Выбрать главу

“Yes, please,” Ali agreed. “Feel free to give them my contact information.”

When the phone call ended, Sister Anselm consulted her watch. “We’ve made arrangements for the patient transfer,” she explained. “The air ambulance is due here any moment. I’d best go make sure all the details are handled.”

When Ali and B. left the conference room, Ali noticed that, except for two new daddies, the waiting room on the maternity floor was empty. “Where’s Leland?” she asked.

“He looked beat,” B. said. “I told him to go home and get some rest. You’re not in such great shape yourself,” he added.

A mirror hung on the wall outside the nurses’ station. A glance in that told Ali that B.’s assessment of her appearance was on the money. Her hair and makeup were a mess. Her pantsuit had been slept in, and it showed.

She shook her head. “You’re right,” she said. “I look like hell, and I’m starving besides. Any chance of getting some breakfast before we head for Kingman?”

“I’ve got a better idea,” B. said. “Knowing you’d been stuck here overnight, I brought along a change of clothing and your traveling makeup kit. They’re out in the car. How about we rent a motel room so you can get showered and changed? Then before we head for Kingman, we’ll stop long enough to have breakfast.”

“You’re a good man,” she said, giving him a peck on the cheek. “In fact, you’re a gem. If we weren’t already married, I’d marry you on the spot!”

28

Betsy woke up early and pulled on her robe as soon as she got out of bed. The idea that people she didn’t know might be watching her every move was still very disturbing. After walking Princess, she made a careful circuit of the house, checking the windows and doors, making sure nothing was out of the ordinary.

Once Princess was fed and the coffee finished perking, Betsy went over to the kitchen cabinet and opened what she liked to call her “dynamite drawer.” The whole time she and Alton were married, he had carefully balanced the checkbook every single month—without fail. Alton had been a pretty sensible guy. Betsy had generally gone along with his programs without raising much of a fuss, whether the question at the time was about installing a new roof, purchasing a car, or selling off part of the farm. It wasn’t because Betsy didn’t want to voice a countervailing opinion so much as the fact that she had usually agreed with Alton’s assessment of the situation at hand.

Once he was gone, Betsy still did most things his way, with one small exception—balancing the checkbook and savings accounts, and it happened that now there were several of those. Each account had been established to fund and handle some particular purpose. She checked the credit card bills each month when they came in just to be sure there were no oddball charges in addition to the ones that were on automatic or the occasional small purchases she herself made. Once she had surveyed those, she tossed the statements, along with the collection of bank statements that came in month after month, in the bottom drawer—the deepest one—in the kitchen cabinets. Finally, once a year and usually at the beginning of March, she hauled out the ledger—she still used Alton’s old-fashioned ledger—and his calculator and did a year’s worth of bookkeeping all at once before handing the whole shebang over to the accountant to sort out the taxes.

She and Alton had lived carefully if not exactly frugally. Having seen too much of what happened during the Depression, Alton had stayed away from the stock market. He had derided it as “gambling with other people’s money.” And he hadn’t gone looking for investment schemes with high returns, either. But he did believe in banks. The tiny returns that came back on savings accounts were fine with him. He had created several and assigned a label to each—Household, New Car, Travel, Emergency, Home Improvement. Once one of them was full to the extent that it didn’t exceed FDIC limits, he went on to create the next one, and the next, and the next—five in all. When it came time to pay bills, he—and, later, Betsy—would transfer the necessary amounts from the proper account into the checking account where Social Security checks were automatically deposited.

With the farm long since paid for, most of Betsy’s day-to-day bills could be handled by that without having to resort to taking funds from one of the named accounts. When she did have added expenses, like the credit card bills for her trips to and from DC to look after Athena and also her trip to Arizona for the wedding, those were transferred over on an as-needed basis only. Since those occasional expenditures were few and far between, Betsy had zero concerns about running out of money in her lifetime, just the way she and Alton had intended.

It was only February, a month earlier than usual, but since Betsy had to visit the various banks later on in the day anyway, she decided she could just as well get the onerous bookkeeping chore over and done with. Steeling herself for the task with a first cup of coffee on the table next to her and with Princess curled up in a cozy ball at her feet, Betsy settled down to work.

She dumped the whole drawer upside down on the table, so that the earliest statements would be the ones on top. In the very first statement—in the account Alton had labeled “New Car,” Betsy saw something worrisome. There were four different $250 ATM withdrawal transactions posted to that account in a one-month period—one a week—a thousand dollars gone. The only problem was, Betsy Peterson had never made an ATM withdrawal in her life. She supposed you’d need some kind of card to make that happen, but she didn’t have one. The only plastic she carried of any kind consisted of her trusty Visa and Amex cards, where she always maintained a zero balance.

With trembling hands, she tore into the next envelope—her Home Improvement account—only to discover the same thing, one withdrawal a week, $250 a shot, four times in the course of the month. And so it went, in every account. Betsy worked in a state of rising fury until she had the whole year’s worth of statements opened and accounted for. And there were the cold hard numbers. In one year, someone had relieved her of $60,000 without her knowledge or consent.

Too late she realized that Alton had been right to do the accounting every month. Had she done that, she could possibly have limited her loss. But now? Her first instinct was to pick up the phone, dial the first bank, and go to war with the manager. She had the phone in her hand when she thought better of it and put the receiver back on the hook. The bank statements for January had not yet arrived. If she called the bank and alerted them, that might also serve to alert whoever was doing it. She wanted the guilty parties caught and punished every bit as much as she wanted them stopped.

Instead, she tracked down the phone number for Joe Friday, the guy who had installed what he had explained was something like a distant band of guardian angels there to watch over her.

“Good morning, Betsy,” he said when he answered. Obviously his caller ID was in good working order. “What’s up?”

“I’ve been going over my bank statements,” she said. “Someone has been making unauthorized withdrawals all year long in every one of my accounts. They’ve been using ATMs, which I’ve never once used. I’m mad as a wet hen about it, and I don’t know what to do.”

“I’ll call Stuart,” Joe said. “Believe me, this kind of thing is right up his alley. He’ll be back in touch as soon as possible.”

When the phone call ended, Betsy reached down, lifted Princess into her lap, and held her close. “See there?” she told the squirming dog. “I wasn’t just being paranoid. Someone really is after me.”