Chapter 5: Page Fourteen
Ethan fell silent on the other side of the study door. I stepped away before he could come out and reached the stairs just as I heard him end the call.
At the top, I stood still, listening to him cross the hall below me. Nina had shown me her packing list that morning. I had not told Ethan about it. Yet he had named the blue ledger and distinguished it from the folders we had found.
I went back down.
Ethan was in the kitchen, filling a glass at the sink. He turned when I entered.
“You’re home.”
“I heard you on the phone.”
His hand stayed on the faucet. Water spilled into the full glass and ran over his fingers before he shut it off.
“What did you hear?”
“You’re looking for a blue ledger.”
He set the glass down and reached for a towel.
“It’s an old accounting book. Someone asked me to see if I could locate it.”
“Who?”
“A colleague.”
“Why would anyone at Halden Bridge want a book from my father’s company?”
Ethan folded the towel carefully over the counter’s edge. He had an answer ready to most questions I asked him. This time he took a moment.
“Old files turn up in unexpected places. I thought I could help.”
“You said Nina’s name.”
He looked at me then.
“Have you been speaking with Nina Ortiz?”
“I met her.”
“Claire.” His voice softened. “You should have told me.”
At Margaret’s birthday dinner, he had made twenty people laugh at my expense. Now he looked wounded because I had met someone who once worked for my father.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because if this is about what happened to the company, I know people who can help you understand it.”
“Is your colleague one of them?”
He picked up the glass but did not drink.
“I’m trying to find out what became of the ledger. That’s all I can tell you right now.”
I wanted to ask how long he had known it existed. I wanted to ask who had called Nina’s storage facility. Neither question would get a useful answer while I was standing in our kitchen with my hands shaking.
“I’m tired,” I said.
He let me pass.
Upstairs, I wrote down what I had heard, then what Ethan had said to me. The order mattered. So did the difference between his words and what I feared they meant.
I called Maya.
“He knew about the ledger,” I told her.
“Did he say how?”
“A colleague asked him to locate it. He wouldn’t name the person.”
Maya waited while I described the call.
“Don’t assume his colleague contacted the storage facility,” she said. “We still need the facility’s written record. But Nina should know someone else is looking.”
I sat on the edge of the bed.
“If I tell her, she’ll think I led him straight to her.”
“You didn’t give him her name just now. He said it before you entered the room.”
I had nearly forgotten that in the rush to defend myself.
“I’ll call her,” Maya said. “You don’t have to carry every conversation yourself.”
The next morning, Margaret arrived without warning.
I saw her through the front window as I was putting on my coat. She stood beside her car with a paper bakery bag in one hand, surveying the house as if she were deciding whether it still met her standards.
I opened the door before she rang.
“I brought you breakfast,” she said.
“I’m going out.”
“This won’t take long.”
She walked past me into the kitchen. I followed her, leaving my coat on. Margaret set the bag on the counter and looked at the empty glass Ethan had left beside the sink.
“He says you two had a difficult conversation.”
“Ethan can tell you what he said.”
“He worries about you.”
I thought of him asking for the ledger, not the folders.
Margaret took two pastries from the bag and put them on plates. She offered me one. I stayed where I was.
“Grief can make a person reach backward,” she said. “Eleanor’s death, your father’s business. It’s understandable.”
I had not mentioned my father’s business to her.
“Who told you I was looking into the company?”
Her fingers paused against the plate.
“You don’t have to tell me your sources, Margaret. I’m asking about yours.”
“Ethan said you’d been asking questions.”
“He knew I met Nina after I heard his phone call last night.”
Margaret drew out a chair but did not sit. For the first time since I had known her, she seemed uncertain which answer would satisfy me.
“People remember the end of a business differently,” she said. “Employees. Lenders. Family. You could spend years chasing a version that makes you feel better.”
“Is that what you did when you asked Nina for the financing files?”
The change in her face was small. Her mouth closed; her eyes stayed on mine.
“Nina told me about your visit.”
“I made inquiries on behalf of someone interested in the company’s assets.”
“After it had closed.”
“There were still assets.”
Perhaps there were. I had no documents in front of me that could tell me what Margaret had sought or for whom. I had only Nina’s recollection and Margaret’s sudden care with every word.
“Then why ask Nina who had approved the financing?”
Margaret pushed the untouched plate a few inches away.
“Claire, I came here because I don’t want you hurt by a history you can’t change. Leave it buried.”
