The Lender Filed A Motion With Our Empty Rooms Attached

Mara read the demand letter while I watched water drip from my coat onto her office mat.

April had brought cold rain. I had walked from a free parking space six blocks away.

"Did you speak to a newspaper?" she asked.

"No."

"Post accusations online?"

"No."

"Give the records to anyone outside the review?"

"Only you. Jonah didn't read them."

She placed the letter beside Curtis's signed retention rule.

"We'll answer through his lawyer. You don't owe money just because he put a number in a letter."

She took the job-loss case under a new written fee agreement. I read every line. Then we prepared a demand to preserve my personnel file, schedules, messages, and the forms I had refused to sign.

At home, I made a different list.

The next mortgage payment. Electricity. Car insurance. Groceries.

Six weeks of reduced shifts had cost me $4,968 in gross wages. Now my entire paycheck was gone.

I had enough saved to make the May house payment, if nothing else broke. I paid it four days early. I needed to see the word Received beside something I could control.

Rukhsana offered to bring dinner.

"Please don't bring money," I said.

"I said dinner. You always hear the hardest version first."

She brought rice, lentils, and a folder.

"This folder isn't dinner," I said.

"It's the written credit offer."

The clinic had offered to clear her $840 balance if she signed that the date error had been resolved to her satisfaction.

She had replied that her dispute concerned a service that never occurred. She wanted the claim corrected with the plan, not a credit tied to her silence.

"I kept both envelopes," she said. "The postmarks help keep things in order."

We ate at my kitchen table. She talked about an old tour group that had lost twelve suitcases between Denver and Boise. For twenty minutes, we discussed somebody else's paperwork.

Then Mara called.

"The clinic's lender filed for a receiver," she said. "There are documents you should see."

The motion asked a judge to put a neutral manager in charge of Alder Span while the lender protected its collateral. It did not decide whether Curtis had committed a crime.

Its exhibits showed why the lender had become alarmed.

Curtis had secured a $620,000 revolving credit line to build the satellites. He had drawn $442,000.

The lender advanced money against reported completed work and the accounts expected to pay for it. In monthly reports, Curtis had described the satellite clinics as already producing steady revenue.

Some of the entries I knew as empty Idaho Falls beds appeared again as proof that those sites could support more loans.

The dates came before Jonah had received keys.

I read one page three times.

"So he wasn't just trying to collect for those nights," I said.

"He was using them to obtain expansion money too," Mara said. "That's the lender's allegation. Their records support it."

The new sites made his numbers look like growth. The reported growth supported another advance. He had spent loan money on deposits, beds, signs, and more leases.

Each framed floor plan in his office had needed the next stack of completed studies.

Jonah's delivery records were attached to a declaration. So were the landlord's key record and dated pictures of unfinished Rigby rooms.

No patient names appeared in the public copies.

The lender's lawyer had also requested my inventory records. Mara arranged a formal production of copies and kept a record of what she sent.

One clinic sheet in the exhibits listed a January supply transfer to Rigby. The same date on my yellow copy showed a blank transfer box.

"That wasn't there when Denise and I counted," I said.

"Keep that page marked," Mara said. "They may ask you about it under oath."

I was afraid of court. I had never testified. I worried that a lawyer would ask a question with ten meanings and I would answer the wrong one.

Mara told me to answer what I knew, ask when I did not understand, and stop talking when my answer was complete.

"Don't guess why he did something," she said. "You can describe what he asked you to sign."

I took out the central-billing explanation he had given me. I had saved the email in which I sent my refusal through Mara. It stated that I had no knowledge of studies at any satellite site.

"Do I bring this too?"

"Yes. The request and your answer belong together."

I placed both behind the signed retention policy. For once, the folder looked like a set of instructions I could follow.

I practiced with the kitchen clock ticking behind me.

"How many occupied beds?"

"Ninety-four."

"How many packets used for patients?"

"Ninety-four."

On Friday, a process server handed me a subpoena for the receiver hearing on May 4.