The man in the black suit was Roy Lamar, and he was easy to find, because he was in the phone book. He owned the funeral home in Laurel that had called Mrs. Bolden. When Deputy Cole and I walked into his office on Monday morning, he stood up behind his desk with the look of a man who has been waiting for a particular knock. He said, “I wondered how long it would take.” He said he had done a great many things in his thirty years in that trade, but he had never before measured a living man.
Roy Lamar said he had been uneasy from the first visit. Kyle paid him in cash, six thousand dollars, and insisted on a date, the twenty eighth of the month, and refused to say that Earl was ill. He had asked to see the casket sizes before the man was dead. Roy had gone along because Kyle seemed so calm and so certain, and because he had thought, God forgive him, that perhaps an old man was dying and the family was merely well organized.
Then he had seen my grandfather on the cot in the laundry room, breathing, with a fan on him and a fork in one hand. He drove home that night and did not sleep. He kept every paper. He kept the receipt, the schedule, and the scrap on which Kyle had written the twenty eighth in ballpoint. When the sheriff asked for them, he brought a folder two inches thick, in alphabetical order, with a note on top. It said, I am sorry. I should have called.
The people we love most will sometimes keep a hook on the door and call it care, and only a visit that comes two days early will see it.
The laboratory in Jackson called four days later about the sweet tea. The pitcher in the refrigerator held a heavy dose of a sleeping medicine, crushed, enough to stop the breathing of a weakened man in his sleep. Amber had a prescription for the same drug. The doctor of Earl said he had been drinking that tea every evening for six months, and that it explained the confusion, the weakness, and the long gray mornings that Kyle had called wandering.
They were charged with attempted murder, false imprisonment, elder abuse, forgery, and fraud. Kyle sat in the Forrest County jail for two days before he asked for a deal. Amber lasted one. The prosecutor, a heavy woman named Ms. Dukes, told me it was the cleanest case she had seen in eleven years, because the criminals had kept better records than the police. She placed the brass hook and eye latch in an evidence bag with a gloved hand and held it up to the light.
Granddaddy spent a week in the hospital in Hattiesburg, and every day I sat by his bed in my uniform and did the crossword with him. His left hand grew stronger. His eyes cleared. On the fourth morning he asked for a razor, and when I handed it to him he shaved his own face for the first time in half a year, slowly, squinting in the mirror. He looked up at me and said, “There he is.” I laughed until I had to sit down.
I took him home to my house. I had a ramp built, and I traded nights at the dispatch center for days so that I could be there in the evenings. A neighbor, Miss Pearl, a retired nurse from down the road, began to come every afternoon with a peach cobbler. He said it was the best thing about the whole mess, and he said it with a straight face.
Kyle took a plea in March. Fifteen years. Amber got ten. The judge, an older woman who had known my grandfather at the Rotary, said she hoped they would spend that time thinking about a man who had raised a child alone and then been locked in a room by his own family. She said she had given them the most that the law allowed. The courtroom was quiet. Granddaddy, in a pressed suit, sat in the front row with his good hand on his cane and did not look at either of them.
He asked me, a week later, as we sat on the porch with a plate of catfish, why I had not cried in the laundry room. I said I did not know. He said, “Kelsey Ann, you carried me out of that room. You can cry about it now.” And I did. I cried for an hour, with my head on the shoulder of a seventy eight year old man, and it was the first time since I was eight years old that I had let anybody see me.
The brass hook sits in a little glass case on my desk at the dispatch center now, with a card the prosecutor typed and signed. When a new dispatcher comes in, shaking, on her first night, I show it to her. I tell her that the most important thing in this job is to listen to the one small voice that says, something is wrong. And I tell her about a Saturday night, and a latch, and an old man who was waiting to be asked how long he had been in there.
