The director of the hospice, a tired and honest woman named Evelyn Rudd, took me into her office and closed the door. She did not need to be asked. She pulled up the log of visitors for the night of September twenty eighth on her computer and turned the screen toward me. At 2:07 in the morning, a man had signed in as Dwayne Dutton, son of the patient. The handwriting was a thin, slanted scrawl. “Marlene,” she said quietly, “I should have flagged it. The night nurse told me the next morning, and I let it go. I am so sorry.”
I asked if there was a camera in the lobby. She nodded slowly. The system kept ninety days of footage, and the date in question was well within that. She found the file, and we watched together, her chair beside mine, the screen throwing a pale blue glow on our faces. At 2:04 a man came through the double doors in a long dark coat. Sixty or so, tall, with a gray beard trimmed close to the jaw. He walked straight past the desk. He knew exactly where he was going. I leaned in until my nose almost touched the glass.
I knew that man. I had typed him. In the spring of 2011, I sat in the front of a courtroom in Laurel with my stenotype on my knees and took down every word of the disciplinary hearing of a lawyer named Cecil Marbury, who lost his license for forging signatures on wills. He had worn the same long coat. He had stood at the same angle, hands in his pockets, chin lifted, as though he were the one doing the court a favor. I had typed his name nine hundred times. I said it out loud now, in a whisper. “Cecil Marbury.”
A forged page can fool a hurried eye, but it never fools the woman who typed the original with her own two hands.
Evelyn made a copy of the video on a thumb drive. I drove it directly to the sheriff in Ellisville, a decent man named Tommy Wheat, who watched it twice in silence. I laid out the entire matter for him, calmly, in order, the way I had once laid out testimony for a judge. The forged will. The witness who did not exist. The witness who did, who had quit her job two weeks later. The man who signed in under the name of a son who was, at the time, asleep in a hotel in Jackson. He listened without writing a word. At the end he said, “Marlene, I am going to need you to stay out of this now.”
I did not stay out of it. I could not. Late that night, I found Tonya Pickens in Jackson through the hospice staff directory, in a small apartment above a laundromat. She opened the door a crack with the chain on. I told her who I was. I did not shout. I said, “Tonya, you sat with my husband for seven nights. I want to ask you only one thing. What did you see?” She stared at me for a long moment. Then she took the chain off the door and began to cry.
She told me everything at her kitchen table. Marbury had approached her in September with a plain white envelope. Two thousand dollars, he said, to sign as a witness on a document that Roy had already approved. She had never seen Roy sign anything, but she was behind on her rent, and she told herself it was fine. On the night of the twenty eighth, she was in the corridor and saw Marbury go into the room and bend over the pump. She heard it beep. She did nothing. She said, “I have not slept since.”
The nurse confirmed it. The record of the pump showed that the dose of morphine had been raised at 2:31 that morning and lowered again at 3:12, when the night nurse found my husband gray and gasping and restored the setting. Roy had lived four more days. I would like to tell you that they were peaceful. They were not entirely. But on the third night, he opened his eyes and looked at me and squeezed my fingers, and I was there, and I held on. Dwayne had not been. Dwayne had been in Jackson, asleep, as the video proved.
They arrested Cecil Marbury at an extended stay motel in Hattiesburg, in his long dark coat, with a briefcase of blank forms on the bed and two other wills in progress. Dwayne turned himself in the same afternoon. He sat in an interview room for four hours and told them that Marbury had said the will was a backup copy of what his father truly wanted. He did not know about the pump. He had not been told. He wept when the detective told him what had been done. I believed him. I did not forgive him, but I believed him.
The probate court threw out the forged will in a hearing that lasted nine minutes. The judge held up the original, the one I had typed on the kitchen table in 2015, with the signature of Roy and the double T of our last name. He said it was the clearest document he had seen in thirty years. Marbury was convicted of forgery, conspiracy, and aggravated assault on a vulnerable adult, and he received twenty years. Dwayne pleaded guilty to forgery and was sentenced to two years of probation and five hundred hours of community service.
He came out to the cabin on a Saturday in November, alone, in his old truck. I was on the porch, rocking in the chair that Roy built, with a quilt on my knees. Dwayne stopped at the bottom step with his hat in his hands. He looked ten years older than he had in October. He said, “Marlene, I do not expect anything from you. I just wanted to say it to your face. I am so sorry.” I got up and went inside. When I came back I was carrying a plate with a slice of warm pecan pie.
I handed it to him. He stared at it. I said, “Somebody once told me to go home and bake something. I thought I would take his advice.” He took the plate, and he sat down on the step, and he ate in silence, with tears running down into his collar. When he finished, I told him he was welcome on the land any Saturday, as long as he came to work. We planted a little loblolly pine at the front gate, where the sign had been, and I patted the dirt down with my own hand.
