Part 3 — The Seventh Policy
The woman from the State Insurance Department turned the seventh paper around so I could read it. Under INSURED was a name that had been in my life for thirty-four years. Jolene Marie Brandt. My daughter. And under BENEFICIARY, in the same neat handwriting that used to sign her school papers, it said Dwayne Kolb. My knees hit the gravel because I could not hold up the weight of it.
Cody started shouting that it was a setup, but Jolene spoke first. She stepped out from behind him with her hands shaking and her chin high. “Dad, I bought it myself on September 28th, with my own paycheck. It is only fifty thousand dollars. I did it the day after I found the other six.” Nobody moved. A truck engine idled somewhere out on the road.
She told it in a rush. In June she had been looking for a wrench in the back office and found a stack of insurance statements with my name on every one. She knew what they meant. She sat in her car outside the yard for an hour, and then she made a call. The anonymous tip that sent the investigators to Williston had come from my own daughter. She had laughed at every joke of Cody at that Christmas party with her heart pounding like a drum, because she was afraid that if he suspected, he would destroy the evidence.
“They told me to act normal and not to warn you,” she said, “because if you behaved any differently, he might get nervous. I could not tell you, Dad. So I did the only other thing I could think of. If the whole thing fell apart, I wanted you to have something, even a little, before anybody else did.” I had hauled crude through blizzards on Highway 85, and I had never felt as small as I did on that gravel, or as loved.
The investigator, whose name was Ms. Hargrove, told me what four years of paperwork meant. Cody had been buying policies on me with forged signatures, in a scheme the insurance industry calls stranger-owned coverage. He intended to sell the policies to investors for a profit, which is illegal when the insured person does not know. The extra sixty pounds in my trailer was a steel document case welded inside the baffle. Nothing had been done to the truck. State inspectors had been over trailer number three twice that month, and every brake and weld was sound.
I want to say that clearly, because I turned that fact over in my mind all night. No one had tried to hurt me. I had been the cheapest, quietest name on a piece of paper, and that was bad enough. My daughter had been carrying a secret heavier than any load I ever hauled, and she had carried it for me.
The trooper put his hand on the shoulder of Cody, not roughly, and walked him to the patrol car. Cody did not say a word. He was charged with insurance fraud, forgery, and theft. The six companies voided the policies at once, and the bank froze the operating account of Brandt Crude Hauling before the sun was down. In the spring he pleaded guilty and received a prison term of four years, with restitution to follow.
A court-appointed trustee sorted out the company. The three trucks were put up for sale, and my $58,000 came back to me in full. The State Labor Department added the difference between what I was paid at $14 an hour and what a driver on that route should have earned, another $31,000 for four winters. It was more money than I had held in my hands since Marla passed, and I did not know what to do with it, so I put it in the bank and went home and made a sandwich.
Jolene moved into my spare room in November. She told me that a woman can be brave and still be scared, and I told her she had it exactly right. She filed for a divorce that nobody contested. At night we sat at my kitchen table with cups of coffee and a pad of paper, working on a plan.
By February we had it. The trustee agreed to sell the company back to us at a fair price, with the bank loan in the name of Jolene and my retirement as the down payment. The paint on the doors reads KOLB AND DAUGHTER HAULING. At last it says what the first company only promised. My name is on the truck, right there beside hers.
The kid from the Williston Herald printed the photograph he took that night, after all. Me, standing by my rig in my coveralls, holding my green steno pad up in the floodlights. TRUCKER LOGBOOK CRACKS INSURANCE CASE, said the headline. Twenty drivers cut it out and taped it to their dashboards.
On a cold morning in March, I made my first run on the old route, Watford City to Tioga, with Jolene in the passenger seat and a thermos between us. The black ice sparkled in the headlights. I drove slower than I used to, because I am not in a hurry anymore. On the dash was the picture of Marla, and I could swear she was smiling.
