The Account in Her Name
Chapter 10 - The Account in Her Name
Brittany came to Miriam's office wearing the same white cardigan she'd worn to our first meeting. She brought an accountant, a woman named Denise who looked as if she'd rather be examining a flooded basement. Neither tried to explain away the company registration. Brittany sat down and said, “I signed it. I didn't understand everything I was signing, but I knew I was letting my father use my name.”
She had been twenty-five, recently home from a job in Atlanta, when Caleb arranged for her to own a small holding company. He called it a tax-planning measure. He said family money should stay in the family. Brittany received quarterly distributions, which she used for clothes, travel, and the down payment on a condominium. She had signed bank forms without asking where the funds originated.
“Did Jake know?” Miriam asked.
“Before we got engaged. He helped Dad find some of the property deals. I thought they trusted him because he was good at it.”
“And when money from the Marigold entered the company?”
Brittany looked at Denise. “I was told they were consulting fees. I saw the deposits. I should have asked what work had been done.”
The room was silent. I had begun to like Brittany, or at least to believe she could be more than the woman at the wedding. Now I was forced to consider that she had profited from the same arrangements that left my son and me struggling to pay rent. The truth wasn't kind enough to give everyone a clean division between villain and victim.
“I spent some of it,” she said to me. “On the wedding. Not directly, perhaps, but it was part of what let me live the way I did. I can't ask you to overlook that.”
“No,” I said. “You can't.”
She nodded. “Then I won't.”
Denise produced the company's transaction history and the emails authorizing payments. They showed that Caleb's staff had repeatedly asked Jake for invoices and received vague descriptions of advisory services. Paul Rourke had approved several payments despite missing supporting documents. This did not prove Caleb knew the deeds were forged. It proved the warning signs had been available to anyone willing to see them.
Brittany agreed to cooperate with the investigation and to place the disputed distributions she still controlled into an escrow account pending their proper disposition. She also gave Miriam the name of a former bookkeeper who had resigned from her father's company after complaining about the Marigold transaction. It was a useful act. It was not redemption completed in an afternoon.
When Brittany left, I followed her into the hallway.
“At the wedding,” I said, “were you laughing because you thought I was ridiculous, or because everyone else was laughing?”
She took a moment before answering. “Both. I wanted to belong at the head table. I knew being kind to you would make things awkward with Jake and Linda. So I chose the easy thing.”
I appreciated the answer more than another apology. “My son saw it.”
“I know.”
“That part will take longer.”
She looked down. “I understand.”
The investigation moved faster once the bank and accounting records were available, but there was nothing swift about living through it. I still cleaned the dental office before dawn. I still signed Mason's homework sheet and bought milk and tried to convince him that dinner did not have to come from a box every night. Each ordinary thing felt like a form of resistance.
Caleb's lawyers suspended the sale agreement. They proposed another buyer might purchase the building once the title was cleared, and offered to pay some of my legal fees if I'd consider a settlement. Miriam told them to put the offer in writing. I wasn't yet ready to decide what I wanted, only what I refused to lose.
That weekend Evelyn brought over an old photograph album. She said it had belonged to her sister and she had found it while looking for a receipt. One photograph showed Jake at sixteen, standing beside Daniel on the Marigold steps, both boys holding paint rollers. Daniel's face was streaked with white. Jake was immaculate, smiling like a boy who'd managed to avoid the work and still appear in the picture.
“Was he always like this?” I asked.
“No,” Evelyn said. “He was funny. Charming. He could make your husband laugh when nobody else could. That was the worst of it. Good qualities don't vanish when someone does bad things. They become the excuse people use to let him keep doing them.”
I put the photograph away before Mason came into the room. He already had enough to untangle about his uncle. I didn't want to make the job easier for him by pretending Jake had never been lovable.
Then Linda asked to see me. She didn't invite me to her house. She met me at a diner across from a tire shop, a place where the coffee was strong and no one paid attention to other people's faces. She had grown thin since the wedding. I noticed a patch of gray at the roots of her carefully colored hair.
“I didn't take a million dollars,” she said as soon as we sat down.
“I know the sale didn't close.”
“It was supposed to be my share. Caleb said Jake needed the rest to settle his debts. I was going to let them do it.”
“Even though I owned half?”
“I told myself the deed was legal. I knew it wasn't. I told myself you were young and would find your way.”
I put down my coffee. “I was young when Daniel died. That wasn't permission to steal from me.”
“No.”
She stared out at a pickup pulling into the tire shop. “After my husband died, I was afraid of losing anything else. Jake needed money. Daniel was angry with him. I kept imagining that if I just held the family together for one more week, someone would sort it out.”
“Daniel tried.”
Her eyes filled. “Yes.”
“You could have called the ambulance when he told you his chest hurt.”
“I know.”
“You could have told me the truth at the funeral.”
“I know.”
“You could have given me his will.”
By then she was crying. I let her. There was no reason to hurry her through what I had carried for four years.
At last she removed a thin folder from her purse. Inside were copies of the forged deed, the false letter, and a note Jake had left for her with instructions on what to say if I ever asked about the Marigold. She had kept the documents because she suspected he'd blame her if things unraveled. It was an ugly reason to preserve evidence, but it was evidence all the same.
“Will you testify?” I asked.
She looked frightened. “Against my own son?”
“Against what he did. There's a difference.”
She looked down at the folder. “I'll tell the truth.”
May you like
Outside, my phone rang. It was the school. Mason had been called to the principal's office after a man claiming to be a family friend tried to collect him early. The man had left before staff could verify his identity.
The office had recorded the name he gave them: Paul Rourke.
