The trooper played the video twice. On the screen, in grainy gray, Amber knelt in front of my wife with a smile that I would have called kind if I had not known better. Then she opened the purse of Ellen and took out the cards, one by one, and slipped them into her own pocket. The trooper stopped the picture there. “Mr. Pryce,” he said, “I am going to ask a hard question, and I need you to answer as best you can. Do you have a power of attorney for your wife? Because someone does.”
I did, a plain one, from 2019, with my son named as the second agent in case of my death. I had not thought of it since. But the trooper had already called the bank in Lexington. A manager named Mrs. Whitfield told him, with some distress, that on six different Tuesdays since March, a woman had brought Ellen in, presenting a document that named Amber Pryce as agent. The document was a forgery. Amber had made copies of mine and put her own name where the name of my son was supposed to be. Ellen had signed a withdrawal slip each time with a hand guided by Amber.
It came to forty one thousand dollars. It was most of what we had saved for the end, the cash value of a policy my wife had cashed in decades ago and kept in a certificate. When I heard the figure, I sat down on the bench next to Ellen in the station and I could not stand up for a long minute. She patted my knee. She said, in her small voice, “Walt, are you sad?” I said I was a little sad. She said, “Do not be. We have each other.” I kept my face turned away from the trooper.
A bus station bench is only a bench until someone sits down on it and refuses to go until the person they love has been found.
They took Amber from my house at midnight. I watched from the porch with Ellen wrapped in a blanket under my arm. Amber came down the walk in handcuffs with her head high, and when she passed us she hissed that she had done the work of a nurse for a year and no one had said thank you. My wife looked at her calmly and said, “You were not very kind to my little bird, dear.” Amber stopped, and her face did something I cannot describe. Then the trooper took her elbow and she went on.
The truth about the old man on the bench in July came out slowly. He was the grandfather of Amber from her first marriage, a man of eighty seven named Mr. Dolan, who had also lived in her home until he grew too confused to manage. She had taken him to the station on a hot Tuesday, left him with a ticket to Louisville, and driven away. A passing woman found him four hours later and called the police. He was in a care home in Cincinnati for the rest of his life, and nobody had thought to look at what had been done to him.
Amber pleaded guilty in January to two counts of theft from an elderly person, exploitation, and abandonment of two vulnerable adults. She received eight years. She did not look at me at the sentencing. My son sat in the front row with his coat on his lap, thin as a rail, and when the judge read the sentence he stood and turned toward me and said, loudly enough for the room to hear, “Dad, I let this happen. I am so sorry.” I got up and crossed the aisle and held him. He is forty six years old and he sobbed like a boy.
The bank refunded thirty one thousand dollars, under a fraud protection program, after a long review and a letter from an attorney in Frankfort who took the case for no fee. The rest we have learned to live without. I have learned that a great many things are not necessary at seventy eight. I sold the second car. I moved the dialysis schedule so that a woman from our church can sit with Ellen on the days I cannot. Kevin works two jobs and comes over every evening to sit with his mother.
Hank, the station manager, drove up from Frankfort on a Sunday in November and rang the doorbell. He had a paper sack in his hands and a nervous smile. “Mr. Pryce,” he said, “I took a walk along the highway on my day off, down where the ditch runs along Route 60, and I looked for a while. I think this is hers.” He drew out of the sack a small gray stuffed bird with big yellow eyes, one wing torn, a bit of dried mud on its tail. I had to take hold of the door frame.
Ellen was in her chair by the window. I carried the bird in my two hands and set it on her lap. She looked down at it. For a long moment she said nothing. Then her whole face cleared like a window wiped with a cloth, and she held the little creature up to her cheek. She said, “There you are. I was looking everywhere.” She turned to me, and for the second time that year, she knew me. “Walt, they found him. Thank you for finding him.” I said I had not done it. Hank had. She reached out and took his hand.
That night I washed the bird in the sink with baby shampoo and set it on a towel by the heater to dry. I sewed the wing back on with white thread, badly. When it was dry I put it in the bed beside my wife, and she curled her arm around it. I sat in the dark and watched them both for a long time. The house was quiet. A clock ticked. My heart, which has been through so much, beat steadily in my chest, like a small, tired engine that has decided to run a little while longer.
