I called the number on the sheet of Ed at eight that night, standing at the kitchen window with the crabapple tree black against the last light. A woman answered on the second ring. “Lindqvist.” I told her my name and the name of my husband. There was a silence on the line, and then a long breath. “Mrs. Hollis,” she said, “I have been hoping you would call for a year and a half. Please do not speak to your son about this. I will be at your house within the hour.” She was there in forty minutes, a tall, fair woman of fifty in a plain coat, with a gray folder under her arm.
Karin Lindqvist was a special agent of the South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation. She sat at my kitchen table with her coat still on and turned the pages of the folder slowly, so I could see. Royce Bodine ran a card game in Deadwood and a pawn shop in Sturgis, and he had been under investigation for loan sharking for three years. Six people had died in that time, all of them in debt to him, all of them with a cause of death that looked like nothing at all. “Your husband was number four,” she said, as gently as she could. “We could not prove it. We needed a reason to dig.”
“Ed wrote that Royce shook his hand,” I said. “That it stung.” She nodded. “Royce wears a ring on his right hand. A heavy silver one. A pharmacist in Rapid City told us last winter that it has a hollow needle in the band, the kind that a person can fill. A handshake. A pinprick. A small dose of something. A week later, pneumonia.” She looked at me for a long time. “Mrs. Hollis, I need to ask your permission to exhume your husband. I will understand if you say no.” I said, “Ed would say yes.”
A man who loved his family enough to leave a folder behind can still protect them from the other side of the grave.
They opened the grave at the cemetery of the air base on a gray morning in November, with a flag at half staff and a young airman in dress blues standing guard at the fence. I did not go. I sat at home with a cup of tea going cold and held the photograph of Ed in my hands. Eleven days later Agent Lindqvist called. The laboratory had found a toxin in the tissue of the right hand, a rare one, and no pneumonia on earth could explain it. “It is enough for a warrant,” she said. “But it is not enough for a jury. We need Royce to say something.”
That was when I understood what Ed had meant by the last line of his letter: But Peg, you might have to. On Wednesday I asked Kyle to come to my house. He sat across from me at the table, forty five years old, thin as a rail, with his hands knotted together, and I put the photograph from the basement in front of him. He did not say a word for a full minute. Then he began to cry, the way he had cried at nine when he broke the window of the neighbor. “Mom,” he said, “I never knew about Dad. I swear on my life. I only knew I owed him money.”
I told him everything Agent Lindqvist had told me. I told him that his father had known about the forged deed, and that his father had written, on the last days he could still hold a pen, that he could not do it to our boy. I watched my son hear that sentence. I watched it go through him like a nail. “What do you want me to do?” he whispered. I said, “I want you to be the man your father believed you were. Just once. Just this week.” Kyle wiped his face with his sleeve and said, “Tell me where to stand.”
The signing at the Black Hills RV Center was set for the following Tuesday at ten in the morning. Kyle telephoned Royce Bodine from my kitchen, with the speaker on and the recorder of Agent Lindqvist on the table, and said, in a voice that shook only at the start, that his mother had agreed to sign, and that he needed Royce to be there to hand over the paper he held on the house. Royce was silent for a moment, and then he laughed. “Good boy,” he said. “I will bring it myself.”
He came in a gold pickup, in a bolo tie and a white hat, with a heavy silver ring on his right hand. I sat in the dealership office at a table with a pen in my hand and the folder of Ed in my lap, and Kyle sat across from me, and in the next room six agents dressed as salesmen drank coffee and looked at brochures. Royce took the chair beside mine. He smiled. He laid the forged deed on the table. “Mrs. Hollis,” he said, “I was so sorry about your husband. A fine man. A fine hand.” He held out his right one to me, with the ring turned inward, and said, “Let us shake on it.”
I looked at that hand. I looked at the ring. I thought of Ed on the porch, white as a sheet, closing the door behind him. “No, Mr. Bodine,” I said. “I do not believe I will.” Agent Lindqvist came through the door a second later with her weapon low and her badge high, and the room filled with people. Royce did not run. He only looked at his ring, as if it had betrayed him, and then at Kyle, and said one thing before they led him out: “You had me, kid, until your mother.”
Royce Bodine was convicted of the murder of Ed and four others the following spring. Kyle pleaded guilty to forgery and fraud, and because he had risked his life to help, the judge gave him treatment instead of a cell, and eighteen months of supervision. He is eleven months clean as I write this. In July the two of us took my grandsons to Yellowstone in the old pickup of Ed, with a borrowed camper on the back, and the boys sat in the bed and counted the elk. Beside the geyser, Kyle put his arm around my shoulders. “Dad would have loved this,” he said. I said, “He is here. Look at the boys.”
