I slid the folder across the table of my own dining room, past the ham and the deviled eggs, and Brittany looked at it as though I had handed her a snake. Tom, beside her, looked at me with puzzled eyes. “Pop, what is this?” he said. I said, “It is a letter, son, from your mother. She left it with her attorney two years ago, in an envelope marked To be opened if Brittany ever asks Walter to sign anything.” The room went quiet. Brittany set down her fork and said, in a small voice, “That is not funny, Pop.”
I opened the folder. Inside was a report of eleven pages from a private investigator in Des Moines named Rita Kowalski, whom June had hired in the winter before she died. June had been suspicious of Brittany from the very first Thanksgiving. A girl who was too sweet, who never talked about her family, who had no photographs from before the age of twenty five. June had said to me once, in the car, “Walter, that girl has a past that she is hiding.” I had laughed. I had not listened. Now I read the first page aloud.
Brittany Ames Hollis, born Brittany Dawn Pruitt in Dubuque, Iowa, had been married twice before she met my son. The first husband, Ralph Dietz, was a retired farmer of seventy eight, who died of a stroke eleven months after the wedding and left her a farm. The second husband, Leonard Kroll, was a widower of eighty one, who signed over his savings to her and died in a nursing home in Ames fourteen months later. “Both men,” I read, “had adult children who were told that their fathers had grown confused.” Tom stared at his wife.
A wife who watches a stranger carefully for one winter can protect a family for the rest of its years.
“That is a lie,” Brittany said. Her voice had gone high and thin. “Tom, it is a lie. That woman never liked me. She hired someone to spy.” But Tom was reading the report himself now, one page after another, with his lips moving. On the fifth page there was a photograph. Brittany, ten years younger, with brown hair, standing next to an old man in a wheelchair on the porch of a farmhouse. The date on the photograph was stamped in the corner: 2016. Tom closed his eyes. “That is you,” he whispered. “That is you, Brit.”
I will say this for my daughter in law. She did not scream. She did not throw anything. She looked around at the faces of my family, her mother in the corner, silent and pale, my sister Dora with her arms crossed, and she saw that nobody was coming to help her. She took her purse. She stood up and said, to the whole table, “I loved your son.” And Tom, with tears running down his face, said, “Brittany, you do not get to say that.” She walked out the front door. I heard her car start.
The police came on Tuesday, with a warrant. Detective Laura Pierce of the Cedar Rapids department sat with me at my kitchen table for two hours, taking my statement, and she told me something that I had not expected. The mother of Brittany, who had been on the phone that night, was not her mother at all. She was a friend, and an accomplice, a woman named Sheryl from Council Bluffs, who had helped with the paperwork on two other estates. The two women were arrested in a motel in Omaha. They had been in the middle of packing.
Tom sat on my back porch that night with a beer he did not drink. He is thirty eight years old, a quiet man, a good one, who works for the county as a surveyor. He said, “Dad, I should have known.” I said, “No, son. She was very good. Your mother knew because she was an old woman who had seen a lot of people. You were in love.” He nodded. He said, “I never met her mother.” I said, “No.” He said, “I never met anyone from her life.” We sat there while the sun went down behind the cornfields.
June had left one more thing. In the bottom of the folder, under the report, was a handwritten note in her careful schoolteacher cursive, dated three weeks before her death. Walter, if you are reading this, I was right. I am sorry that I will not be there to say so. Do not blame Tom. He has your heart and my stubbornness, and he will come back to himself. Take care of your money, and of him. And eat something besides toast. I laughed out loud, in the kitchen, alone, and wept a good deal afterward.
Brittany pleaded guilty to three counts of financial exploitation of a dependent adult, and received a sentence of seven years. The farm of Ralph Dietz was returned to his daughter in Dubuque. The savings of Leonard Kroll, what remained of them, went to his son. And my ninety thousand dollars, which had never moved, stayed exactly where it was. I used a small part of it to buy Tom a good used truck, because his old one had finally died, and the rest I put into a trust for the child that he and a nice girl from the county office are expecting in May.
On Easter Sunday the next year, I hosted again. Ham. Deviled eggs. Coconut cake, from the recipe of June. Tom came with Amy, who is round and shy and brought a casserole, and who asked me before she sat down if she could help with the dishes. I said yes. Afterward, on the porch, she handed me a card that she had made herself, a drawing of a mailman with a bag. Inside it said: For Grandpa Walter, who read the paperwork. I read it three times. I did not have to wear my hearing aids to hear it.
