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.”
