Chapter 21: The Accounting

The accounting reached the court at four minutes to five, on the last afternoon of the seventy-two hours.

Philip's lawyer filed it in a box, thick and heavy, in the hope that nobody would read it.

By seven o'clock the box was open on the long table in Tobias's conference room.

The housekeeper had Maisie at the cottage, and Tobias had pushed a chair out for me.

He rolled his sleeves to the elbow and put a pot of coffee between us.

"Where do you want to start?" he said.

"At the bottom."

I turned to the last statement in the box and read the closing balance.

*Three hundred and twelve dollars.*

Then I went to the front.

It took me four hours.

I did not use a calculator.

I had been trained to read a trust statement the way a doctor reads a chest film, and the sickness showed up in the first ten minutes.

"The trust opened with two million four hundred thousand dollars," I said.

Tobias looked up.

"Her father's life insurance, and the settlement from the company whose truck hit him. Two settlements, paid to one account for Maisie."

"You were told eight thousand."

"A lawyer told me it was *a small settlement account.* I never saw a statement. I was twenty-five and I thought I was lucky to have it."

I turned a page.

"Here is the adoption. Four years ago the successor trustee changes from an attorney in Providence to Philip R. Carraway."

"And the week after?"

"The first withdrawal."

I pointed.

It was a wire for one million nine hundred thousand dollars, to a title company in Newport.

The memo line said *Property acquisition, 14 Ocean Terrace, on behalf of the beneficiary.*

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Gave Me Fifty Dollars to Live, I Left Him with Nothing from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.