The Policy Locked In His Desk

The phone call in the morning

The next morning Eli told me a man had called the house phone while I was in the shower.

“He said he was Mr. Hollis,” Eli said around a mouthful of toast. “He asked was Mommy home. I said you were washing your hair. He said okay and hung up.”

My hand went cold around the coffee cup.

Dean Hollis. The same man who had passed down the order to keep me and my son standing outside in the heat. Calling my house, at seven in the morning, to find out whether I was home.

I dropped Eli at his grandmother’s, which I would come to regret, and I drove back to our house, and I went into the little room off the kitchen that Wade called his office, where he kept the rolltop desk that had come down from his side of the family.

I did not tear it apart. I was careful.

The bottom right drawer stuck the way it always stuck. Behind a stack of old seed catalogs and scale reports and the warranty for a combine we no longer owned, my fingers found a plain manila envelope, unmarked, the flap tucked and not sealed.

Inside was a life insurance policy.

I read the top line twice before it went in.

Insured: Wade A. Renner.

Owner: Wade A. Renner.

Beneficiary: Renee L. Dunlap.

Relationship to insured: Friend.

Face amount: two hundred fifty thousand dollars.

I sat down in his chair. I remember the chair squeaking.

He had a wife. He had a son who wore his dinosaur shirt to bed. And the name on the line where his family was supposed to go, the line that says who catches you when you fall, was hers.

Proof has a feeling to it when a marriage dies. It is not loud. It is cheap paper going soft between two fingers that will not stop shaking.

I took a picture of every page. Then I squared the corners, tucked the flap exactly the way it had been, and put the envelope back behind the combine warranty, and I slid the drawer shut until it stuck.

I wanted him to keep thinking I could not see him.

The numbers that did not add up

By noon my sister Carol had driven in from Cedar Point with a folder of her own.

Carol taught herself the Renner books the way some women teach themselves crossword puzzles, out of pure stubbornness, sitting at Gary’s kitchen table with a legal pad. She had pulled three years of Dunlap Hauling invoices against three years of scale tickets.

She laid them side by side on my kitchen table and put her reading glasses on and pointed with a pencil.

“Look here,” she said. “Dunlap bills the elevator for forty-one loads out of the north bins in October. But the scale only weighed thirty-two trucks going out that whole month. Where’d the other nine loads come from, Diane? They’re paying her for grain that never crossed the scale.”

She flipped a page.

“And these. Fuel surcharges. She’s charging a surcharge on hauls to Cedar Point that are shorter than the hauls she doesn’t charge one on. It’s not a mistake. A mistake goes both ways. This only ever goes one way, and it always goes toward her.”

I stared at the little columns of numbers, at the neat rows of a fraud somebody thought no one would ever read.

“Who signs off on paying Dunlap?” I asked.

Carol looked at me over the top of her glasses.

“Renee does,” she said. “She keeps the books. She writes the checks. And Wade signs whatever she puts in front of him.”