They Raised the Wrong Girl, So Five Brothers Came for Me novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: The Other Column

Finbar's POV

I drove to Toledo with the radio off.

For two years I had carried one question about that sale: why would anyone vote no on a deal that saved a plant.

Hattie had answered it that morning, and I hadn't wanted to hear her.

The old bearing plant sat behind a chain-link fence on the east side, dark, with a For Lease sign wired to the gate.

I parked beside it and sat there until my hands were steady.

Then I called the one person I had never called, the plant's last bookkeeper.

She was a woman in her sixties who had written me a letter after the layoffs.

I had kept that letter in a drawer with the others.

I had never answered it.

She opened her door in a cardigan, with her reading glasses on a chain.

"Mr. Hulme," she said. "I wondered if you'd come."

"I'm sorry it took two years."

"Come in," she said. "I'll make coffee. You'll want to sit down."

She laid a banker's box on the kitchen table.

"I kept copies," she said. "Nobody asked me to, and nobody asked me anything. When the sale fell through, the people from your office told us it was an unlucky vote."

"What's in the box?"

"The other column," she said.

She had a bent finger, and she put it on a ledger page.

It was the plant's pension fund, line by line.

I read it the way I read a contract, from the bottom.

It took four minutes to see what Hattie had seen in one night.

Eleven million dollars had gone out of the fund six weeks before the sale.

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