He Called Her Sweetheart Fourteen Times. She Called the Bank Instead

By October I had learned to be quiet on purpose. I played the trusting widow for Gavin, nodding and smiling and offering him pie. Inside, I was counting.

I drove to the Peoples National Bank branch in Coshocton on Thursday, October 15, with copies of the deposit slips and a page from my notebook folded in my purse. The young woman at the desk took me back to see Mr. Ellis Brandt, who handles fraud and compliance. He was a careful man of about fifty-five with reading glasses pushed up on his head.

He read every page without saying a word. Then he looked up and said, “Mrs. Holt, you have done more work on this than most of my staff would. I am going to flag this account today.”

Janine came over that evening with a cup of cocoa and her reading glasses. We sat at the oilcloth and went down the notebook line by line. She ran her finger down the column of times and dates.

“Bernice,” she said, “look at the numbers. Every one of these calls came from the same phone.”

I had not noticed. I had been so busy writing down what he said that I had not looked at where he said it from. I called the phone company the next morning. A girl there told me the number belonged to a rented mailbox service in a strip mall on Route 36 in Newark. The office Gavin called home was a box with a lock.

Janine did not say I told you so. She just squeezed my hand and said, “Now you have it.”

That Sunday Tom came to dinner, and I waited until the dishes were done. I put the custodial transfer form on the table in front of him, with his name on it.

Tom turned red and then pale. “Bernice, he told me it was a managed portfolio. He said the money would grow. He said Dale would have wanted it put to work.”

“Did he tell you that you would be signing as a witness to my money going out the door?” I asked him.

Tom put his face in his big hands. He said he was sorry, that he had been flattered by a man in good shoes who knew the right words. He said he had gone along because he wanted to be the one who helped Owen.

Carol came into the kitchen then, drawn by the voices. When she understood what she was hearing, she sat down hard and cried into a dish towel. “Mama,” she said, “how could you have kept this quiet so long?”

“Because I was waiting until I could prove it,” I told her. “Some things you have to let a man think he has gotten away with before you can catch him.”

On Thursday, October 22, the phone rang while I was rinsing the coffee pot. It was Gavin, the fourteenth time he had called since August. He was cheerful as ever.

“Sweetheart, I’m bringing a notary out Saturday morning,” he said. “We’ll get everything finished up so you can rest easy.”

I hung up the phone slowly and dried my hands on my apron. I knew then he meant to close the account that day, and I knew I had two days to be ready.