He thought he had it all locked down. He thought the papers and the signatures and the legal seals were an armor nothing could punch through.
“I didn’t call a lawyer, Wayne,” I said softly.
He stopped, his fingers curling into the edges of the bank statements until the paper tore. “Then what did you do?”
“I called the probate clerk this morning before you got here,” I lied, and the words came out smoother than I expected. “The investigator is already looking at the date on that power of attorney. He said signature verification on elderly accounts takes about forty-eight hours once the bank flags the duplicate transfers.”
Wayne’s hands flattened out again, but this time his fingers were trembling. The color drained right out of his cheeks, leaving him looking gray and old under the kitchen light. He knew as well as I did what the signature looked like on those withdrawal slips during the last six months, back when Mama couldn’t hold a pen without her hand shaking so bad it looked like a spider crawled across the page.
“You didn’t,” he whispered.
“Box 319 is empty, Wayne,” I said, and I reached out and tapped the corner of the laptop screen with my fingernail. “And the USB drive is already copied and sitting in a safety deposit box at a different bank across the county line where nobody in this town has the keys.”
He stood there for a long time, his chest rising and falling under the dirty denim shirt. He looked like he wanted to reach across the table and shake me until my teeth rattled, the way he used to do when we were kids and I wouldn’t give him back his fishing reel. But the fight had gone out of his shoulders. He could see the end of the road just as clear as I could.
“You’re a cold bitch, Liza,” he muttered, and the words didn’t have any heat left in them. They just sounded tired.
“I learned it from watching you take care of things,” I said.
Wayne turned around without another word, his boots heavy on the floorboards as he walked down the hall. The screen door didn’t bang this time. He let it close slow and quiet behind him, the latch clicking into place like a deadbolt sliding home in the dark.
I sat there at the table for a long time after he left, watching the little blue light on the monitor blink against the dark glass of the window. The house was quiet again, just the hum of the refrigerator and the wind moving through the pines outside. I didn’t feel like I had won anything. My hands still felt cold, and the ninety-three thousand dollars in the canvas bank bag sitting by the sink didn’t look like money anymore. It just looked like seven years of Mama sitting in that dark kitchen by herself, waiting for someone to come home who wasn’t just looking for the key.