The Nice Girl Gets Even novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Carbon Copies

Posey's ledger proves Margot has cashed her rent for three years, Emmett refuses to cover for his sister again, and Margot walks into Tuesday class livestreaming her rival manners brand.

"That's not possible," I said.

Then I went upstairs and got the green ledger.

It's a bookkeeper's ledger with a cloth cover, the same kind my grandmother used.

On the first of every month I write the rent check.

I write a thank-you note to go with it, on my good cream cards.

I keep a carbon of both and tape them into the ledger, side by side.

I carried it down and laid it open on the card table.

This was the second one. The first was full.

Emmett turned the pages slowly.

Thirty-six checks.

Thirty-six notes.

Thank you for the new porch light. Thank you for fixing the gutter before the storm. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone at Gaillard.

"You thanked them for the gutter," he said.

"They fixed it."

"Did they?"

I thought about it.

Truett fixed it, actually, on a Sunday, in his boat shoes.

"Pull up your bank," Emmett said. "The cashed checks. I want to see the backs."

I opened the app on my phone.

Every cleared check had a little picture, front and back.

I tapped one from four years ago and turned it over.

GAILLARD PROPERTIES, in black.

I tapped the next one, three years ago.

There was a stamp on the back in purple ink.

FOR DEPOSIT ONLY. MERRILL EVENTS LLC.

I tapped the month after.

Same stamp.

I tapped the one from last month, the one with the thank-you for the Christmas wreath on the door.

Same purple stamp.

Gussie leaned over my shoulder and read it out loud.

Then she said a word I'd never heard her use in front of the piano.

Emmett had gone very still.

"That's her party company," he said. "She plans engagement parties and baby showers. I know that stamp."

"How?"

"Because I've paid her vendors out of my own account with that stamp on the invoices." He sat down on a folding chair like his knees had stopped holding him. "Seven years now."

"Since she was twenty-two," Gussie said.

He looked up at her.

"How did you know that?"

"Honey, I worked a school cafeteria for thirty years. I know the face of a man who's been paying for his sister's lunch."

He laughed once, without much in it.

"She wrecked a car at twenty-two. I paid for it so our father wouldn't find out. Then a credit card. Then a caterer she stiffed. Then a lease she broke in Birmingham."

He closed the ledger with one hand.

"Every time, I told myself it was the last time."

"And this time?" I said.

He looked at me.

His eyes were very dark, and very tired.

"This time she took it from you."

"So what does that mean?"

"It means I'm not paying for this one."

Nobody said anything for a second.

"You should call the police," Emmett said. "Today. You've got a stamp and thirty-six carbons. They'd take it."

I thought about it.

I thought about Margot in a red dress, crying in a police station, and Truett holding her hand.

I thought about Mrs. Gaillard finding a reason it was all a bookkeeping error.

I thought about the building going to the next buyer while the lawyers wrote letters.

"No," I said.

Gussie turned around.

"No?"

"Not yet. If I call the police, she cries and says it was a mix-up. Gaillard fixes it quietly. And I'm still out on the sidewalk by Fat Tuesday."

I put my hand flat on the ledger.

"I want the building first."

"And then?" Emmett said.

"And then I want her to hear it in public. With everybody she cares about watching."

He studied me for a long moment.

"Your grandmother would've called this a scene."

"My grandmother would have bought the building."

He smiled then, slow and crooked, and I felt it somewhere I had no business feeling it.

Tuesday class meets at seven.

It's six grown-ups who need to dance at something and don't want anybody to know.

There's a shrimper in his fifties whose daughter is getting married in April.

There's a widower who wants to dance with his granddaughter at her prom.

There's a bride from Daphne who can't tell left from right.

At five to seven, Emmett walked in with the shrimper.

"I'm taking the class," he said.

"You are not."

He handed Gussie forty dollars.

"I'm a terrible dancer, Miss Blanchard. It's a known problem in my family."

Gussie stuffed the money in her cardigan pocket.

"He's paid. He stays."

I put him with me, because nobody else deserved him.

Box step. Six counts. I put his hand on my back and my hand on his shoulder.

His shoulder was warm through the white shirt.

He stepped on my left foot on count one.

"Sorry."

He stepped on my right foot on count four.

"Sorry."

"You're leading with your heel," I said. "Lead with your ball of the foot. Look at me, not at the floor."

He looked at me.

That was a mistake for both of us.

He stepped on my foot again, and neither of us said sorry.

The shrimper whistled.

I let go of Emmett's hand.

"Again," I said. "From the top."

The front door opened.

A light came in first, a white ring light on the end of a pole.

Then a phone on a gimbal.

Then Margot, in a red sweater dress, talking to the phone in a bright voice.

"Hey, y'all, we're live! Welcome to the launch of Merrill Manners!"

She swung the phone around to the eight of us frozen on the floor.

"And this," she told her viewers, "is what happens when you learn etiquette from somebody's grandma."

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