The Saturday Thirty Men Brought Ladders

Sondra Pike, who has worked the teller window at the Lindell State Bank for nineteen years, came by on her lunch hour. She had pulled the paperwork from the day my check was cashed. He had asked for the whole thing in cash, thirteen thousand five hundred dollars in hundreds and fifties.

“I had to ask the manager to open the vault,” she said. “And he stood at my window and told me how he felt for you, Maureen. I thought he was the nicest man.” She had made a copy of his driver’s license. She gave it to the sergeant that afternoon.

Sergeant Alan Roper of the Moniteau County Sheriff’s Office is a tall, tired man with a mustache like a push broom. He sat at Lowell’s counter with the legal pad and rubbed his face with both hands.

“I can’t be everywhere, folks,” he said. “But I have his picture now, which is more than I had Friday. If he turns up in my county, I’ll put the cuffs on him.”

“He’ll turn up,” said Lowell.

“Why?”

“Because it’s working. A man like that doesn’t quit when it works. He just goes to the next town over, where nobody’s heard.”

A week went by. Then, on the Tuesday ten days after the roof, at two in the afternoon, the phone at the store rang. He picked it up, listened, and wrote something down.

Then he called me.

“Maureen,” he said. “It’s Fern Albright, in Barlow. She’s eighty-one. She’s got a gray truck with Texas plates in her driveway, right now, and a fellow with a tablet. He says he’ll be back at four for her deposit.”

Fern’s Porch

I will tell you what Sergeant Roper said, because it matters.

“I can’t ask you to do this,” he said. “I can’t set a trap. That’s not how it works, and a judge would throw it out.” He looked at the floor. “But I can’t stop a woman from visiting her friend on a Tuesday afternoon. And I can’t stop her friend’s neighbors from stopping by.”

I drove to Barlow in my old Buick with Dwight in the passenger seat, because Dwight did not trust my knees. Lowell followed in the flatbed with the pastor and Wendell Brauer, and four of the men from Saturday came in two trucks.

Kenny Marsh from Midland was waiting at the Casey’s on the highway, a short, round man in a good tie who had driven over from Sedalia as soon as Lowell called. “I’ve sold lumber for thirty years,” he said. “Nobody has ever used my name before.”

Sergeant Roper parked an unmarked car across the street at ten till four and kept his window down. He did not get out. He sat with his hands on the wheel like a man waiting for a funeral to let out.

Fern Albright lives in a yellow bungalow at the end of Poplar Street with a covered porch and a swing. Her roof had been open since the same storm. A blue tarp snapped over her kitchen, held down by cinder blocks.

She met me at the door, a small woman with white hair in a braid and eyes the color of weak tea. She took one look at me and burst into tears.

“I wrote the check already, Maureen. It’s on my kitchen table. I wanted to believe him so bad.”

“I know you did.”

I sat on her porch swing. She sat beside me and held my hand in both of hers, hard, like a child holding a railing.