Chapter 5
At nine thirty, I went back to Mabel’s cottage.
I did not walk onto the porch immediately.
Instead, I parked beside the road and waited.
After several minutes, Mabel appeared in the doorway.
She had seen me.
She folded her arms.
I got out but stayed beside the truck.
“I’m not here to ask about your daughter.”
Something flickered across her expression.
“Then why are you here?”
“I want to ask about Red Mesa Advisory Services.”
The change in her face was immediate.
Not fear.
Recognition.
Mabel looked toward the field beside the cottage, then back at me.
“Where did you hear that name?”
“I read the internal investigation.”
Her mouth tightened.
“Then you read a story somebody decided to write before they collected the facts.”
“That’s what I’m beginning to think.”
For a few seconds, neither of us spoke.
Then Mabel opened the screen door.
“Sadie is eating breakfast. We can talk outside.”
Sadie.
So that was her name.
I followed Mabel no farther than the porch.
There were two mismatched chairs beside the front window. She took one. I sat in the other.
Through the screen I could hear a child singing softly to herself.
The sound did something to me I was not prepared for.
Mabel noticed.
“Don’t,” she said.
I looked at her.
“Don’t decide anything because you heard her singing.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Yes, you were.”
Her voice was not cruel.
It was tired.
“You always decide quickly when you’re uncomfortable, Damian. You decided leaving Bellweather was the only way to become something. You decided coming back for me would interfere with whatever life you were building. Four years ago, you decided one night between us was something you needed to escape before breakfast.”
I looked down at my hands.
“You’re right.”
That seemed to surprise her.
I continued.
“I’ve spent half my life being the man in the room with the answer. I don’t have one now.”
“No.”
“I’m trying not to invent one.”
Mabel looked through the screen toward the kitchen.
When she turned back, some of the hardness in her expression had eased.
“What do you want to know about Red Mesa?”
“Everything.”
She took a breath.
“I first noticed the payments because the invoice numbers were wrong.”
“How?”
“They weren’t sequential.”
“That happens.”
“Not the way these happened. Red Mesa submitted invoice 1147 in February, then 1092 in March, then 1181, then 1103. The descriptions were vague. Soil analysis. Water-resource planning. Land-use evaluation.”
“Grant was managing irrigation expansion then.”
“I know.”
“Did you ask him?”
“Twice.”
“What did he say?”
“That Red Mesa was a specialist firm recommended by an outside consultant.”
“And that satisfied you?”
“No.”
Despite everything, I almost smiled.
Of course it had not satisfied her.
At seventeen, Mabel had once discovered our high school treasurer had miscounted ticket revenue from a football fundraiser by eleven dollars and thirty cents.
She had stayed after school until the numbers matched.
“What happened next?” I asked.
“I searched the vendor file. The tax paperwork was incomplete. The listed office address belonged to a mail center in Austin.”
“That isn’t necessarily suspicious.”
“No. But the bank account receiving the payments had changed twice in six months.”
I sat forward.
“You told Ruth?”
“I did.”
“What did she say?”
“She said she would look into it.”
“And then?”
“Nothing.”
“How long before you were accused?”
“Three weeks.”
A dry wind moved through the scrub grass beside the porch.
Inside the cottage, Sadie laughed at something playing on a small radio.
Mabel lowered her voice.
“The morning everything happened, Ruth asked me to come into the conference room. Grant was there. So was the company attorney. They put the transfer logs in front of me.”
“Your credentials.”
“Yes.”
“Could anyone else use them?”
“They shouldn’t have been able to.”
“Shouldn’t?”
Mabel looked at me.
“About six months earlier, we had a software migration. Grant insisted everyone give temporary administrator access to the outside IT contractor. There were shared recovery credentials during the transition. I complained about it.”
“Is that documented?”
“It was.”
“Was?”
“My copy disappeared from my desk after I was suspended.”
My jaw tightened.
“What about backups?”
“I had some records at home. Not enough.”
“You had an attorney.”
“For six weeks.”
“Why only six?”
A faint, humorless smile crossed her face.
“Because attorneys expect to be paid.”
I wanted to offer money.
May you like
I almost did.
Then I remembered what she had just said about me deciding things quickly when I was uncomfortable.
