Part 3 — Aunt Bevs List
The name at the top of Aunt Bevs list was Ellis. Under it, in her neat bus-driver block letters, was Darlene. The detective unfolded the paper, read both names, and let the chapel go quiet for a long moment before anyone moved.
Darlene collapsed into the pew. Ellis stood very still. Then he gave a short, hollow laugh and said that nobody could prove anything. The detective asked them both to step outside, and sixty band members parted to let them through, never once raising their instruments.
They confessed within the hour, one in each interview room. In the weeks before her death, they had let themselves into Aunt Bevs house with the spare key. They took her pills and moved her checkbook. They emptied the locked drawer for the envelope, which held her deed and a small life-insurance policy that named me.
The coroner went back over his report with the detective. Aunt Bev had died of her heart, quietly, in her chair, on Sunday night. She was not harmed in any way. But Ellis found her in the morning, panicked, and moved her to the bedroom before calling anyone, because he wanted time to search the house.
That was why the detective had said she had not been found where she died. It was a cruel and cowardly thing to do, and it was against the law. But it was not murder. Aunt Bev passed at peace, with a pot of tea beside her and her bus-route map on her knee.
Ellis and Darlene were charged with theft, burglary, tampering with a death scene, and forgery. Both pleaded guilty. A judge ordered restitution and community service, and they were barred from entering any property of the estate again. She spent forty years counting children onto a bus, and at the end she counted her own relatives with the same care.
The envelope was recovered from Ellis truck. Inside were the deed to her house, a savings book with $41,000 in it, and a note in her handwriting that said, For Kelsey, who laughed, and then stopped. I had to sit down on the funeral home floor to read it.
We held the real service that Saturday, with the gray box exchanged for a handsome oak casket the band members chipped in for. The drumline marched, and the horns played the fight song one last time. A thousand people stood on Front Street, many of them in old yellow bus-patch jackets.
The man in the wheelchair with the snare drum rolled the final cadence by himself. When he finished, the whole street was silent. Then every driver in the line honked once, long and low, the sound of a bus at a crossing.
I moved into the house on Poplar Street in the spring. I kept the bus-route map on the wall in the kitchen, with her pencil marks and her coffee rings. Each morning, when the yellow bus passes on Route 14, the driver taps his horn twice.
