The number from the 1996 trial was answered by Loretta Pace, and she was not gone at all. She was seventy nine years old, a retired schoolteacher living in a tidy brick house in Richmond, Kentucky, with a bird feeder and a Bible on the arm of her chair, and she opened the door before I could knock. We stood on the porch looking at each other. Twenty nine years earlier I had typed every word she said on the witness stand, and she had said it in a steady voice, and then she had vanished. “Mrs. Rowe,” she said, “I have been waiting a long time for someone to come and tell me it was safe.”
She had not vanished. She told me so in her kitchen, over coffee in a chipped blue cup. After the trial, the Commonwealth Attorney moved her under an agreement kept sealed from everyone, including the court reporters who typed the transcript. The brother of Curtis Lyle had made threats. She took a new name, taught third grade in another county for twenty years and never came home. She kept the old phone number alive on a small prepaid line, in case the court ever needed her. For six weeks, a man had called her every night at eleven, from my number, asking in an official voice whether she was Loretta Pace.
Loretta had recorded every call. She handed me a small tape recorder, the kind with a button as big as a dime, and I pressed play with a finger that would not stay still. The man said he was a clerk of the Fayette Circuit Court, and he used the kind of stiff phrases that I had heard in thousands of depositions. But behind the words I heard something else, a faint hiss in the second syllable of her name, a habit he had had since he was six. His ears had probably gone red. It was my son.
A prepaid phone line kept alive for twenty nine years gave one retired court reporter the length of a single weekend to bring her son back to the truth in Lexington.
I gave my terms to Bradley and Tara at my kitchen table in Chevy Chase on Sunday afternoon, with Loretta Pace sitting calmly at the end of it, her purse in her lap, and the recorder in front of her like a gavel. The line in my name would be restored. The access to my accounts would end that hour, and the lawyer who had paid them for the address of Loretta would be named to the Commonwealth Attorney. If they cooperated, I would not testify against my own son. If they did not, Loretta would. I read it from a card, in the same flat voice I once used to read back testimony.
Bradley went red to the tips of his ears, which I had been waiting for. He said a lawyer for the family of Curtis Lyle had offered fifty thousand dollars for the current address of the old witness, and Bradley had found her name in my boxes of steno notes in the basement. He had thought it was only an old file. He had never believed anyone would be hurt. Tara cried quietly. Loretta set down her coffee and said, very kindly, to him, “Young man, I taught third grade for twenty years. I know exactly what you look like when you are lying.”
Bradley snatched the little recorder off the table, meaning to run out to his car and throw it into the creek behind the house, and he bolted through my front door and down the porch steps with the tape player in his fist and Tara shouting after him. Loretta did not move. She only folded her hands and told me, in a low voice, that she had made four copies of that tape, and that one of them was already in the mailbox of the Commonwealth Attorney.
Bradley reached the street just as the University of Kentucky marching band came around the corner of Euclid, forty trumpets and twelve drums in blue and white, rehearsing for the homecoming game. The band flowed down the street like a river and swallowed him whole. A tuba blocked his left. A drum major in a tall hat marched backward directly into his path. Bradley tried to cut through the line and was swept along for an entire block, holding a recorder over his head, while a snare drummer called out, “Left, left, left, right, left!”
Bradley was out of breath, and out of road, by the time he reached the end of the block, and Mr. Okonkwo, who was walking his beagle, calmly took the recorder from his hands. The lawyer for the Lyle family was disbarred within the year. Bradley pled to a lesser charge and spent a year on probation, selling no insurance, working on a horse farm shoveling stalls. Tara went home to her mother in Hamburg. Bradley wrote me a letter every Sunday. It took a long time, but the ears finally stopped turning red.
In the name of Harold, who passed in 2020, I started the Harold Rowe Quiet Voice Fund. It pays for phone plans, medical alert devices and legal protection for seniors in Fayette, Scott and Madison counties who have been cut off from their own phones or accounts. In the first year we helped eighty three people, including a retired jockey in Georgetown who had not been able to call his daughter in three weeks. Mr. Okonkwo delivers the phones himself, and I bake a pound cake for every one. I never miss a Christmas.
Loretta Pace comes to Lexington twice a month now, in her blue cardigan, and we have lunch on my porch in Chevy Chase. She says her real name aloud, again and again, as if tasting it. We watch the October light on the Keeneland road, and when a horse trailer passes, she tells me what she thinks of the animal inside. She has a good eye. Harold would have liked her. He used to say a horse would tell you everything if you watched its ears. So, I think, would a person.
