“He closed them all?” Connie asked incredulously.
“Yes. After all the years I’d been looking after your family’s accounts, I was personally very disappointed. I thought we’d done a good job of handling things for you and your parents both, but I didn’t feel it was my place to argue with your husband.”
The kitchen seemed to swirl around her. Connie closed her eyes in an effort to stop the spinning. “Which checks?” she asked woodenly.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Which checks are overdrawn?” she asked. Connie knew that she hadn’t written any checks since Ron had disappeared. Unless he had the checkbook with him and was still writing checks, the overdrafts most likely had come from some of those automatic deductions.
“One to Blue Cross, one to Regency Auto Lease, and the third is to Prudential,” Ken told her.
Connie nodded. Their health insurance premium, the lease on Ron’s car—his new BMW 740i—and their long-term care. After years of being the unpaid maid-of-all-work for her ailing and eventually bedridden parents, Connie Haskell had been determined to have the wherewithal to pay for long-term care for both herself and her husband should they ever reach a point where their own declining health required it. It was the one purchase she had insisted she and Ron make as soon as they returned from their honeymoon.
“How much?” she asked.
“The total outstanding?” Ken returned. Connie nodded wordlessly, although her private banker couldn’t see that.
“Let’s see,” he said. “‘That’s eighteen hundred forty-six dollars and seventy-two cents, including the service charges. Under most circumstances I’d be happy to waive the service charges, but since we no longer have any of your other business ...”
He let the rest of the sentence hang in the air. Meanwhile Connie, grappling with finding a way to fix the problem, wrote down the amount he had mentioned.
“What about my credit card?” she asked. “Can we transfer the money in from my VISA?”
Ken Wilson cleared his throat. “There’s a problem there, too, Connie,” he said apologetically. “Your VISA account is over the limit right now, and the payment was due yesterday. That’s another seventeen hundred sixty dollars and forty-three cents. That would just bring the balance down to where you wouldn’t be over your limit.”
As Ken Wilson spoke, Connie was remembering how Ron had encouraged her to sign application forms for several other credit cards—ones that evidently weren’t with First Bank. “Even if we never touch them,” Ron had told her, “we’re better off having them available.” And indeed, if any of those applications had been approved, the resulting credit cards had never made it into her hands or purse. And if her VISA at First Bank was maxed out, what about balances on the other cards—ones Connie had no record of and no way to check?
I won’t think about that right now, Connie told herself firmly as she wrote down the second figure. After adding that one together with the first, she arrived at a total of $3,607.15. Swallowing hard, ( ;mini. drew a circle around it.
“Your office is still on Central, isn’t it?” she asked.
“That’s right,” Ken Wilson replied. “Central and Camelback.”
“And how long will you be there?”
“I have an appointment out of the office this afternoon, but that won’t be until one o’clock. I’ll need to leave here around twelve-thirty.”
“All I have to do is dry my hair and throw on some clothes,” Connie told him. “I should be there with the money within forty-five minutes.”
She heard Ken Wilson’s sigh of relief. “Good,” he said. “I’ll be looking forward to seeing you.”
Connie hung up the phone. Then, with her whole body quaking and unmindful of her still-dripping hair, she walked back through the house. She went to the room which had once been her mother’s study—the green-walled cozy room which had, after her mother’s death, become Connie’s study as well. With trembling hands she opened the bottom drawer of the dainty rosewood desk and pulled out her mother’s frayed, leather-bound Bible. One by one she began to remove the old-fashioned but still crisp hundred-dollar bills that had been concealed between many of the thin pages. Claudia Armstrong Richardson had told her daughter the story so many times that even now Connie could have repeated it verbatim.
Claudia had often related how, as an eleven-year-old, her idyllic life had been shattered when she awoke that fateful morning in October of 1929 to learn that her once affluent family was affluent no longer. Her lather had lost everything in the stock market crash. There had been a single payment of three hundred dollars due on the family home in Columbus, Ohio, but without sufficient cash to make that one payment, the bank had foreclosed. Months later, the day they were scheduled to move out of the house, Claudia’s father had gone back inside—to make sure the back door was locked, he had told his wile and daughter. Instead, with Claudia and her mother waiting in a cab outside, Roger Armstrong had gone back into the empty room that had once been his book-lined library and put a bullet through his head.
“So you see, Constance,” Claudia had cautioned her daughter over and over, “you must keep some money set aside, and not just in banks, either, because many of the banks were forced to close back then, too. The only people who were all right were the ones who had cold, hard cash put away under their mattresses or hidden in a sock. You have to keep the money someplace where you can get your hands on it when you need it.”
Over the years, long after Claudia had married Stephen Richardson and long after there was no longer any valid need for her to be concerned about such things, Claudia Armstrong Richardson had continued to put money in the Bible, right up until her death, insisting that Connie put the money there for her once Claudia herself was no longer able to do so.
There were times Connie had argued with her mother about it. “Wouldn’t it be safer in a bank?” she had asked.
“No!” Claudia had declared heatedly. “Absolutely not.”
“What if the house burns down?”
“Then I’ll get a new Bible and start over,” Claudia had retorted.
After her mother’s death, Connie had left Claudia’s Bible as it was and where it was—in the bottom drawer of the desk. It had seemed disrespectful to her mother’s memory to do anything else. Now, as Connie counted some of those carefully hoarded bills into a neat pile, she was glad she had abided by her mother’s wishes. She had told no one of her mother’s private stash—not her father, not her sister, and not even her new husband.
When Connie had counted out enough money to cover her debt, she started to put the Bible back in the drawer. Then, thinking better of it, she took it with her. In the kitchen, she stuffed the Bible into her capacious purse. After hurriedly drying her hair and slathering on some makeup, she dressed and headed off for her meeting with Ken Wilson. Twenty minutes later she was standing in the foyer of the private banking offices of First Bank of the Southwest. At that point, Connie had her involuntary quaking pretty well under control.
Ken Wilson himself came out to greet her and take her back to his private office. “I hope this hasn’t troubled you too much, Connie,” he said kindly.
She gave her banker what she hoped passed as a supremely confident smile as he showed her to a chair. “Oh, no,” she said, willing her face not to reveal the depth of her humiliation. “It’s no trouble at all. I’m sure this is nothing more than an oversight on Ron’s part. He was called out of town on business and ended up being gone longer than either of us intended. I expect to speak to him later on today, and we’ll get this whole thing straightened out. In the meantime, I brought along enough cash to dig us out of the hole.”