I read Kyle text twice in Dennis warehouse, while Hank stood behind me holding his hat. I did not panic. I am eighty two years old and I have taught three thousand teenagers to read music in a room full of trumpets, and very little in this world can frighten me. I turned to Dennis, who was still holding the envelope in its plastic sleeve. “Dennis, would you be so kind as to keep this in your safe until I return?” I said. “And would you lend me your telephone? I need to call the Leadville police chief.” He handed it over without a word.
The chief of police in Leadville is a man named Rafe Gonzales, who played second chair trombone in my band in 1996. I told him in four sentences what was happening in my house. He did not interrupt. When I had finished, he said, “Miss Lucy, I will be there in six minutes, and I am bringing Judge Ortega, because I think we are going to need a paper.” I thanked him. Then I called Hank locksmith friend, Burl, and asked him to be at the house with a ring of keys and a stout heart. Hank and I turned the truck north.
We drove back over the pass in the failing light, with the snow just beginning, in Hank old Chevy truck. Hank did not say a word for the first forty miles. At Fremont Pass, with the wind howling and the flakes as big as dimes, he finally cleared his throat. “Lucy, in all the years I have known you, I have never seen you angry,” he said. I told him I was not angry. I was thinking. I was thinking of my grandmother, in 1889, hiding a letter under a bathtub because she could not bear to speak the truth.
A cast iron tub in a salvage yard, a sealed envelope from 1889, and a music teacher who called the chief of police.
We arrived at the house a little after seven. Chief Gonzales stood in the yard in his heavy parka with two officers. In the front window, under the lamp, I saw four silhouettes, three men and a woman, sitting at my dining room table. My grandfather dining table, built in 1889, with the lions head legs. A silver Cadillac sat in the drive with California plates. Kyle stood on the porch with his hands in his pockets, shivering. When he saw my truck, he turned white. “Aunt Lucy, I am so sorry,” he said. “I did not know they would change the locks.”
Burl, the locksmith, had the new lock off in ninety seconds. The chief walked into my house first, with his hand on his belt, and I followed him, in my good wool coat, with the snow melting on my shoulders. The man from California rose from my chair, a dapper gray haired fellow in a camel coat, with a leather folder. “Mrs. Bergstrom, I am Thomas Tabor,” he said. “I am the great grandson of Horace Tabor. This gentleman is my attorney. We have reason to believe that this house was built with stolen silver, and that it belongs to my family.”
I looked at him for a long moment. “Mr. Tabor, how do you do?” I said. “I am Lucille Bergstrom. I taught music at this school for forty years, and I have known every Tabor descendant in Lake County since 1962. They are a lovely family. I am afraid you are not one of them.” The chief had taken the man identification, and he looked at it, and at his phone, and then back at the man. “Sir, your name is Ronald Pettit,” he said. “And you are wanted for fraud in Nevada, California, and Colorado.” The man in the camel coat did not move.
It took ten minutes. The man tried to run, in the snow, through my kitchen door. Hank, who is eighty five and was a Marine, stepped quietly in front of him and held out one big miner hand, and the man ran into it as if it were a wall. The two officers put cuffs on him on the back porch, and his lawyer, who turned out to be his brother, sat down on the stairs with a groan. Kyle stood in my front hall, white as a sheet, and began to cry. “I owed him money,” he said. “He said it was a sure thing.”
I did not call the district attorney to charge my nephew. I took him into the kitchen, sat him down at my grandmother table, and made him a cup of hot chocolate. He told me everything, with chocolate on his lip, like a boy of nine. He had lost his Denver restaurant to a gambling debt in the spring. He had learned about my grandmother letter from a sentence in an old family Bible, and he had sold the bathtub to find the envelope, not to steal it, he said, but so Pettit, who held his debt, would give him another year.
The real Tabor heirs lived in Denver. Their names were Margaret and Edwin Tabor, a brother and sister in their seventies, and I called them the next week. They came to Leadville in the spring, in a rented van, and I met them on my front porch with a tray of lemonade and my grandmother letter. Edwin read it aloud, standing in the sun. When he finished, he folded it very carefully. “Mrs. Bergstrom, my family has always said a little silver went missing,” he said. “We never knew where.” I said I was sorry. He took my hand. “Do not be,” he said.
We decided together to give the papers, the assay reports and the maps to the Matchless Mine Museum, where they could be read by anyone, and the house, at their insistence, stayed with me. Dennis delivered my grandmother tub back to Leadville on a flatbed truck in May, free of charge. Kyle and Hank installed it in the upstairs bathroom, on a new raised platform built of old oak, by the window facing Mount Massive. On the first Sunday night I ran the hot water and climbed in, into the cream colored enamel, and I looked at the snow on the mountain and thought, Forgive us, Johanna. Forgiven.
