovered. Amos Keel got back sixty two thousand. Lowell Birdsong, whose granddaughter had moved him into a care home with forged guardianship papers, was released and returned to his farm. Cody Dunn and Kaylee were charged with kidnapping, exploitation of the elderly and theft, and both pleaded guilty. The five untouched men got visits and new locks.
In the name of Edna, who passed in 2020, Harlan and I started the Edna Pettigrew Fund. It pays for door locks, cameras and weekly visits from trusted friends for elderly landowners living alone in Garvin, Murray and McClain counties. In the first year we protected seventy one homes. A woman in Wynnewood called us when a stranger came to her porch with a clipboard. The deputy arrived in eleven minutes, and the stranger left in nine. She baked us two pies, and Harlan ate both.
On the first Sunday in October, Harlan invited me to dinner at the farm. The tool shed had a new door, painted blue, and the old tackle box sat on the porch rail. Inside it lay the cell phone of Edna, charged, with a bright yellow sticker on the back. It read, call Rhonda. I sat on the porch swing with a plate of fried chicken, looking out over the pump jacks nodding in the pasture, and he told me he wanted me to have the number in his phone forever.
