Kelsey stared at her. "Grandma. You don't think Grandpa..."
"Your grandpa couldn't forge his own name on a Christmas card," Wanda said. "He'd sign it twice and smear the first one."
She put her reading glasses back on.
"Sit down, honey. Let me show you how a bank worked in 1991."
She drew it on the back of the bank's letter with a pencil.
In 1991, First Prairie had six employees. When a farmer paid off a note, the payment went to the teller, then to the bookkeeper, which was Wanda. She stamped the note PAID across the face in red ink, wrote the date and her initials, and filed it in the paid-notes drawer in the vault. Then the loan officer typed a payoff letter for the president to sign.
"If Dean was in Wichita," Wanda said, "somebody signed for him. That happened. I won't pretend it didn't. Small banks did that when the president was sick. It wasn't right, but it was common. The loan officer would sign his name so the farmer wasn't kept waiting."
"Who was the loan officer?"
"Gary Lindgren," Wanda said. "He retired to Arizona. He's ninety now."
"So the letter's real. It just wasn't signed by the right person."
"The letter's real," Wanda said. "But the letter isn't the proof. The note is."
Kelsey frowned. "What note?"
"The original. With my red PAID stamp on it." Wanda tapped the pencil on the drawing. "A bank keeps the original note until it's paid. Then it either hands it back to the farmer or files it in the vault. First Prairie filed them. Twenty years of paid notes, in steel drawers, in alphabetical order."
"Where are they now?"
Wanda took off her glasses.
"When Heartland bought us in 1998, they didn't want any of the old paper. They hauled the newer files to Omaha and left the rest. The old vault drawers went to the Prairie County Historical Society, because it was the only place that would take them. I know. I packed them myself."
The Prairie County Historical Society was in an old brick schoolhouse in Sumner Creek. It was open Tuesdays and Saturdays, ten to two. On the Tuesday before Christmas, Wanda and Kelsey were waiting on the front steps at a quarter to ten.
The volunteer was a retired mail carrier named Ollie Strand, who had delivered Wanda's mail for thirty years. He took them down to the basement himself.
The steel drawers were there, stacked against the back wall under a tarp. Twelve of them, gray and dented, with the First Prairie name still painted on the front in gold.
"Not a soul has opened these since they came in," Ollie said. "Except the mice."
Wanda pulled the tarp back and found the drawer marked D to F.
She did not need to look long. Her own filing system had not changed. Ekdahl, Melvin and Wanda. Note 4471. A long, stiff sheet of paper, yellowed at the edges, with her husband's signature at the bottom from 1987 in his big careful hand.
And across the face of it, in faded red ink, a stamp.
PAID.
Below the stamp, in blue ballpoint, in a young woman's neat handwriting: 10/4/91. W.E.
Kelsey put her hand over her mouth.
"You stamped your own loan," she said.
"I stamped every loan," Wanda said. "Ours was just one of them."
Ollie Strand made three copies on the society's old copier. Then he signed a letter on the society's letterhead, stating that the original note had been in the society's custody since 1998 and had not been altered, and he had it notarized at the courthouse that afternoon.
Kelsey drove the original note to the Heartland Federal branch in Emporia herself, in a plastic sleeve, and asked for the branch manager.
The branch manager was a woman about Kelsey's mother's age. She looked at the note for a long time. Then she looked at the faded initials under the stamp.
"W.E.," she said. "Is that your grandmother?"
"She was the bookkeeper," Kelsey said. "She stamped it herself. In 1991."
The manager picked up her phone.
The letter from Omaha came on December 30.
It said Heartland Federal had located a data conversion error affecting a small number of First Prairie loans in 1998. Note 4471 had been incorrectly carried as open. The balance was zero. The bank would file the release of mortgage with the county immediately. It apologized for the inconvenience.
There was a second page.
The bank had reviewed the other First Prairie notes carried over in 1998. It had found eleven more loans with the same error, belonging to farm families in Prairie County and the next county over. All of them had been paid decades ago. Several of the borrowers had died. The bank would be contacting their families.
Wanda read the second page twice.
"Eleven," she said.
"Grandma, you found those," Kelsey said. "Not them. You."
"I filed those," Wanda said. "There's a difference."
On New Year's Day, after the cattle were fed, Wanda sat at the kitchen table with Melvin's green ledger for 1991 open in front of her and a cup of coffee going cold.
Kelsey came in and sat down across from her.
"Can I ask you something? Why did Grandpa keep that letter in the Bible?"
Wanda turned the ledger page. October 4. Note paid in full.
"Because he was proud of it," she said. "His daddy lost this quarter to the bank in 1932. Melvin bought it back in 1987. When he paid it off, he wanted it in the same book with the births and the weddings." She smiled a little. "He said it was a family event."
She closed the ledger, got up, and went to the front room.
Then she opened the family Bible to the record page, uncapped her pen, and under the last line in her own handwriting, where she had written Melvin's death in September, she added one more.
January 1. Home quarter paid. Still ours.