I read the last letter from Gene three times at my kitchen table, with the afternoon light going gold on the linoleum, and when I came to the sentence about the man three houses down, I put the paper face down and stood up and walked to the window. Hyde Avenue lay quiet in the October sun. A boy rode a bicycle past the juniper hedge. Three doors to the east, a white house with green shutters and a flag on the porch stood exactly as it had for eleven years. My neighbor Carl Dunning waved at me every morning from his mailbox.
I had brought him a casserole when his wife died. I had held his arm at the church supper. He was seventy eight years old, a tall man with a courtly stoop, and he walked his terrier past my house twice a day. Gene had played cribbage with him on Thursday nights for ten years. I put my hand flat on the cold glass and understood that for a decade my husband had sat across a card table from the man who had been blackmailing him, and had said not a word.
I was a dispatcher for twenty nine years, and the first thing you learn is not to rush. I made a pot of coffee. I wrote down every date in the letters of Gene on a legal pad. Then I called a man named Lyle Hargrave, a retired FBI agent who lived in Blackfoot and whose truck I had once dispatched to a wreck on Interstate 15 in the middle of a snowstorm. He had once told me, if I ever needed a favor, to call. He answered on the first ring. I said, “Lyle, it is Rosalind. I need your help with a very old case.”
A man who spends a lifetime afraid for his wife has already given her more courage than he knows.
He came that evening in a green pickup, an old man with a white mustache and a briefcase, and he sat at my table and read the letters of Gene in complete silence. At the end he laid down his glasses. “Rosie,” he said, “I worked the Reno casino robbery in 1993. It was the biggest unsolved heist in Nevada for thirty years. The guard who died was a man named Frank Mooney. His widow is still alive, in Carson City. We never had the driver. We never had the inside man. Your husband just handed me both.”
The safe deposit box at the credit union on Main Street held thirty three envelopes, one for each of the boxes Gene had received, each marked with the date and the amount. The cash was untouched, still in the same rubber bands, still in the same old newspaper. Fifteen thousand dollars from every year, thirty three years in a row. Gene had never spent a cent. In the bottom of the box, wrapped in a handkerchief, lay a small tape recorder, and on the tape the voice of a man giving instructions, plainly, in a light Idaho accent: Carl Dunning.
Lyle played it for me in the kitchen. It was Gene at the age of thirty five, in a motel room in Reno, recording a conversation he had had the courage to tape. The man on the other end was telling him exactly what to do with the laundry carts. He was telling him to drive to a loading dock on Virginia Street. He was telling him that nobody would be hurt, and then, some days later, when the guard died, he was telling him that nobody would ever know. My husband had kept that tape for thirty three years, in a safe deposit box, for his wife.
They did not arrest Carl Dunning that week, because Lyle Hargrave said the Bureau needed to be certain. On the following Monday, an agent in a gray suit sat in my living room with a cup of tea, and a federal judge in Boise signed a warrant on the basis of the tape and the letters. On Wednesday morning, at six, a convoy of black vehicles with no lights arrived at the white house with the green shutters. Carl Dunning opened the door in his bathrobe with his terrier under his arm. He saw them. And he smiled.
“Rosalind,” he said, looking past the agents to where I stood in my own driveway in a coat over my nightgown, “I always wondered which of you it would be.” He handed the terrier to the nearest agent, with great politeness. “His name is Biscuit. He takes a pill at noon.” They put him in a car. I stood watching, with my arms wrapped around myself, and I understood something that took my breath away. Gene had not been afraid for himself. For thirty three years he had been afraid for me.
The trial was held in Reno in March. Carl Dunning, seventy nine, was convicted of felony murder, armed robbery, and conspiracy, and sentenced to life. The family of Frank Mooney sat in the front row, a white haired woman named Dorothy and her two grown sons, and when the verdict was read she bowed her head and wept. Afterward she crossed the courtroom and took both of my hands in hers. She said, “Mrs. Kemper, your husband kept the tape. That is the only reason I have been able to bury my husband.”
The state of Nevada returned the cash to the casino, and the casino, to my astonishment, offered a reward of two hundred thousand dollars to the widow of the man who had held the evidence. I gave all of it to Dorothy Mooney. She protested. I said, “Gene would want you to have it.” We stood on the steps of the courthouse in the March wind, two old women in good coats, and she hugged me, and I smelled the same lavender my own mother wore, and I was not afraid at all.
I sit on the porch of the house on Hyde Avenue now in the evenings, in the glider Gene built, and the white house with the green shutters stands empty three doors down. A young family is moving in next month. I think I will bring them a casserole. Before I go in, I read the last letter of Gene once more, the one he wrote and never sent, and I come to the last line, where he says: Rosie, you were the best part of my life, and I was so afraid of losing you. I say, to the dusk, “You never did.”
