The dock master pulled the card from the marina file and read the emergency contact aloud. It was a Texas number belonging to my husband’s older brother, the man everyone in the family had told me died in 1996. I asked whether the number had been updated recently. He said no, the card had been on file since the slip was first rented in 2014. Then he showed me the registration history. My husband’s name had been added as lien holder in 2014, and the same person had renewed it every three years. I asked who had been paying the registration fees. He pulled up the account and said the payments came from a checking account in my husband’s name.
I called our bank from the parking lot. They told me there was an account I’d never seen, opened in 2013, with my husband’s Social Security number attached to it. I asked who had access. They said there were two authorized signatures. One was my husband’s. The other belonged to a woman. I gave them the name, and the banker went quiet. It was the same woman whose name appeared on the marina’s original emergency-contact card. I asked whether she’d ever made a withdrawal. The banker said there had been regular transfers every month for twelve years, usually the same amount, and the last one had gone through three weeks before my husband died.
I drove home and went through the box where I’d kept his old tax papers. At the bottom was a receipt from 2014 for a cashier’s check made payable to a marina in Toledo Bend, and beside it my husband’s handwriting said, “Keep this separate until she comes back.” I had no idea who “she” was. Then I noticed the receipt was folded around an old photograph. It showed my husband standing beside the woman from the bank, with the same pontoon behind them. On the back was a date from 1996 and a sentence that made everything worse: “She thinks I’m dead too.” The next morning I called the Texas number from the marina card. A woman answered. I said my husband’s name. She started crying and said, “I knew you would eventually find the boat. But if you’re his wife, then he lied to both of us about who was supposed to inherit it.”
