Part 3 — The Bank Teller Text
The second number belonged to a teller at the bank on Capital Avenue. Her name was Megan Rusk, twenty-seven, with a lanyard and a smile and access to the screens that showed which customers were planning to withdraw cash. I sat in my van while the detective said it into the phone.
It made a terrible kind of sense. Corey, the polite young man from church, would help an older woman set up a new phone, plant a spy app on it, and hide a second burner phone in her bathroom for his partner to text. Megan then watched the accounts and told him which widow was about to pull out big money.
Opal was still in the kitchen, humming, pouring a fresh cup of coffee. When the detective explained it gently at her table, she put the pot down very slowly and said, Why, that boy ate my pound cake. Then she asked me, in a perfectly steady voice, what she was supposed to do on Thursday.
What she did was go to the bank, as planned, with a plainclothes officer sitting in the lobby and Megan behind the counter. Opal asked for four thousand dollars in cash. Megan counted it out with a bright face, and texted a single word on her own phone under the counter.
The detective had already taken the burner out of the tank and put it back exactly as I found it, and in the parking lot Corey drove up in a gray hatchback. He walked toward the bank doors, whistling, and met two officers on the sidewalk who asked him about the roof.
Both of them were arrested that morning. Corey had a stack of copied keys, a notebook of widows names, and two other prepaid phones in his glove box. Megan had printed account balances in her purse. The charges were fraud, conspiracy, exploitation of an elderly person, and unauthorized access to customer accounts.
The bank closed the case file with a full apology to Opal. The cash she had counted that day was never even handed across. It was marked, photographed, and returned to the vault. One flapper that would not seat was all it took to uncover a plot that had run for weeks right under her ceiling.
The church board held a meeting and wrote to every member over seventy, explaining what had happened and how volunteers would now be vetted. Opals pastor stood in the pulpit that Sunday and said sorry, to her face, in front of everyone.
I replaced her flapper that afternoon, adjusted the float arm, and shortened the chain by an inch. I wrote her a bill for nothing and set the tank lid back square. It sat flat and tight on the porcelain without a bit of play.
Opal wrote a check anyway for $85 and pinned a note to it in her round handwriting. For the man who found the phone. Please come to Sunday dinner.
I went. She had a roast, green beans, and rolls, and she straightened the doily on the arm of the couch before we sat down. The lid in her bathroom has never been crooked since.
