The Tutor and the Senator's Widow novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: Marion

Marion Ellsworth lived in a narrow brick row house on Church Hill with a cat and a kitchen full of calculators.

My advisor had called her at six that morning, and she had said, "Bring them Friday at noon, and bring a pie."

Eleanor brought the pie.

It was a lemon one from the bakery on the corner, and Marion looked at it, and at her, and at me, and said, "You're the widow."

"I'm Eleanor."

"I knew your husband. He gave a speech at my retirement party about how much he loved public servants." She took the pie. "He voted to cut our pensions that same spring."

"I'm sorry."

"I'm not asking you to be sorry. I'm asking you to sit down."

We sat at a round table with a plastic cloth.

Marion was sixty-eight, short, silver-haired, in a denim shirt with coffee on one cuff.

She put on half-moon glasses and took the blue report out of Eleanor's tote.

Nobody spoke for twenty-five minutes.

I watched her turn pages, and I watched Eleanor watching her, and under the table Eleanor's foot found mine and stayed there.

"All right," Marion said at last. "Which one of you found the six million?"

"I did," I said.

"Good. It's there." She tapped the page. "And whoever typed the cover number knew it. A typo doesn't come out six million high in the one place the bank looks."

"Is that illegal?" Eleanor asked.

"It's lying in a document the state relies on. I'd call that illegal." She flipped back. "But it's not the biggest thing. Let me show you."

She took a yellow pad and wrote down the three things from page four that a bank would call real.

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