Part 3 — The Attic Tenant
The name written beside the circled Tuesday was Candice Voss. Miss Tolbert knew her as the cheerful woman who did her hair every week at the shop on Seventh Avenue. She had been standing behind that chair every Tuesday morning for a year.
The deputy took it slowly. The young man who claimed to be a former student was named Dalton Reece, twenty-nine, and he and Candice were partners. She learned which clients lived alone and when their houses stood empty, and he made use of the quiet hours.
The spare key Miss Tolbert had given him in June was the only door he needed. He had been sleeping in her attic on the nights between jobs, eating soup from cans, charging his phone at her fan outlet. On Tuesdays he came down and went through her desk while she sat under the dryer.
He had copied her checkbook, her bank PIN, and her pharmacy account. He had not yet taken anything big. The plan, according to the calendar, was a withdrawal from her savings on the final circled Tuesday. We were one day ahead of it.
The sheriffs office did not rush. Miss Tolbert went to the salon as usual the next morning, smiling, in her good blouse, and sat in Candices chair while two deputies sat in plain clothes under the dryers. Dalton was inside her attic, as planned, with the hatch open.
Deputy Bryant waited at the bottom of the pull-down stairs. When Dalton climbed down with a duffel bag, he found himself looking at a badge. He did not fight. He said only, Miss Tolbert never goes up there, and sat on the carport step with his head in his hands.
Candice was arrested at the salon, still holding the comb. Both were charged with burglary, identity theft, attempted fraud, and exploitation of an elderly person. The sheriff told Miss Tolbert that her calendar and her fourth-grade memory for names had done half the work. She had taught that boy his own cursive, and the attic floor proved he had learned nothing else.
The roof held through the next storm. I finished the tear-off the following week with my crew, and I took out every board of that little plywood floor myself. I put in new insulation over the joists and sealed the hatch with a lock that only Miss Tolbert and I had keys for.
The county judge ordered full restitution for her time and her locks, and the salon owner, horrified, paid for her new deadbolt. A line of former students came by that fall with casseroles, and one of them, a retired deputy, fixed her screen door for good.
Miss Tolbert called me in December to ask if I would climb the ladder once more. She wanted to hang a string of lights in the attic window, white ones, visible from the street. She said it looked like an honest house at last.
I hung them myself. When I came down, she handed me a slice of sweet potato pie and said, Curtis, thirty-one years of fourth grade taught me one thing. A child can fool you once. A teacher gets the last word.
