The car door slammed again, and then the front door, and I turned in the dim hallway with the paper of the corkboard still in my hand. It was Dana. She stood in the doorway in her work blazer with her keys in her fist, and she looked at the locksmith, and at me, and at the board on the wall, and her whole body folded like a tent. “Mom,” she said. “Oh, Mom. I was going to tell you tonight.” The word beside my name on the spreadsheet was SELL. Two weeks from today. My house in Marion, with my garden and my crabapple tree, listed under a power of attorney I had never signed.
Travis, the locksmith, tactfully stepped out to his van. Dana leaned against the wall and told me in a flat, tired voice, the way a person reads a diagnosis. After her second divorce she had met a man named Rick Ames, who was charming, and who owned a business that bought houses. He had moved in six months ago. He had a crew with a white van with Illinois plates. They kept files on older people in Linn County, from probate records and obituaries. “Mom, I did not know at first,” she said. “By the time I did, he had everything. My name was on the loan. He said he would put me in prison.”
“Where is the piano?” I asked. Dana looked up, and I saw in her face for the first time something I recognized. She took out her phone and showed me a photograph of a storage unit, a ten by twenty on the far side of Cedar Rapids. In the corner, under a quilt, sat my mother Steinway, with the lid down. “Rick wanted to sell it,” she said. “He had a buyer in Chicago. I rented the unit in my own name and moved it at night, with my friend Bryce. I put your quilts on it. Mom, I was trying to hide the one thing he could not have.”
A hallway corkboard and a missing Steinway gave one retired college piano teacher the length of a single afternoon to bring her daughter back to the truth in Cedar Rapids.
I gave my terms in the hallway, softly, with my hand on the arm of my daughter. We would not run. We would not hide. We would call the Cedar Rapids police and the Linn County attorney, who happened to be a former student of mine from Coe, and we would wait for Rick Ames in the kitchen with a pot of tea. Dana nodded. Travis put his head in at the door. “Madam, I took the liberty,” he said. “I called my cousin on the force. He is on his way.” I told him I would pay him double. He said that was not necessary, but he would not refuse a piece of pie.
Rick came home at four. He was a tall, easy man in a leather jacket, and he came through the back door whistling. He saw the three of us at the table, and Travis in the corner, and the corkboard on the wall behind us with his name written on every page. He did not run at first. He leaned on the doorframe and smiled. “Evelyn,” he said, “you have the wrong idea. A man in my business collects information. It is perfectly legal.” I said, “Rick, the word beside my name is not information.” He stopped smiling. The kettle began to whistle on the stove.
He snatched the spreadsheet off the corkboard, meaning to run out to the van and drive off with it, and he turned and bolted back through the kitchen door, out onto the deck and down the steps to the yard. He rounded the corner of the house at full speed and made for the garage. It was a good plan, and it would have worked, except that Travis had been busy while he was out. The locksmith, a thorough young man, had rekeyed the side door, the garage door and the deck gate in the last hour, and had left the keys on the kitchen table.
Travis opened the door about six inches and put his face in the gap. “Sir,” he said, “I am going to need you to wait right there.” Two police cruisers pulled into the driveway with their lights off. They took the spreadsheet and the corkboard and Rick, and the white van with the Illinois plates, which turned out to hold eleven boxes of files on thirty seven households. By dark the county attorney, my old student, was sitting at my kitchen table drinking tea and calling me Mrs. Duval and apologizing for the paperwork. Dana gave a statement till midnight.
The prosecutor treated Dana with great care, and her cooperation reduced her case to a single fine. Rick Ames went to prison for nine years. We brought the Steinway home on a Saturday, with Bryce and Travis and four movers, and set it in my living room in Marion by the window, where the light falls. Dana sat down on the bench and put her hands on the keys and did not play. Then she played the first four bars of a lullaby I had taught her when she was six. We both pretended it was nothing. She cried into the keys.
In the name of my mother, Marta Kovar, who passed in 1991, I started the Marta Kovar Fund. It pays for credit freezes, identity theft recovery and legal help for older adults who have been targeted by scammers, in Linn, Johnson and Benton counties. In the first year we helped one hundred eighty three people, and we returned the files of thirty seven households to their owners, one at a time, in person. An old farmer in Alburnett, eighty eight, accepted his envelope with both hands and said no one had ever told him he was not a fool.
On Saturdays, Lily and Mason come to my house in Marion for lessons, and Dana drives them, and stays. She sits on the couch with her knitting and listens to the children play badly. Mason has a feel for Chopin. Lily has a feel for loud. Last week, at the end of the lesson, Dana asked if she could play the duet part, the second piano line, on the old Steinway, beside her son. I moved over. She sat. And my mother, who cleaned houses in Davenport for eleven years to buy that piano, filled the room.
