The Shop Audit Traced The Loan Into Nolan's Private Debts

The first morning I returned to work, I brought a folding chair.

For eleven years, Nolan had kept the office chair behind his desk and left me standing when we discussed money. Now the court required access to the books. I put my chair beside the file cabinet.

Nolan watched from the doorway.

"You look comfortable."

"I plan to be here a while."

Maren Cole, the accountant Elise hired, plugged in her adding machine. She asked for bank statements, loan records, expense receipts, and the full ledger.

Nolan supplied a spreadsheet called Final Accounts.

Maren compared its last balance with the bank statement.

"These differ by $59,000."

"Timing," Nolan said.

"What dates account for the difference?"

He went to make coffee.

I put blue wool around the school bell's clapper again. Each turn covered a place where the hammer had scuffed the iron. Wes had already photographed it.

For the next four days, Maren worked in the office while I worked at the bench. We could hear each other through the open door.

"$41,000," she called on Thursday. "Do we own a cabin?"

"No."

Nolan appeared behind her.

"That's a business retreat."

"Whose name is on the deed?"

He said he needed to call his lawyer.

The $64,000 loan had entered the company account on a Tuesday. On Wednesday, $41,000 went toward Nolan's cabin loan. Another $18,000 went to a truck dealer.

The truck title named Nolan alone.

The remaining $5,000 still sat in our account. Under Elise's direction, it stayed untouched and separately recorded while she worked out its return.

Maren showed me the trail on three sheets.

"Fifty-nine thousand dollars left for his benefit," she said. "There are no member approvals or loan agreements supporting it."

I had spent the winter putting off shoulder treatment because our cash seemed short.

"Did we have money for the new hoist brake?" I asked.

"Yes."

"For the health insurance increase?"

"Yes."

I went into the washroom and shut the door.

There was no mirror over the sink. We had never replaced the one that broke years earlier. I watched water run over the burn mark on my wrist until I could speak without shaking.

Then I went back.

"What else?"

The receipts for the bells had been uploaded from the shop computer. A saved draft still had a blank space where each owner's name belonged.

Nolan had entered prices totaling $8,600.

No matching payments had left the bank.

Mavis brought the church's full account book. Its pages showed no sale and no $1,250 receipt, the amount Nolan claimed he had paid for their bell.

The school district sent its property record. The museum sent a board letter. Grace Meeting House sent an insurance schedule older than our company.

Their bells had traveled through wars, roof leaks, and Kansas hail. Nolan had tried to change their owners with four typed pages.

Elise hired a document examiner to compare the receipts with earlier files. The dark crescent beside my signature appeared on an old estimate exactly where I remembered it.

"Don't guess at who made them," she told me. "We will use what the records can show."

I wanted to tell everyone.

Instead, I called each customer with the same short update. The bells were safe. Their title was under review by the lender. They would get written reports and clear collection dates.

Mavis asked what I needed.

"A witness when your bell leaves."

"You'll have three."

Elise had sent notice of a member meeting under our operating agreement. Its main business would be removal of Nolan as manager and the choice of a replacement.

My sixty-five votes out of a hundred could carry it. His thirty-five shares still belonged to him. That fact went into the notice too.

He read the notice in the shop.

"You think you can vote me out of something I built?"

"I think we both agreed to these rules."

I had put $78,000 into our opening fund. Nolan had put in $42,000. Those amounts were still on the first page of the ledger, beside the shares we had agreed to. He had liked that agreement when my money bought the first lathe.

He looked toward Maren.

"You've heard her threaten me."

Maren made a note of the time.

He stopped talking.

That evening, I finished Mercy Prairie's new bearing sleeves. The shaft turned smoothly in them. For a few minutes, the only papers on my bench were measurements.

Then a courier arrived.

Nolan had filed a counterclaim seeking $18,000 from me for damage to the Otter Creek bell. He said I had cracked it after losing my job.

His attached statement called the bell sound and usable before that morning.

I opened my bag and took out the school district's intake copy.

Nolan's initials sat beside the drawing of the old crack.