The money was from my college fund, Grandpa. Lily said it so quietly I almost did not hear. I looked at the line highlighted in yellow on the bank statement. Withdrawal, eighteen thousand four hundred dollars, to a travel agency in Portland. Then another, twelve thousand, to the same agency. Two one way tickets to Dubai. I put my hand flat on the oilcloth of the kitchen table and read the third highlighted line, and my heart seemed to stop for a moment and then start again, slowly, heavily, like an old engine in winter.
Reverend Stowe leaned over the page. He said, “Walt, there is more. Look at the date on the first transfer.” It was the ninth of October, a full week before the accident. Ethan had been emptying the college fund of his daughter, which her mother had built up since the day she was born, while Sarah was still alive. Sarah had found out and highlighted it, and then hidden her passport so he could not use it for a trip she would not take. I realized, looking at that yellow line, that she had been preparing for a fight.
I opened the envelope marked DAD in the handwriting of my daughter. Dad, I think Ethan is planning to leave, and he has been taking money from Lily. I do not know where he is going or with whom. I have not said anything because I do not want to frighten her. Here is what I have done. I took out a protective hold on the college account at the bank, which Ethan does not know about. Next week he will try to move the rest, and it will fail. In the birdhouse I have also put a number for a lawyer in Bangor. His name is Mr. Doucette. He will help.
A mother who hides a map for her child inside the gift of her father has given the child two homes at once.
I read the last paragraph aloud to Lily. Tell her I love her, Sarah had written. Tell her it is not her fault. Tell her that sometimes the people who should stay do not, and the people who stay are the family. I stopped. The kitchen was silent. The stove ticked. Lily sat very straight on her chair with her hands in her lap and tears running down her cheeks without a sound. She said, “Mom wrote that for me.” I said she had. She nodded, once. Then she got down from the chair and climbed into my lap, though she is twelve, and put her face in my neck.
Mr. Doucette came to the farm on Wednesday, a thin, bald man in a green cardigan, with a battered briefcase. He read the documents in my parlor and looked at me over his glasses and said, “Mr. Hallett, your daughter was ahead of nearly everyone. The hold on the account is valid, and the court will honor it. Mr. Dunn will find, when he reaches the bank, that eleven thousand dollars is what remains, and that it cannot be touched. The rest has been spent, and we can pursue it. But the flight is the more urgent matter. He leaves tomorrow.”
We drove to Portland that night, Mr. Doucette and I, in his old Buick, through a hard rain. He had called a friend in the state police. We arrived at the airport at ten in the evening and were met at the departures door by a trooper named Pelletier, a woman in a rain slicker with a stern, tired face. She had already spoken to the airline. The tickets, she said, had been bought with stolen funds. If Ethan reached the gate with the money of a minor child in his pocket, she could stop him. She asked me to stand by the glass. I did, with my cap in my hand.
He came through the doors at six in the morning, in a tan travel jacket, rolling a black suitcase. The woman from the church basement walked beside him, laughing. He saw me and stopped. His whole face went slack. The trooper stepped between us and said, “Mr. Dunn, I need you to step this way.” He did not resist. He looked over her shoulder at me, and for a moment I thought he might say something, but he only shook his head very slowly, like a man waking from a dream. They took his suitcase. Inside was a thick envelope of cash and a stack of printouts.
The woman, Brianne, was released after questioning. She had known nothing of the source of the money, and said so, and the police believed her. She cried in the terminal. She flew home to Ohio alone. Ethan was charged with theft by deception and misuse of the funds of a minor. He pleaded guilty. The judge in Penobscot County sentenced him to four years, two suspended, with a full order of restitution. At the hearing, Lily did not look at her father. She looked at the window, where a cardinal was clinging to the sill in the snow.
I became her guardian on the first day of spring. We went to the courthouse in my good suit, and she wore the dress from her mother, which still hung a little long. The judge asked Lily if she understood. She said yes. The judge asked if she wished to live with her grandfather. She said, in a clear voice, “More than anything.” Then she asked if she could ask a question. The judge said of course. Lily asked whether Grandpa could keep the birdhouse safe, and everyone in the room laughed, and I wiped my eyes with the back of my glove.
We hung the little house on the porch the first week of April. It was the one I built her when she was six, out of birch branches and a coffee can, with a round door the size of a half dollar. Within a week a pair of chickadees had moved in. Lily watched them every morning from the kitchen window with her cereal. She named the female Sarah. The male she called Walt. One afternoon in May I stood beside her at the glass, and four tiny heads poked up from the door, beaks open, crying out, and she took my hand.
