Part 3 — Floyds Seventh Tape
Daddys voice ran out, and for a moment no one in Mr. Dobbs office breathed. Then Mr. Dobbs picked up his phone, called the Florence police, and said in the calmest voice I have ever heard, I have a client who needs a detective and a locked room.
Charlene sat with her purse in her lap and her mouth set. A uniformed officer stood inside the door. Stan drove me home, silent, until he pulled over after two blocks and held my face in both his hands.
I knew where to look. Daddy had told me with masking tape under a stuck drawer and with his own tired voice. The words he never finished were, Look inside the engine. For forty years he kept an old Briggs motor on the shelf above his workbench, and no one was allowed to touch it.
Stan and Detective Hollis lifted it down together. The cylinder housing had been hollowed out and fitted with a plastic bag, and in the bag were six small cassette tapes, numbered in carpenter pencil. Tape seven was already in my hands from the lawyers office. The label read, For the judge.
We listened to every one in a conference room at the courthouse with the district attorney. Charlene on the phone with a man named Gordon Teal, who held a notary license and had a nephew at a print shop. Charlene telling him exactly how to type the June will. Charlene counting pills out of a bottle on the kitchen table.
Tape seven was the worst. She named her accomplice, the sum she expected, and the date she meant to list the house. Gordon laughed once and asked, Does the old man still know his own name? She said, Only in the mornings.
Daddy had been right about the mornings. Tape after tape, you can hear him, slow and careful, setting up the recorder and checking the date, saying a few words to me. He could not stop what was happening to him, but he could make sure somebody would hear it.
Charlene was arrested that afternoon for elder abuse, fraud, and forgery. Gordon Teal was taken from his print shop that evening and gave a statement before supper. The probate court threw out the June will and every paper signed after March.
The older will from 2015 was still on file with Mr. Dobbs. It left the house and shop to me and a modest sum to Charlene, which the judge reduced to nothing after the conviction. The watch, the wallet, and the truck keys came back to me in a sealed evidence bag.
The medical examiner reviewed Daddys records. His heart had given out naturally, though unneeded sedatives had worn him thin for months. That was a comfort and a rage together, and I let myself feel both.
The day the shop reopened, Stan and I plugged the beige answering machine back into the wall. The old landline hummed with a dial tone as it always had. That night I recorded the message myself. This is Nan. I am in the shop. Talk slow.