“You haven’t told me what’s buried.”
She stood and smoothed the front of her coat.
“You’re late for somewhere,” she said.
I watched from the doorway as she drove away. The bakery bag stayed on the counter. I left it there.
Nina was waiting when I reached Maya’s office. An envelope lay between them on the conference table, its flap worn soft from being opened and closed.
“Maya told me about Ethan,” Nina said. “I looked through the things I kept at home.”
“You didn’t have to do that last night.”
“I know. I couldn’t sleep anyway.”
She slid the envelope toward me. Inside were photocopied ledger sheets, their edges uneven where they had been lifted from the copier one at a time. The blue cover and the bound original were still missing.
“I made these when we were finishing the company’s records,” Nina said. “Before the original files went to the people handling the wind-down. I was trying to reconcile the customer credits with the revised payment schedules. I copied what I needed for that.”
“Why keep them at home?” Maya asked.
“I thought I’d have to answer questions later. Then no one asked.”
Nina looked down at her hands. I remembered her beside the storage box, apologizing for a book she could not find.
Maya spread the sheets out without changing their order. She wrote down Nina’s account of when and where she had made them, then asked permission to scan them. Nina nodded.
“Are these the same records as the payment notices you brought us?” I asked.
“They refer to some of the same amounts. They aren’t a substitute for the notices.”
Across one sheet ran a column headed Original Credit. Another was marked Revised Destination. Each row had a date, a reference number, and a brief notation. Some destinations appeared to be businesses I had never heard of.
Nina pointed to a name halfway down.
“Birch Lane Services. I couldn’t find it in our customer accounts. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t legitimate. It means I couldn’t match it with what I had.”
Two rows later, an amount moved through an account labeled East Quay Holdings before being credited against a balance owed to Whitmore Machine Works. The figures were precise enough to follow, but not enough to explain who had authorized the route.
Maya copied the reference numbers into her notebook.
“These give us transactions to check against records held elsewhere,” she said. “They don’t tell us what those other records will show.”
I leaned over the next sheet. Near the bottom was a smaller entry, eighty-four thousand dollars, marked consulting. In the adjacent column someone had typed one word.
Mercer.
I read it again. My husband had once been Ethan Mercer. Margaret had used the same name when she visited Nina.
“Does this name refer to a person?” I asked.
Nina moved closer.
“I don’t know. It could be a payee description copied from another schedule. I don’t remember seeing a first name.”
“Did my father ever mention a Mercer?”
“Not to me.”
Maya circled the reference number on her own notes, leaving the photocopy untouched.
“We can look for a corresponding invoice or payment record,” she said.
I thought of Ethan in the kitchen, saying he could help me understand the company. If the entry concerned him, he had offered no explanation. If it concerned someone else, I did not want to accuse him on the strength of one surname.
Nina turned another sheet. A credit for just under two million dollars had been redirected in stages, according to the columns. She traced the dates with her finger and compared them to one of the payment notices she had brought earlier.
“Here,” she said. “This date is why I kept asking questions. The notice shows the credit available before the schedule says it was moved.”
“Could that be a recording delay?” Maya asked.
“It could. I never had the sender’s records to check.”
We spent the next hour matching numbers where we could and marking those we could not. Maya made separate lists: documents we had seen, records we might request, and questions no document yet answered. Watching her keep them apart steadied me.
Then Nina reached the last photocopy.
“This was the largest one,” she said.
The amount was $4.8 million. Unlike the earlier entries, the row gave no intermediary name. Beside it was a notation: Revised allocation per schedule, page 14.
Maya looked at the sheet beneath Nina’s hand. A page number was printed low in the corner.
“Fifteen,” she said.
Nina checked the preceding sheet. Its bottom edge had curled under. She flattened it with her palm.
Thirteen.
We searched the envelope, the space beneath the table, and the backs of every sheet. Nina turned the stack over twice. No page fourteen appeared.
“I copied the section,” she said quietly. “I remember putting the sheets together.”
May you like
Maya did not tell her she was wrong. She asked when Nina had last checked them and whether anyone else had handled the envelope. Nina could not remember checking the pages after she brought them home. She had kept the envelope in a drawer, but she could not say who might have opened it over the years.
I looked again at the $4.8 million entry. Its explanation pointed to a page Nina believed she had copied. Between thirteen and fifteen, that page was gone.
