I did not follow Todd out the side door. Forty years of selling work boots to Iowa farmers will teach a man to wait for the customer to come back, and the Lord God knows they always do. I folded the paper on which Ingrid had printed my balances and put it in the pocket of my good Sunday coat. I went to the coffee urn, drew myself a cup, and sat down at the table of Pastor Nygaard. In a very quiet voice, I asked him to see that nobody left. Then I turned my chair, and I looked at my daughter, and I waited.
Ingrid came across the basement through the whispering guests, in her blue church dress, her cheeks wet. She sat down in the folding chair beside me. “Dad, I did not know about the note,” she said. “Todd told me you were forgetting things. He said you had left the stove on. He said you gave Erik a hundred dollars three times in one week.” I said, “Ingrid, I gave Erik a hundred dollars three times because he is seventeen and wanted a guitar.” She laughed, once, a terrible little laugh, and put her hands on her face.
I told her about the box. Karin had opened it in 1983, in the small bank in Story City, using her maiden name, Karin Marit Olsen, because she was afraid that a bad year might take all the Pedersen accounts. She had added to it for thirty nine years. Before she passed, she had made me promise to leave it shut until Erik turned eighteen. I did not know what it held. I only knew that Karin had never once lied to me, and that Todd had drilled it open on the fourteenth of October. “Ingrid,” I said, “go and find your husband.”
A drilled safe deposit box and a note in a son in law handwriting gave one retired farm store owner the length of a single birthday to bring his daughter back to the truth in Ames.
I gave my terms to Ingrid, and she carried them out the side door into the November dusk. Todd would return to the basement, with whatever he had taken, within the hour, or the sheriff would come to his house in West Des Moines. He would stand before this church and tell the truth about the box. And no one in this room would raise a voice, because Karin would not have wished it. Pastor Nygaard put his hand on my shoulder. “Lars,” he said, “I will ask them to sing something.” I said, “Please, Pastor. Not a long one.”
Todd came back in forty minutes with an old leather satchel, gray in the face, and Ingrid walking beside him like a guard. The guests went quiet. He set the satchel on the table in front of me, and opened it with unsteady hands. Inside were four things: a savings bond file with forty seven bonds in the name of Erik Pedersen, worth a hundred sixty one thousand dollars; the deed to eighty acres of timber along the Skunk River; a thick envelope with my name; and a small gold wedding band. Karin mother ring, I knew, which she had promised to our grandson.
He told it plainly, because there was no way to tell it otherwise. He had learned of the box from the pages of an old tax return, in August. He had thought it held cash. He had used a forged letter from the bank, and a drill, and a Saturday, and when he saw the bonds and the deed he realized that he could not touch them without a signature of Erik. “I thought if I held on to the timber deed,” he said, “I could sell it to the developer in Boone, and you would never know.” Then, in a sudden motion, he snatched the satchel and the envelope off the table, meaning to run for the stairs.
He sprinted across the basement and got as far as the foot of the stairs. And there stood Ingrid, who had fallen behind him by two steps and then passed him, with her back against the railing and her arms folded across her blue dress, the way Karin used to stand at the back of the store when a customer tried to leave with an unpaid bag of seed. “Todd,” she said. “Give it to my father.” He stopped. He looked at his wife. He looked back at her face, and he did not recognize it.
Karin wrote that the bonds were for Erik, the timber for the Skunk River, and the ring for his wife. She wrote that if Todd Bauer ever laid a finger on the box, she hoped I would be kind. Kind, she wrote, but not a fool. The sheriff took Todd statement on Monday, and Todd pleaded to a lesser charge, and repaid the bank for the drill. Ingrid moved to my house for the winter with the children, and then back to West Des Moines on her own terms. I did not tell her about the thirteen million dollars until Christmas. She laughed for a quarter of an hour.
In the name of Karin, who passed in 2022, I started the Karin Pedersen Fund. It pays for seed corn, fencing wire and work boots for beginning farmers and FFA students who cannot afford their first season, in Story, Boone and Marshall counties. In the first year we outfitted ninety three young farmers. A girl of nineteen from Nevada, Iowa, whose father had lost the family land, picked a pair of size seven boots off the shelf at the Ames store and walked up and down the aisle in them without saying one word. Then she bought a hat.
Erik turned eighteen in April, and I took him to the bank in Story City, and we opened the box together. It was empty, except for a Danish prayer on a card in the handwriting of Karin. He read it. He did not know Danish. I told him what it said. It said, A man keeps his money where his mouth isn t, but he keeps his love where everyone can see it. He put the ring in his pocket. Then he asked me for a hundred dollars, for a guitar, and I gave him three.
