Chapter 25: The Ledger

Every face on the second floor turned to the folding chair.

Opaline stood up.

She smoothed her gray skirt with both gloved hands, the way she smoothed a tablecloth before guests.

"I witnessed a loan," she said. "Inside my own family. My daughter-in-law signed it at my son's kitchen table, and I watched her do it."

"Which day?" I asked.

She turned her pale eyes on me.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The day you watched me sign. Which day was it?"

"I hardly remember. It was five years ago."

"It was the Thursday after my father's funeral," I said. "I didn't get out of bed that whole week. Ask anybody who brought a casserole."

The dentist's wife, near the back, nodded slowly.

Opaline's mouth opened. Nothing came out of it.

The detective pushed off the stairwell wall and came down the hall.

She pulled on a pair of blue gloves before she touched anything.

"Ms. Rhoads, may I?"

Shayla held out the form.

The detective slid it into an envelope and wrote on the flap while everybody watched.

Then she looked at me over the box.

"Five years," she said quietly. "And he kept it in a box with tape on it."

"He couldn't burn it," I said. "It had her name on it too."

The detective glanced at the folding chair and didn't answer.

She reached for the green ledger.

Shayla put her hand flat on it first.

"Wait," she said. "I said I'd tell them what I did."

She turned around to face the three investors in good overcoats.

"Your names are in this book," she said. "Next to every one of them is a transfer I signed."

She opened the ledger and held it up.

Each page was a column of names and numbers in his slanted capitals.

The tallest investor stepped forward and read his own name off the second page.

Then the amount next to it.

"That was our escrow," he said. "He told us it was sitting in escrow."

"I knew something was wrong by August," Shayla said. "I kept signing because he said he'd marry me."

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