“What were you doing at this mailbox?”
The young man, his voice shaky, mumbled something I couldn’t make out. But whatever he said seemed to confirm the officers’ suspicions. They placed him in the back of the squad car and drove off, leaving the neighborhood in an eerie silence.
The next morning, the police came back to update me and Ruth separately on what had happened. The young man they had arrested was a distant relative of Ruth’s, someone she hadn’t seen in years. Apparently, my neighbor’s son had died in a car accident many years ago.
His car had gone off a bridge into a river, and his body was never recovered. Ruth had never fully come to terms with his death, clinging to the hope that he might still be alive.
Steve, the young man, knew this and had been sending her letters pretending to be her son. His goal was to drive Ruth to the brink of insanity so he could eventually become her legal guardian and take control of her house.
It was a cruel, twisted plan, and the thought of it made me sick to my stomach! After the police left, I sat down, trying to process everything that had happened. I couldn’t shake the image of Ruth sitting alone in her house, waiting for a son who would never come home.
I knew I couldn’t just leave her to deal with this alone. That afternoon, I decided to visit her. I knocked on her door, feeling a mix of nerves and determination. After a moment, she opened it, her eyes red from crying.
