The Audit Matched Every Paid Penalty To A Changed Setting

The complaint did not call Beryl names. It listed dates, duties, amounts, and the records the merchants still needed.

I read it twice at Alma's desk.

“Can she say this is just me trying to ruin her?” I asked.

“She can say that. The group authorized this case. Their payment records will speak for themselves.”

Marta signed for the merchants' group. Alma filed the civil case in Cass County. The request sought an accounting, return of improper assessments, and protection of the remaining money while the case went forward.

Beryl hired a lawyer after the papers were served.

Her first letter through him said she had acted to protect the arcade from careless customers. Her second said the clock changes had been tests.

Nikhil supplied the maintenance schedule. There were no tests ordered on those dates.

“Don't write that she never had a reason,” Alma told me. “Write that there's no work order. Stay with what you can show.”

I understood. When a clock stopped, I could point to a broken pivot. I could not swear what the owner had been thinking when he dropped it.

Danica worked at a borrowed table in the empty florist's unit. She used three piles: assessments issued, proof of payment, and validation events. Each assessment had a number, and each number belonged to a ticket.

“I won't count the same charge twice,” she said.

Some invoices included unpaid amounts. Those went into a separate schedule to be canceled. Refunds would cover money actually received.

Nikhil identified every period when the validation unit ran seventeen minutes ahead. Danica matched tickets in those periods against the server's entry and validation times.

There were six hundred forty-one paid assessments that should not have been issued.

At eighteen dollars each, they totaled $11,538.

Danica let me check my own page against my receipts. I found a charge from the day a woman had brought her late husband's wall clock through the snow. She had stayed only long enough to leave it with me.

I remembered apologizing for the parking rule when she returned. I had thought the fault was mine for taking too long to hear her story. I put that receipt back in its sleeve and checked the next one.

My thirty-one charges were five hundred fifty-eight dollars of that total. Marta's seventeen were three hundred six. The rest belonged to the other shops in smaller and larger sums.

Danica's report included a page explaining exactly how she had checked them. It also listed the records she still lacked.

“This shows what people paid,” she said. “It doesn't yet show where Beryl put it.”

The merchants held their removal vote after the required notice. Beryl attended with her lawyer. He asked that her denial be entered in the minutes. Owen entered it.

Fifteen members voted to remove her. One abstained. Beryl voted against removal, and one member was absent.

She left the meeting with her peppermint bowl under one arm.

Marta was elected chair for the rest of the term. The group required two approvals for payments and direct bank statements for its treasurer. Those rules would not recover a dollar, but they would make the next missing dollar harder to hide.

The following week, we went to the courthouse for the first hearing.

I wore a dark jacket over a shirt with a tiny oil stain near the cuff. I had tried three times to wash it out.

Beryl's lawyer said the reserve account had been used for group business, though it had been opened through her office business. He asked for more time to sort the records.

Alma handed the judge the meeting resolutions, invoices, and Danica's report.

“The members paid these assessments to a fund they were told belonged to them,” she said. “They need the account records, and the remaining funds need protection.”

After hearing both sides, the judge ordered the records produced and restricted transfers from the disputed account except as agreed or allowed by the court. A later date was set to address the remaining claims.

There was no cheer in the hall afterward. Marta sat on a bench and finished the cracker packet she had brought for breakfast.

“I thought I'd feel better,” she said.

“Maybe after the statements.”

They came through the lawyers nine days later.

Danica traced every merchant payment into the reserve account. Then she traced eight thousand six hundred seventy dollars from that account to Beryl's personal account. No member vote approved those transfers. No receipts showed arcade expenses behind them.

$2,868 remained in the reserve. Together, those amounts matched the $11,538 paid by the merchants.

Alma arranged for the remaining balance to move into a lawyer's trust account by agreement.

That evening, a courier brought Beryl's settlement proposal to my shop.

The last page required us to keep her name out of the correction sent to the merchants.