Ramona Opened The Old Book And Found A Second Account

Ramona caught the sheet before it reached the floor.

“Temporary rent routing,” she read.

Cecil held out his hand.

“That's office material.”

“So is this book.”

She laid the sheet flat where all of us could see it.

It told the manager to place certain rent payments in the cooperative's roof reserve account. It claimed the board had approved the change in March.

At the bottom, someone had typed Ramona's name.

“I didn't write this,” she said.

“It was an emergency arrangement,” Cecil said.

“The leak happened in June.”

He stared at her.

“We'd had roof trouble before that.”

“We had. And we kept minutes.”

Elaine reached for her phone, then stopped.

“Let's finish the receipt review first,” she said. “One thing at a time.”

I kept my finger beside the page, never on the writing.

The May copy matched receipt 629 and money order ending 237. June matched 646 and 254. July matched 662 and 278.

Same amounts. Same dates. Same payee. Four carbon copies still stitched into the book where Cecil had written them.

He had recorded each payment when I stood at his desk. His spreadsheet had left every one out.

“Somebody could have entered these wrong,” he said.

“You can see your initials,” I said.

“I'm talking about the computer.”

Ramona looked up.

“Then we will find the error. Meanwhile, Mrs. Fields has shown payment. Her balance cannot stay marked overdue.”

She photographed each matched set. Elaine wrote the page numbers on a checklist. I signed beside the four lines that covered my documents.

Cecil stood so close behind my chair that I could smell his coffee.

“You want to make trouble over bookkeeping?” he asked.

I moved my chair sideways and stood.

“I want to sell the baskets I brought.”

Elaine asked him to wait in the office. When he did not move, she repeated herself. He went, taking his cardboard box.

Anita came in with her folder a few minutes later. Ben followed, holding receipts in a rubber band. Both had given permission for Ramona to review their accounts.

Their duplicate entries were there, too.

Anita cried when Ramona found her first one.

“I thought I'd put the money in the wrong envelope,” she said.

“You didn't,” I told her.

Ben put his receipts down very carefully.

“My wife said to pay again and get it over with.”

His voice shook on “again.”

The workshop fan clicked each time it turned. Outside, a truck backed up to the loading door. Ordinary sounds kept going while the room changed around us.

Ramona found routing marks beside several entries. They were small penciled letters, R.R., with running totals in the margin. My four payments were among them.

She did not call them stolen money. She called them amounts to trace.

“The book proves receipt,” she said. “The bank records must show where the money went.”

I rubbed my thumb along a spare oak split in my apron pocket. Smooth one way. Rough the other. We had reached a rough place, and there was no use pretending otherwise.

Ramona called the cooperative's bank from the number on its own statement. She and Elaine arranged to obtain the reserve account records together as authorized board officers.

Then she called the accountant who prepared our year-end reports.

“I need an independent review,” she said. “Collections, deposits, transfers, and the rent ledger.”

She listened for a while.

“Yes. Include my oversight. I should have checked that reserve account directly.”

That sentence made me trust her more.

“Will people say you lost control of the books?” I asked after the call.

“They may,” she said. “I can answer for what I missed. That doesn't give him the right to collect your rent twice.”

She took a fresh sheet and wrote the questions she still could not answer. There were more questions than answers. She left room beneath each one.

Before we left, Elaine called a special board meeting for that evening. She sent written instructions that no stall could be cleared while the balances were under review.

We copied the relevant pages without taking the book apart. The typed routing sheet went into a sleeve with a note saying exactly where it had been found. Elaine and Ramona signed the note.

The originals went back into the cabinet. All three of us signed the new inventory.

“You saved us a great deal,” Ramona told me.

“You told me to save it.”

“You were the one willing to do the slow work.”

I returned to my stall. Cecil's brother was waiting beside my table with a large envelope.

“Would you give this to Elaine?” he asked. “Cecil said she'd be here.”

The envelope was open. A colored plan showed my stall, Anita's, and Ben's as one wide room.

Across the top, above Owen Morrow's signature, were the words Proposed Vacant Space Lease.