“They are still married,” Jake said, and the words fell between us like a dropped plate. I sat in the VFW hall with my spoon beside the gumbo and watched Rhonda put her hand on the arm of Darren Voss, who was supposed to be her lawyer, and I thought of my father at the kitchen table, laughing like a foghorn, saying that the numbers of Mama had come in. I put my hand over my mouth. “Not here,” Jake said quietly. “Not one word here. Finish your gumbo, Mom. We will go outside when it is time.”
We waited forty minutes. Then we walked out to his truck in the gravel lot behind the hall, under the pecan trees, and Jake made two telephone calls. The first was to Detective Marie Thibodeaux of the office of the sheriff of Calcasieu Parish, a woman he had worked beside for four years. The second was to the Louisiana Lottery office in Baton Rouge, where he reached the supervisor of claims, who agreed to hold the claim file of Earl and to say nothing to anyone. “They will meet us Monday at nine,” Jake said. His hands were steady. Mine were not.
On Monday morning, Detective Thibodeaux spread the file of Earl on a table in a conference room and went through it with a pencil. The assignment of the winnings was dated July 18th. The signature was the unsteady scrawl of my father. The notary was a woman in Rosedale, Mississippi, whose commission had expired in 2020. “That is two hundred miles from his house,” the detective said. “Your father did not drive after dark. Mrs. Stroud, I want to ask you something. Was your father in a condition to sign in July?” I thought of the telephone calls. He is tired, Patty. He is resting.
A last message squeezed onto the back of a ticket is proof that a father can protect his children even after he is gone.
They obtained an order to exhume that same week. I stood at the cemetery in Sulphur with Ray and my sister Denise, in the cold, while the backhoe lifted the vault, and I held the flag of my father that Rhonda had abandoned on a chair at the VFW hall. The medical examiner called Detective Thibodeaux eight days later, and the detective called me. “The injuries are not consistent with a fall,” she said. “Your father had a heavy sedative in his blood, a drug that his doctor never prescribed. And there is a mark at the base of his skull.” I sat down on the kitchen floor.
The telephone of Rhonda told the rest. The detectives took it with a warrant on Tuesday at dawn, on her porch, in her robe, with her mouth open. The messages were all there, thousands of them, between Rhonda and Darren Voss, going back to the day she met my father at the casino. He is lonely. He plays the same numbers every week. If he hits, we take him. And in June, one line of four words: He hit. Ours now. She had not even bothered to delete them. She had been so sure no one would ever ask.
By then they were running. We learned it from the tracker on the truck of Voss, which Jake had asked Detective Thibodeaux to install the day of the funeral. They left Lake Charles at noon on Wednesday in the white sedan of Rhonda, with two suitcases and a cooler, heading east on I 10 toward Biloxi, where a man Voss knew ran a boat to the Cayman Islands. Jake was four miles behind them in his own truck, off duty, with his lights off. At the Pearl River bridge, two state police cruisers closed in from ahead.
Jake told me later that Rhonda did not scream. She sat in the passenger seat with her arms folded and her sunglasses on, and when the trooper opened her door, she said, quite calmly, “I want my lawyer.” Voss was in the driver seat with his hands raised. In the trunk of the white sedan the troopers found a duffel bag containing nine hundred thousand dollars in cash and cashier checks, and a second passport for each of them, and a small black notebook with the names of eleven men. All widowers. All elderly. All of them dead.
The trial was in the spring, in Lake Charles. Jake could not testify, because of his place in the case, but I did, and so did Ray, and so did two sons of a widower from Greenville whose stairs had killed him. The prosecutor played the messages. She showed the jury the back of the lottery ticket on a screen as large as a barn door, with the words of my father in the crooked hand, squeezed into the corner: If I die before Christmas, it was not an accident. The jury took four hours. Rhonda Voss and Darren Voss were each sentenced to life.
The money came back, almost all of it. A judge in Baton Rouge signed an order restoring the winnings to the estate of Earl, and the three of us, Ray, Denise, and I, divided it the way our father would have wished. I paid off my house. I put the grandchildren in the college fund. And Ray, who had never said a word about it, went down to a boatyard in Cameron one Friday morning and came back with a title in his hand and a grin I had not seen on his face in years.
In April, on what would have been the eighty third birthday of my father, the whole family went out from Cameron on a thirty two foot shrimp boat, a little blue and white thing with a rusty winch. Ray had painted the name himself across the stern in white letters: MISS LOUISE. Jake took the helm, and the boat slid out of the channel into the Gulf, and the grandchildren ran along the deck with bread for the gulls. I stood at the rail with the old ticket in its plastic sleeve and read the numbers aloud, the birthdays of the four of us. Ray laughed, and the sound rolled out over the water, exactly like our father.
