I put on my glasses and looked at the newspaper photograph a third time, and the man standing with his hand on the shoulder of Brandon Pell looked back at me across sixty years. Harold Voss. Thin gray hair now, a handsome face thickened by age, but with the same wide smile. He had stood up beside George at the altar of the Congregational church in Bangor in the summer of 1962, in a rented gray suit with a carnation. He had danced with me at the reception. And twenty years ago, at the age of sixty, he was supposed to have drowned in a boating accident on Moosehead Lake.
“Gram,” Emily said, “the caption says that man is a financial advisor named Harold Pratt.” I laughed, a dry, awful sound. “Emmy, that is not Harold Pratt. That is Harold Voss. He took forty thousand dollars from your grandfather in 1996 for a lumberyard that never existed. He disappeared in 2005, and everybody said the lake got him.” I put the photograph down very gently on the kitchen table, as if it might bite. “Your grandfather never forgave him. And neither did I.”
The laboratory called on Friday morning. Emily put the telephone on speaker, and I heard a young man read the report in a steady voice. The pill I had been given was not my heart medicine. It was a compressed tablet of ordinary flour and a small amount of a drug that would make my pulse irregular and my blood pressure rise and fall, a drug used in veterinary medicine, which in an old woman with a weak heart could easily be fatal. The dose in the pills Wayne had sorted for me was increasing each week. Another month, perhaps less.
The mother who sorts out the poison from the medicine in her son will not stop until the roof stays up.
I did not scream and I did not weep. I sat very quietly in the apartment of my granddaughter in Brewer with my hands folded, and I thought about my son as a small boy, in a yellow raincoat, catching frogs by the creek behind the farmhouse. I thought of him at nine, holding the hand of his father at the lineman rodeo. I thought of him at thirty, a bridegroom, laughing. And I knew that the man who had put poison in my pill box was not that child. He was someone who had been taken, slowly, a piece at a time, by greed and by a man with white teeth.
Emily called a friend in the Maine State Police, a trooper named Ferris, who arrived that afternoon in plain clothes. He listened to the voicemail from Wayne. He read the lab report. He looked at the photograph from New Hampshire, and his jaw tightened. “Mrs. Shaw,” he said, “we have been looking at Brandon Pell for eleven months. We believe he and a partner have done this to at least five elderly people in New England. We never had a witness who survived. You are the first.” He leaned forward. “Would you be willing to help us finish it?”
On Saturday morning at ten, Brandon Pell and my son pulled up in front of the white farmhouse on Ohio Street. I was in my chair by the window, in my blue cardigan, with a pen in my hand and the reverse mortgage papers on a tray. Wayne carried in a bag of groceries. He kissed me on the forehead. It was the hardest moment of my life. He smelled of cologne and fear. I said, “Wayne, I have thought about it, and you are right. Let me sign.” His face flooded with relief, and a terrible shame came over it, which he could not hide.
The troopers were in the pantry, in the cellar, and in a van on the road. Brandon Pell took out a pen and a notary stamp. And then, from the front hall, a third man stepped into the kitchen, a tall gray haired figure in a navy blazer with a wide smile, who had come in through the door that Wayne had left open. He said, “Good morning, Norma. It has been a long time.” It was Harold Voss. He had come to supervise. He had never trusted his partners to do it right.
I looked at him for a long moment, and then I said, in a strong clear voice, “Hello, Harold.” And the troopers came out of the pantry. Brandon Pell reached for a pocket, and Trooper Ferris had him on the floor in a second. Harold Voss did not move. He simply stood in my kitchen with his hands raised and his wide smile fading, and he said, to nobody in particular, “Well. That is what comes of a sentimental visit.” They put him in handcuffs at the same table where George and I had eaten supper for fifty five years.
Wayne sank into a chair. He did not run. He put his head in his hands and said, in a voice like a child, “Mom, I did not know about the pills. I swear on Dad. Brandon said it was a sedative to keep you calm. He said it was safe. I thought I was only signing papers.” I looked at my son, and I believed him, and I did not. I said, “Wayne, you knew they were not my pills. You knew the minute they tasted of soap. And you put them in the box anyway.” He nodded, and sobbed.
The case against Harold Voss and Brandon Pell took a year. Voss was convicted of attempted murder, fraud, and the unlawful practice of medicine, and given thirty years. Pell received twenty five. Wayne pleaded guilty to conspiracy and elder abuse and received three years, with the judge noting his cooperation. I attended every hearing. I sat in the front row in my blue cardigan, with my cane across my knees, and I looked at my son each time, and each time he lowered his eyes. On the last day he mouthed two words at me across the courtroom. Forgive me.
He is home now, living in the little apartment above the garage, with a job at the hardware store and a counselor in Bangor. He comes to supper on Sundays. I have taught him to sort my pills again, but this time I stand beside him with Emily, and the two of us watch his hands. He does it carefully, with great reverence, one pill into each little box, Monday through Sunday. When he finishes, I take his rough hand in mine and I say, “George built this house, Wayne, so nobody could take the roof from me. You are the one he built it for.”
