Kiara Booker laughed.
She laughed with her whole chest, on a porch, holding a shoebox, with her face wet — and I understood, in that second, exactly what Mr. Booker had meant.
It was Loretta’s laugh.
PART 4
The VA fr*ud investigator was a tired woman named Lorna Pike who had, she said, “seen this exact thing forty times and never once with a tape.”
She listened to Sunday thirty-one in Mr. Abernathy’s office with her hands folded and her face doing nothing, and at the end she said, “Marcus. Who’s Marcus?”
Marcus was Patrice’s boyfriend, a man who “handled her finances,” and who had, it turned out, handled them straight into a joint account with Patrice’s name and Mr. Booker’s power of attorney and forty-one thousand dollars of a blind veteran’s savings over three years.
“He signed for the house,” Lorna Pike said. “She told him it was for the house. He couldn’t read it.”
“He couldn’t read it,” Mr. Abernathy agreed, “which is why he came to me in April and had me pull every document filed under his name in the county, and had me read every one of them to him, out loud, twice.
He knew about the power of attorney before I did.
He asked me not to act on it.”
“Why?”
“He said, ‘Because if I stop it now, Patrice will stop the girl from coming, and I’m not done knowing her yet.'”
I had to leave the room.
The confrontation, when it came, happened at the house.
Patrice had a key.
Patrice had, in fact, been at the house every day since the reading, “sorting things,” which Mr. Abernathy had permitted for one week because the estate hadn’t closed, and which he had allowed to continue for a second week for a reason he didn’t explain to me until later.
He wanted her there when we arrived.
So on a Saturday morning in April, Kiara and I drove to Alder Street together, in her car, with the shoebox on the back seat like a passenger, and Mr. Abernathy behind us in his, and Lorna Pike behind him in a county vehicle, and the whole street — because it is that kind of street — was on its porches by the time we parked.
Mr. Delgado across the way.
The Simmons twins with their coffee.
Miss Ruby from the corner, who had brought Mr. Booker a plate every Wednesday for two years and had, she told me later, “wondered about that daughter since the first week, but it wasn’t my place.”
