The Woman at the Bank
Chapter 04 - The Woman at the Bank
Adeline had not spoken to her aunt in eight months. Their last conversation had ended over a borrowed hundred dollars and an accusation neither woman had quite meant. Evelyn had said Adeline was too proud to accept help. Adeline had said that people who offered help always seemed to keep accounts.
At sixty-two, Evelyn Vance was a small, tidy woman who worked part-time at a dry cleaner's in Cranston. She had raised Adeline in a two-bedroom house where everything had a designated shelf. Even grief had been given its place: a shoebox in the linen closet, sealed with tape.
Miriam obtained records showing that the account in Grace's name had been opened five years after Grace's death. The signature card bore Grace's date of birth but gave Evelyn's house as the mailing address. Most of the withdrawals had been made in cash, at a branch near the dry cleaner's.
Miriam did not pretend these facts proved who had taken the money. She only told Adeline they had enough to ask difficult questions.
“I want to go myself,” Adeline said.
Enzo offered a car. She chose the bus.
Evelyn opened the door still wearing her work apron. She took one look at Adeline and said, “You look thin.”
“I've had a difficult few months.”
“You could have called.”
“I did. Twice.”
Evelyn looked at the floor. Behind her, the old house smelled of starch and lemon soap. Nothing had changed except the wallpaper in the hall, which had begun to peel away above the radiator.
Adeline placed a copy of the bank signature card on the kitchen table. “Did you open this?”
Evelyn stared at it for a long time. Then she sat down without taking off her apron.
“Yes.”
The answer was so plain it left Adeline nowhere to put her anger.
“You used my mother's name.”
“Someone told me it was the only way to collect what she'd been owed.”
“Who?”
“Harold Cain. Preston's father. He said there were outstanding distributions, but the trust had been dissolved and we couldn't trouble the court.”
“Did you believe him?”
“I believed some of it. I needed to. Your school fees, the roof, your asthma when you were little. The doctor said that inhaler would last a month and it hardly lasted two weeks.”
Adeline remembered the nights Evelyn sat at the kitchen table with an adding machine, looking older every time a bill arrived. She remembered, too, the months during which Evelyn refused to tell her why they never visited her mother's old friends.
“How much?”
Evelyn said the sum. It was enough to keep a modest household alive for several years, nowhere near enough to account for the property itself.
“And the rest?”
“I never saw it.”
Evelyn pulled a ledger from the kitchen drawer. It had columns for groceries, heating oil, and Adeline’s school supplies, every amount recorded in pencil. At the end of each year she had written a single word beside the total: Enough. Adeline had once seen those pages and assumed her aunt was calculating how much it cost to raise her. Now she wondered whether Evelyn had been trying to convince herself she had made a reasonable bargain.
“I put some of the money aside,” Evelyn said. “Not much. There’s an account with your name on it, opened properly this time. You can have the statements.”
“I don’t want to talk about money yet.”
“Then we won’t.”
She had been given cash in envelopes twice a year, Evelyn explained. In exchange, she had agreed not to challenge anything connected with Saint Agnes. She had also signed a statement saying Grace's belongings had been destroyed in the fire.
“But they weren't,” Adeline said.
Evelyn opened the linen closet. On the top shelf was the taped shoebox.
“I couldn't make myself throw it away.”
Inside lay a blue hair ribbon, two birthday cards, a yellowed recipe for apple cake, and a little brass key with the number 214 scratched on a tag. The key was wrapped in paper bearing the same address written on the slip from Samuel's wallet: 48 Ash Street.
“Why did you keep the key?” Adeline asked.
“Grace gave it to me the day before the fire. She said if anything happened, Samuel would know what it opened. Then I got scared. I told myself it was only a storage locker.”
Adeline closed her fist around the brass.
“People always say they got scared,” she said. “As if fear takes the pen in your hand.”
Evelyn flinched. Adeline wished she could take the sentence back, but she had said it for the girl who waited all those years for her mother to come home.
“I loved you,” Evelyn said. “I still do. I know that's not an answer.”
“It's not.”
For one instant Adeline saw her aunt at the end of a school concert, holding a paper flower and wearing the good winter coat she saved for church. Evelyn had come to every concert and every appointment, even the ones that began before her shift ended. Love had been present. So had the lie. The two facts stood beside each other, unwilling to cancel one another out.
“Did you ever mean to tell me?” Adeline asked.
“Every time I thought I could bear it, I told myself I’d already waited too long.”
“You were right about that,” Adeline said.
They sat opposite each other in the little kitchen. Outside, a neighbor's leaf blower whined along the sidewalk. Nothing in the room agreed to become dramatic for them. Evelyn folded her work apron into quarters, unfolded it, and smoothed it again.
At last she said, “I was outside the restaurant that night.”
Adeline looked up.
“Grace had called. She wanted me to take you home from Carmen's. Said she needed to meet somebody and might be late.”
“Who?”
“She wouldn't tell me. When I got there, smoke was coming out near the pantry. Men were running around the alley. I heard shouting.”
“Did you see my mother?”
“No.” Evelyn pressed her fingers to her temples. “I saw somebody at the courtyard gate. He had a chain in his hands. He was trying to take it off, or put it on. I never could tell. Then he saw me.”
“Who was it?”
“I was told afterward I must have been mistaken.”
“By whom?”
Evelyn looked toward the window. “By Victor Rinaldi. He came to the house the morning after Grace died. He said grief plays tricks and there were things a sensible woman ought not repeat.”
Adeline had thought she understood the geography of her childhood: her mother gone, her aunt protective, the rest of the world distant and indifferent. Now every road led back to the same building.
“Who did you see at the gate?” she asked again.
Evelyn's face had become gray and small. “Matteo Rinaldi. Enzo's older brother.”
May you like
On the bus back, Adeline held the key in her palm until its teeth made red marks. She did not know what it opened. She only knew someone had spent fourteen years making sure she never thought to ask.
Then Evelyn sent a final message: There is something else. Matteo saw me too. He said he knew exactly where you were sleeping that night.
