The small brown glass bottle that fell from the jacket pocket of Glenn rolled across the planks of the Cracker Barrel floor, and stopped against the toe of my shoe. I am Bonnie Sue Akers, seventy three years old, of Hodgenville, and I looked down at that little bottle with a typed label I could read plainly. It held a sleeping medicine, a strong one, with a name I recognized from the shelf of my late husband. Glenn went still. The coffee dripped from his lap to the floor. A silence spread across the dining room, and the clatter of forks faded away, one table after another.
The waitress, a woman of fifty named Tammy with a pencil behind her ear, set down her tray of sweet tea and crossed the room in four quick steps. “Honey,” she said to me, in a very calm voice, “I called a state trooper from the back, ten minutes ago. He is out front. Sit tight.” A big man at the counter in a cap that read Kentucky Hauling stood up from his stool, and a second man beside him did the same. Glenn looked from face to face, and for the first time since June, he stopped smiling, and I saw a very different man looking out through that familiar kind face.
I picked up the bottle by its cap, using my napkin, the way I had seen on television. “Glenn,” I said, “did you put that in my coffee?” He did not answer. His hand went toward his chest, and he said I was confused, that it was only a vitamin. His voice shook on the word. Outside the plate glass window, a gray cruiser of the Kentucky State Police rolled up beside the rocking chairs on the porch, with its lights turned off, and a tall trooper in a campaign hat stepped out with one hand resting on his belt.
A folded napkin slipped under a coffee cup gave one widow the length of a lunch hour to bring a smiling stranger back to the truth in Elizabethtown.
I gave my terms right there between the peg game and the pie case, in a voice that carried to the back of the store. “Glenn Dobbs, if that is your name, I am not afraid of you. You will go outside with that officer. You will tell him where the money is, all three hundred and eighty thousand dollars. And you will tell him the names of the other women, because I do not believe for a minute that I am the first. Tammy, bring this man a clean napkin, so he may wipe his lap before he goes.”
The shoulders of Glenn collapsed, and he sat down heavily at our table. “Bonnie Sue, there were five before you,” he said, in a flat, tired voice. “Widows from church groups in Tennessee and Indiana. I gave them kindness, and I took what they had. I only needed them to sign things when they were tired. That is what the pills were for. Nobody was ever hurt.” He rubbed his forehead. “I told myself that the money would stop it, that I would stop. It never did. I am sorry. I am not sorry enough.”
But even now he schemed. Glenn suddenly snatched the bottle from my hand and a notebook from his jacket, the little black book with the names and numbers, leaped from the booth, and ran for the kitchen door at the rear, meaning to go out through the loading dock. He knocked over a high chair. The cook, a huge man in an apron, stepped out of the swinging door with a ladle in his hand. The trucker came in from the left. And the trooper stood in the dining room doorway.
Glenn stopped between the pie case and the biscuit warmer, with the notebook clutched in both fists, and half the diners of the restaurant on their feet, the smell of hickory smoke and maple syrup hanging in the air. The trooper spoke without raising his voice. “Mr. Dobbs, I have been looking for a man matching your description for fourteen months. Put your hands where I can see them.” Glenn looked at the exit, and the trucker, and the cook with his ladle. The notebook fell open on the floor, and he raised his hands.
The consequences were thorough. Glenn Dobbs was an alias, and the man was identified as Gerald Pruitt, wanted in three states. The notebook led to six victims, and the state recovered more than a million dollars, including every cent of my savings and the life insurance of Ray. He was sentenced to nineteen years. Tammy, the waitress, was honored by the state police at a ceremony in Frankfort, and she wore her apron and cried the whole time. I testified, and I wore the old wedding ring of Ray on a chain.
In the name of my first husband Ray, who passed in 2022, I started the Ray Akers Fund. It pays for fraud protection and legal help for widows and widowers and for safe meeting spaces and support circles for people who have lost a spouse, in Larue, Hardin and Nelson counties. In the first year we protected two hundred and eleven seniors and opened four support circles. One was a seventy one year old widow from Radcliff who hugged me in a church parking lot, and said she would have lost everything without the little napkin of Tammy.
On a warm Sunday in June, I sat on the porch of the Cracker Barrel off Interstate 65 in a rocking chair, with a cup of coffee and a slice of peach pie. Tammy came out with a pot and filled my cup, and sat beside me on the next rocker, as she did now on her breaks. “Bonnie Sue,” she said, “I almost did not leave the note.” I took her hand. I told her that of all the napkins I had ever folded, I would never forget that one, and the rocking chairs creaked in the breeze.
