“Cabin,” Dad finished, and his thin face wrinkled into something that was almost a smile. “Donnie, I am eighty five years old, and I was a sergeant in the Army for twenty two of them. I know when a man is working me.” He gripped my wrist. “I told him it was in a coffee can behind the stove at the lake. Which is a lie. The deed has been in the safe at the VFW for fifteen years.” I stared at my father. He chuckled, dry as paper. “That man sat on a bucket and worked me for an hour, son, and I never gave up a thing that was not worthless.”
I told Mrs. Okafor, and Mrs. Okafor told the detective, a bulky man named Reyes who had worked financial crimes in Franklin County for nineteen years. The detective said the information was gold. Gerald Pike, he explained, had been in the middle of a scheme he had run in two other states. He would collect the details of an old person, apply for credit cards, get the account numbers, and then forge a deed to any property the person owned. He sold it to a cash buyer within a day. The lake cabin, which my father and I had built together in 1989, was worth a hundred sixty thousand dollars.
Detective Reyes set a trap. He asked Mrs. Okafor to call the number on the credit card application, which belonged to a burner phone, and leave a message in the voice of an elderly man. The message said that he had found the deed after all. It was in the coffee can behind the stove at the lake, as he had said. He just needed someone to drive him there on Friday. By Thursday afternoon, the detective had four officers hidden in the woods around the cabin, and a state trooper in an unmarked car parked at the mouth of the gravel road.
A veteran can be pushed onto a cold porch, but he has not forgotten how to guard what matters.
Gerald Pike arrived at ten past noon on Friday in a rented sedan, wearing a fishing vest and a baseball cap, with a crowbar in the back seat. He went around the back, found the stove through the window, and let himself in. The officers waited until he had pulled the old coffee can from behind the firebox and was staring into it with a look of dawning rage. The can held a single object, a small laminated card with a handwritten line. It said, Nice try, Gerald. Love, Sgt. Riggs, U.S. Army, Retired.
He did not run. He put his hands up with the card still in one fist, and he laughed, a thin, broken laugh. “Ninety minutes,” he said to the arresting officer. “That old man outsmarted me in ninety minutes.” The officer said, “He had a head start. He has been outsmarting people since 1952.” Pike was returned to Chillicothe to serve out the remainder of his sentence, with an additional fifteen years for identity theft, fraud, and the exploitation of an elderly veteran. I did not attend the sentencing. I was at the VFW, helping my father rearrange the trophies.
Trevor had not been arrested at first. He was a young man of twenty six whose only adult skill was to lie to people and make them like him, and I had been sure of his guilt. But Detective Reyes showed me the evidence, and the evidence said he had opened the credit card under pressure, with a gun to his future, as he put it, because Pike had threatened his mother. He cooperated. He testified at the trial of Pike, in a borrowed tie, and the jury believed him. He received eighteen months of probation and a long, searching conversation with a judge.
Sherry was another matter. She had known that Gerald Pike was alive. She had known that he was out of prison. She had let him into my house, kept her mouth shut, and allowed my father to be moved onto a plastic chaise in an unheated room because Trevor needed space and Gerald needed time. She pleaded guilty to conspiracy and neglect of a vulnerable adult, and she was sentenced to three years. I did not speak to her before she went in. I signed the divorce papers on a Wednesday at the kitchen table, with a pen that skipped.
I took a position as a welding instructor at the technical college in Columbus. Day classes, a short commute, and eighteen young students who call me Mr. Riggs and write their names on the back of their gloves. I come home at four. Dad is waiting in his recliner with his war photographs behind him, hanging in their old order on the wall. The sunporch I closed off with plywood and plastic and then, in the spring, tore out completely. In its place, I built a deck, with a railing, a ramp, and a long wooden bench facing the sunrise.
In June, we drove to the lake. Dad rode in the front seat with the window down, his arm out in the wind, a thermos of coffee clutched between his knees. We opened the cabin together. It smelled of old pine and lake water. He shuffled to the stove, bent with great effort, and looked into the empty space behind the firebox. The coffee can had been replaced by the police. “They took it,” he said, disappointed. I told him they had been very polite about it. He nodded. “It was a good can,” he said.
That afternoon, we fished off the end of the dock, the two of us, with a single pole and a can of night crawlers. The sun came down gold and slow. After an hour, my father had a bite, and he reeled in, in his old stubborn way, a small bluegill, hardly bigger than his hand. He held it up in the light, grinning like a boy. “Son,” he said, “this is the best day I have had in four years.” He tossed the fish back into the lake and watched it flash away. “And I did not even need the deed,” he said.
