Part 3 — Walt Was Ready
Tina turned around with her sweet church smile. “Erin, honey, how long have you been standing there?” she asked. I answered with the truest thing I had. “Long enough,” I said, and I held up my phone. “And the recording is already in the cloud.”
My grandfather chair was rocking because he had gotten up from it. He was not napping. He was in the barn with Deputy Marsha Lee of the Pennington County sheriff office, who had been waiting for his call. Grandpa had grown suspicious weeks before. He wrote quietly to his accountant, and the accountant alerted the sheriff.
Tina saw the deputy through the garage door and tried to hurry down the lane. A second cruiser blocked the end of it. She stopped, set down her purse, and asked for an attorney.
The scheme was an old one. Tina targeted older clients, urged them to change their beneficiaries, and then arranged for a doctor friend, Ronnie, to say they were confused. “Stop the heart pills” meant stopping the pharmacy deliveries so Grandpa would seem foggy at his next evaluation. But my mother had put him on a locked weekly pill box the year before, and the pharmacy logs showed he had never missed a dose.
A rancher who has weathered eighty-eight winters can read a stranger as easily as the sky.
The South Dakota attorney general coordinated with investigators in Montana and Minnesota. The families in Sioux Falls and Billings were contacted, and their cases were reopened. Tina and Ronnie were charged with multiple counts of elder financial exploitation, forgery and fraud.
Grandpa accountant restored the original beneficiaries. The bank reversed every transfer, and the ranch went into a family trust that nobody could change without three signatures. The gun safe combination, in the cover of his Bible, was changed that afternoon.
The VFW helped us hire a new caregiver, a retired Army medic named Frank who talks to Grandpa about Korea and burns the toast.
Walt walked back into the VFW hall on Thursday in his old cap. Forty men stood up and applauded, and he waved them down, grumbling, grinning from ear to ear.
That weekend we took the fishing poles from the garage to the lake. Grandpa caught the biggest trout of the day, and he held it up and said, “Tell your mother I am not confused.”
