…the chief of police. Who is now the mayor of this town.”
The retired detective, Walter Briggs, had spent thirty years believing my husband was dead.
In 1996, my husband, then a young bank security guard named Tom Keller, had seen the police chief, Ray Doyle, let the robbers into the bank through a side door. Tom told one detective: Walter. A week before the trial, Tom received a photograph of his own front door with a bullet hole in it. He disappeared that night.
He changed his name to Tom Hayes. He married me two years later. He never told me.
The cash under the floor wasn’t stolen. It was his savings. For thirty years, he’d been too afraid to use banks under a false identity. He’d been counting it because he was planning to leave, he told me later, before anyone recognized him. Ray Doyle had recently been elected mayor. His face was on billboards all over town.
When Tom came home from work that evening, I was sitting at the kitchen table with Walter.
He went pale. Then he sat down and told me everything. He said he’d lied to me for twenty-eight years because he was trying to keep me safe.
Walter took the case to the state attorney general. Tom finally testified, thirty years late. Two of the original robbers, now old men, confirmed his story in exchange for reduced sentences. Mayor Ray Doyle was arrested in his office.
My husband uses his real name now. He opened a bank account for the first time in thirty years. He was so nervous at the teller’s window that I had to hold his hand.
