Seven Church Folders Opened Beside The Old Receiving Scale

The accountant charged $175 an hour. When Lena gave me that figure, I looked at my savings balance.

“We need someone who can check your figures,” she said. “Even if your figures are right.”

I hired Ellis Boone for a first review capped at $2,100. The seven churches agreed to share later costs if the review found grounds to go on.

Ellis arrived with a plain calculator and a gray box for files.

“Tell me where bronze goes,” he said.

We sat at a folding table during my next supervised visit. Dexter watched from his office window.

I drew a furnace on scrap paper.

An old bell went in with extra copper or tin when needed. A new bell came out of the mold with channels still attached. Those channels carried the bronze into the mold. We cut them off afterward.

“Those are solid bronze,” I said. “They can go back into another melt.”

“And the dirt?”

“Dross. Skim from the top. Clay from the mold. We account for that separately.”

“So every pound of leftover material isn't worth eight dollars.”

“Correct.”

He crossed out his first heading and started again.

I liked him after that.

We checked the seven contracts. Each church kept title to unused bronze unless it signed a separate sale or disposal agreement. Dexter had offered that term to win bids. I had made the shop tags match it.

But our job sheets had gone through his office before customers received their final bills.

Ellis made columns for incoming metal, added metal, finished bell, clean returns, and waste. He asked for the crate weights and the removed iron fittings too.

“We don't count a clapper as bronze,” he said.

“Neither do I.”

“Then we should agree at the end.”

Some jobs did balance. He marked those in green. One difference came from a wooden pallet that had stayed on a scale. Another came from a clerk entering 690 as 960.

He corrected both before he totaled anything.

The remaining gaps still made my mouth go dry.

I had weighed the clean returns at the workbench. My figures survived in the bound shop book, with dates and Ruth's initials as witness. The customers' final sheets listed much smaller amounts, or none.

“You didn't see these final sheets?” Ellis asked.

“Dexter handled billing.”

“That left you without a check at the end.”

I wanted to explain how long our days had been. How I had trusted him while Mai was sick one winter. How easy it was to finish a pour and let somebody else finish a form.

Instead, I said, “Yes.”

That evening I told Mai what Ellis had found.

“Did I help him do it?” I asked.

She rinsed a bowl, set it down, and turned off the water.

“You have to tell them what you missed.”

“I will.”

“And let them check you too.”

The churches filed their claims through their lawyers. With the court allowing records to be gathered, requests went to the metal buyer Dexter used and to the company bank.

The buyer wasn't accused of wrongdoing. It had purchased clean bronze from a man who ran a foundry and signed that he had the right to sell it.

Its manager sent purchase tickets with clear weights. The scale had been tested. Photographs showed our job numbers on several loads.

Ellis spread those pictures beside the church files.

River Reach's missing return lay in one picture, its chalk square still visible. A second picture showed bronze from a rural chapel whose members had brought us lunch during their pour.

The seven lots totaled 4,830 pounds.

The buyer had a standing rate of $8 a pound for our clean bell bronze during those sales. The tickets totaled $38,640.

These were solid pieces sold as reusable metal. No one had paid eight dollars a pound for furnace dirt.

Celeste read the total twice.

“Our people held fish suppers for those bells,” she said.

She did not raise her voice.

Ellis kept his hand on the report.

“There is still a question about who received payment. We need the transfer records.”

By then, Dexter had stopped smiling at the window. He walked out to our table.

“Scrap prices move,” he said. “Anybody in this trade knows that.”

Ellis turned one purchase ticket toward him.

“This is the amount you accepted.”

“You're letting an outsider tell you how your own shop works, Phuc?”

I thought of the blank space after customer signature.

“I'm letting him count.”

Two days later, the buyer's payment packet reached Lena.

It included Dexter's email changing the payment instructions. The receiving account belonged to him alone.

At the bottom, he had written: Please Keep These Transfers Off The Company Statements.