Chapter 3: What the Documents Said
The name she said was Marcus.
Dean didn't look at me.
He looked at the table, at a fixed point in the wood grain, as though the name had landed somewhere inside him and he was trying to keep it from spreading.
"Who is Marcus?" I asked.
Priscilla's hands came off the table.
She folded them in her lap.
"Nobody," she said.
"It doesn't matter."
"His name is on my bank statements," I said.
"That makes him somebody."
Dean finally looked at her.
"Priscilla."
She pressed her lips together.
"Tell her," Dean said.
His voice was quiet in a way that was worse than shouting.
"He's a contractor," she said.
"I hired him for a project."
"What project?" I asked.
She looked at the window.
The Christmas lights outside were still blinking.
Red, white, red, white.
"The house," she said finally.
"Our house.
I was having work done."
"On your house," I said.
"Paid from my account."
She didn't answer.
Dean stood up and walked to the counter.
His back was to both of us.
His shoulders rose once and fell.
The bank documents arrived by email forty minutes later.
I read them at the kitchen table while Priscilla sat across from me and said nothing.
Dean stood at the counter and said nothing.
The only sound was the wind outside and the soft tap of my finger scrolling.
The charges went back fourteen months.
Not the handful I had suspected.
Not the grocery runs and the birthday cakes.
Fourteen months of transactions, some small enough to disappear inside a regular statement, some large enough that I should have caught them immediately.
A charge for four hundred and twelve dollars to a company called Linden Home Services.
Six hundred to something listed only as MR Contracting.
Twelve hundred to an account I could find no name for at all.
"Four hundred and twelve dollars," I said aloud.
"October fourteenth."
Priscilla said nothing.
"What was done to your house in October?"
"The kitchen backsplash," she said softly.
"And the six hundred in November?"
She hesitated.
"The bathroom tile."
I set the phone face-up on the table between us so she could see the screen.
She didn't look at it.
"Priscilla," I said.
"I am sixty-eight years old.
I raised Dean by myself after his father left.
I worked thirty-one years as a bookkeeper.
Do you know what a bookkeeper does?"
She said nothing.
"They notice numbers," I said.
"They notice when numbers don't belong.
I noticed these months ago.
I just couldn't bring myself to believe that someone in my family was the reason."
Dean turned around.
His eyes were red at the edges.
"How much total?" he asked.
"The bank's preliminary figure is fourteen thousand, three hundred dollars," I said.
"They believe there may be additional transactions still being reviewed."
The number sat in the room.
Priscilla's chin dropped toward her chest.
"I was going to tell you," she said.
"I was going to pay it back before you ever knew."
"You had fourteen months," I said.
She didn't answer that.
Dean walked to the table and pulled out the chair beside me, not beside his wife.
He sat down.
"Is there anything else?" he asked Priscilla.
Not me.
Her.
As if he already suspected the answer.
She kept her eyes on the table.
"Priscilla." His voice dropped to almost nothing.
"Is there anything else on that account?"
Her phone lit up on the table between her hands.
She didn't touch it.
But I saw the name on the screen before it went dark again.
Marcus.
Dean saw it too.
May you like
His jaw tightened.
He looked at me once, then back at her, and the question he didn't ask yet was already filling the room like smoke.
