Chapter 4: Nine Months of Transfers

The bank opened its Saturday hours at nine, and Maggie and I were at the glass doors at 8:55.

She had put on jeans and a sweatshirt that said Trauma Team, and she was carrying a legal pad.

"Write everything down," she said. "Dates, amounts, names. Never trust a man in a good suit, including the ones at banks."

The branch manager was a tired woman in her fifties with reading glasses pushed up into her hair.

She took us into her glass office and looked at my ID and then at my face.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Stancliffe," she said. "I'm going to pull the full history."

She turned the monitor so I could see.

I had expected one big withdrawal.

It was a column.

Thirty-one transfers over nine months, none of them large, each one made on a weeknight from the banking app.

Twelve hundred dollars. Eighteen hundred. Twenty-one hundred.

They all went to the same account, which belonged to a Dean R. Clanton.

"Nine months," Maggie said, writing. "Brooke was doing the transfers. She could see the balance every time."

"She had full access as a joint holder," the manager said. "Legally, each of you could move the money."

She scrolled down.

"Last night she moved the rest. That brings the total to fifty-two thousand, three hundred."

I looked at the number until it stopped being a number.

It was my down payment on a house I'd never bought.

It was six years of saving at the company, every bonus and every Christmas check.

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