Ashley mouthed two words across that ballroom, and I read them as plainly as if she had shouted. Trust me. Then she lifted one white sleeved arm and pointed past me, to the back of the room, where her Uncle Ray stood by the dessert table in a gray suit, holding a thick manila folder under his arm. I am Corinne Battle, sixty eight years old, a bookkeeper from Pooler, and I have never in my life been quick, but that night I understood faster than the band. The voicemail was not a mistake. The voicemail was a trap, and Ashley had set it, in a white dress, in front of two hundred people, with more courage than I had ever shown in sixty eight years.
She walked to the microphone with her train over her arm, the two hundred guests of the wedding hushed around her, the chandeliers throwing little gold lights on the floor. “Everybody,” she said, in a clear voice, “that message is real. I recorded it myself six weeks ago, in the office of my father, because he made me say those words. He told me that if I did not read them to him over the phone, the loan on my house of my mother would be called. I went to the police, and they told me to play along.” Her father rose from the head table, white as paper.
Marcus took a step toward her. His face was drained and wondering. Beside the cake, two men in dark jackets, who I had taken for caterers, put down their trays and moved quietly toward the folder in arm of Uncle Ray. They were detectives from the Chatham County Sheriff, and they had been at the wedding all night. “Marcus,” Ashley said, her voice breaking, “I married you because I love you. I never wanted a dime of the money of your mother. I wanted my father to be caught.” My son took her hand.
A voicemail played over a ballroom speaker gave one bookkeeper the length of a first dance to bring a wedding crowd back to the truth in Savannah.
I gave my terms, as the mother of the groom, at the head table, standing, with a champagne glass in my hand and the whole ballroom listening. “Gordon Tate, you tried to take a trust from a woman who has worked for every dollar she saved. I am not asking for revenge. I am asking for the truth. You will tell these detectives about the loan, the papers, and every other family you have approached. You will release your daughter from every promise. And you will sit down.”
Gordon Tate gripped the back of his chair, and his voice came out cracked. “Corinne, I owe four hundred thousand dollars to people in Atlanta who do not forgive,” he said. “I run a car lot that has been failing for three years. When Ashley told me she was marrying into a trust, I thought the Lord had given me a way out. I told myself no one would be hurt.” He looked at his daughter. “I have used you terribly, honey. I am so sorry.” Ashley did not look away from him.
But his brother Ray was not as brave. Ray suddenly pulled the folder from under his arm, held it to his chest, and ran for the double doors of the ballroom, sending a chair across the floor, meaning to burn the papers in his car. He ran past the dessert table. A groomsman, the best friend of Marcus, Dre, stepped into his path. Two detectives closed from the left. And the band drummer, a large man, rose from his stool and stood in the door with his sticks crossed.
Ray stopped in the center of the ballroom floor with the folder against his suit and the whole wedding staring at him under the chandeliers, the string quartet frozen mid note. Dre spoke softly. “Sir, you are going to want to give that up. We have a very nice cake, and I would hate for you to miss it.” A ripple of nervous laughter ran through the room. Ray looked at the detectives and the groom. He lowered the folder, and he placed it in the open hand of the nearest man.
The consequences were thorough. Gordon Tate pleaded to attempted fraud and a financial crimes count, and the detectives uncovered two other families he had approached in Atlanta. Ray testified against his brother. The car lot was sold to repay the debt. Ashley moved her mother Patrice into our guest cottage in Pooler, away from the house of Gordon. The wedding continued for another hour, and the first dance went on, and the song they had chosen played at last, to a standing ovation that lasted until the band ran out of verses and the bride laughed through her tears.
In the name of my mother Dorothea, who passed in 2011, I started the Dorothea Battle Fund. It pays for trust and estate planning and free legal help for seniors targeted by family members and for counseling for women leaving controlling relatives, in Chatham, Bryan and Effingham counties. In the first year we helped one hundred and twenty three seniors protect their savings and counseled sixty women. One was a seventy year old retired teacher from Rincon who set her signed will on the desk and said she finally felt safe.
On a golden evening in June, a year later, my son and his wife danced on the porch of my cottage in Pooler, with a string of white lights over their heads and the smell of jasmine in the air. Patrice and I sat on the swing, a glass of sweet tea in each of our hands, watching. Ashley caught my eye over the shoulder of Marcus and mouthed the same two words again, and this time I mouthed them back. Trust me. The little white lights twinkled, and a fiddle played, and I cried happily into my napkin, as the whole porch swayed with music and the fireflies rose from the lawn.
