Chương 5
Daniel stepped closer.
“I know how it sounds.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Mom—”
“You keep saying that.”
“What?”
“Mom. Like it’s an explanation.”
Daniel’s face tightened.
“I was trying to keep everything from falling apart.”
“You were trying to keep yourself from seeing that it already had.”
He looked down.
Eleanor regretted the sentence almost immediately because it sounded too finished, too neat.
Life was not neat.
So she added, “And you used me to do it.”
Daniel nodded.
“Yes.”
The admission left nowhere for her anger to go.
She leaned against the doorframe.
“Did Vanessa forge my name?”
“I don’t know.”
Eleanor’s hand tightened around the cracker until it broke.
“You forged the transfer.”
“Yes.”
“Did you forge anything else?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
She watched him.
Then she thought of how many times he had said everything was fine.
“I don’t believe you.”
Daniel looked as though she had struck him.
That reaction made Eleanor angrier.
He was allowed to be hurt by distrust after creating it.
People were unfair even in guilt.
“I brought something.”
He removed a small flash drive from his pocket.
Eleanor stared at it.
“What is that?”
“Copies of the company books. Emails. Loan documents. Whatever I could download before Vanessa locked me out.”
“Locked you out of your own company?”
“She changed the accounting password this morning.”
Eleanor almost asked whether spouses were allowed to do that.
Then she decided she did not care.
“Give it to Ruth.”
“I want you to see it.”
“I don’t understand company books.”
“You’ll understand some of it.”
He crouched and placed the flash drive on the front step.
“I’m staying at the Lakeside Inn.”
Eleanor knew the place. George had once described it as a hotel where even the ice machine looked divorced.
“Why are you telling me?”
“In case you need me.”
She stared through the glass.
“I needed you yesterday.”
Daniel stood very still.
Then he nodded.
“I know.”
He walked away.
Eleanor waited until his car disappeared before opening the door.
She picked up the flash drive with a paper towel.
That made her feel foolish, but Ruth had spent half the morning telling her not to casually handle possible evidence.
She put it into a sandwich bag.
Then she called Ruth.
“You’re becoming teachable,” Ruth said when Eleanor described the bag.
“Don’t get excited.”
The accounting records answered some questions and created worse ones.
Over the following week, Ruth brought in a forensic accountant she had worked with before. Eleanor disliked the phrase forensic accountant. It made her imagine someone performing an autopsy on a calculator.
The accountant’s name was Priya Shah.
She was forty-something, direct, patient, and completely unimpressed by Daniel’s bookkeeping.
“This is not accounting,” Priya said after reviewing the first batch of files. “This is anxiety with columns.”
Eleanor liked her immediately.
They sat at the same coffee table where Vanessa had placed the forged transfer.
The bat was gone.
The legal papers were gone.
The suitcases were gone.
Eleanor had moved the family photograph back to the center.
Priya turned her laptop so Eleanor could see.
Several transfers had moved from Eleanor’s checking account into Daniel’s company over eleven months.
Some were relatively small.
Four hundred.
Eight hundred.
Twelve hundred.
Others were larger.
Eleanor recognized none of them.
“But Daniel had access,” she said.
“Yes.”
“So he did these?”
“Maybe.”
“That isn’t useful.”
“It’s accurate.”
Priya showed her login records.
Some transfers had been initiated through Daniel’s credentials.
Others came through linked payment authorizations Eleanor had never seen.
A credit card had also been opened using Eleanor’s information.
Ruth asked, “Can you tell who did that?”
“Not from this.”
Eleanor looked at the balances.
She felt less shocked than she expected.
Numbers were easier than faces.
Numbers did not ask to be forgiven.
“How much?”
Priya hesitated.
“All together?”
“Yes.”
“Including the senior-community deposit and the credit balances, approximately forty-six thousand dollars of activity appears questionable.”
Eleanor stared at the screen.
Ruth touched her arm.
Eleanor moved away.
“I’m not going to faint.”
“I know.”
“Then stop looking at me like I might.”
Ruth sat back.
Priya closed one spreadsheet and opened another.
“There’s something else.”
Of course there was.
Eleanor almost laughed.
Priya pointed to payments from Daniel’s company to a business Eleanor did not recognize.
VHS Consulting LLC.
The initials caught her attention.
“Vanessa Hayes?”
“Possibly,” Priya said. “We’re verifying.”
The payments totaled nearly eighty thousand dollars over two years.
Daniel had not mentioned them.
Eleanor called him from Ruth’s office that afternoon.
He answered on the first ring.
“Mom?”
“What is VHS Consulting?”
Silence.
She closed her eyes.
Daniel said, “Where did you see that?”
“Wrong answer.”
“Mom, listen.”
“Daniel.”
He exhaled.
“It’s Vanessa’s company.”
“What does it do?”
“Administrative work.”
“For your business?”
“Yes.”
“Eighty thousand dollars of administrative work?”
Another silence.
Ruth sat across from Eleanor, taking notes.
Daniel said, “I didn’t know it was that much.”
“How could you not know?”
“She handled payroll and vendors.”
“It’s your company.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
He became defensive.
That almost relieved Eleanor. Shame had made him unfamiliar. Defensiveness made him sound like her son.
“I was on job sites twelve hours a day,” he said. “I was trying to keep people employed. I was dealing with clients who didn’t pay on time. I wasn’t sitting around counting what Vanessa invoiced.”
“You should have been.”
“I know that now.”
“When did you stop knowing it?”
He said nothing.
Eleanor softened despite herself.
That angered her too.
“Did she steal from you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you steal from me?”
“Yes.”
The directness shocked her.
She looked at Ruth.
Daniel continued.
“The twenty-eight thousand. I knew about it. Not every transfer, but enough. I told myself I was borrowing it.”
“Without asking.”
“Yes.”
“That’s stealing.”
“Yes.”
Eleanor gripped the phone.
“What about the credit card?”
“I didn’t know.”
“The property transfer?”
“I signed your name.”
“Why?”
May you like
His breathing changed.
“Because the bank wouldn’t use the house as collateral without ownership or your participation. Vanessa said if we transferred it temporarily, we could refinance everything and transfer it back.”
