The Eight Year Ledger novel · Chapter 6 of 32

Chapter 6: Forgery

I set the coffee cup down before I dropped it.

"Back door," I said.

"That's what it said."

"That key hangs on a hook by our back door. With the tag. I wrote that tag the week we moved in."

Beau didn't say anything.

He just let me stand there and have it.

"Would there be a receipt?"

"Register prints a copy for the store. Dad kept every one, in boxes in the back."

He nodded toward a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.

"July's in there somewhere. Under August, probably. Possibly under a raccoon."

"A raccoon."

"There was a raccoon in March. It's handled. Mostly."

"Will you look?"

"I'm already looking," he said.

The district called me at four that afternoon.

The investigator wanted me at the administration building on Tuesday at nine.

I brought the ledgers.

All eight of them, in a canvas tote bag, green spines in a row.

The administration building was a low brick box behind the high school.

The investigator was a thin man in his fifties with a lanyard and a yellow legal pad.

He had a box of tissues on the table already, set squarely in front of my chair.

I moved it to the side.

"Mrs. Whitford, thanks for coming in. This is an informal interview. You're not under arrest. You can have a lawyer if you'd like."

"She's on the phone," I said, and set my cell on the table with the call open. "Go ahead."

He cleared his throat and opened a folder.

He took out eleven sheets of paper, one at a time, and laid them in a row.

PTA disbursement forms.

The yellow carbon copies, the kind on the pad I kept in my desk drawer at home.

Each one said Reimbursement, Field Trip Fund. Each one said Lodging, Teacher Planning Retreat.

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