Chapter 20: The Fund

The screen above the stage had been showing a slow slideshow of me as a child.

It cut to a spreadsheet.

Heidi had made the font large enough to read from the back of the room.

The first column said CLINIC FUND TRANSFERS.

The last column said WINGATE HOLDINGS.

Under it, the bottom line in bold: $412,600.

I let them read it.

I could hear two hundred people breathing.

"That's the money you gave," I said into the microphone. "Every dollar goes to a company with one name on the paperwork. Chad's."

"That's a forgery," Chad said.

He had risen from his knee, and he was smiling at the room with the ring box still in his hand.

"Friends, this is a grotesque stunt. This woman is a cleaner from the hospital with a pending theft charge, and she's been harassing the family."

"I made that file," I said. "On my laptop, at our kitchen table, the week before I died. It's dated. I told one person about it."

I turned my head.

"I told Blythe."

Blythe said nothing.

At table five a man in a gray suit stood up.

I knew him: the Fund's treasurer, a retired banker whose bulldog I had checked in at the clinic for six years.

"Chad," he said, in the voice of a man reading his own bank statement. "Those figures match the quarter I flagged in August."

"It's a lie, she..."

"Play the other thing," I said.

Heidi pressed a key.

The ballroom speakers crackled, and the mortuary man's voice came out over the lilies and the linen.

The sister had to stay gone, it said.

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