Chapter 8
When Mac left after their meal, taking Pauline with him, Dorothy turned to Michael and Warren and looked at them quizzically. “How did you get him to talk?”
Michael smiled. “It was all Warren.”
Warren smiled sheepishly. “He came into the restaurant looking for you, I think, and so I approached him. I just told him that we’re on his side and believe there’s something going on at the firm.
I told him we don’t trust Harding and Devlin.
Then I asked him to talk to us, and he said he would, but not here.
I don’t know who he thinks is watching him, but his fear is very strong. ”
“You’ve performed a miracle,” Dorothy said with a smile. “Thank you. Would you like to take a look at the information?”
He nodded. “Very much.”
“Meet me in the private sitting room. It’s on this floor, down the passage, third door on the left.” Dorothy rose. “I’ll see you there in a couple of minutes?”
“Absolutely!” Warren agreed.
“Do you need me?” Michael asked. “I would really like to take a walk around the town and see if I can gather any further information.”
“Shouldn’t we do that together?” Warren asked. “Considering what happened with Pauline?”
“You saying that I need you to hold my hand?” Michael asked archly.
“It was merely an observation that it might be a good idea not to go into things alone,” Warren retorted.
“I’m not going to get into anything. Just going to look around,” Michael said with a smile that Warren was certain meant he was going to stir up some trouble.
“Just try not to get shot,” Warren sighed.
Michael left with a little more pep in his step than Warren thought the excursion warranted.
He rose and, leaving the restaurant, made his way to the private sitting room.
Dorothy was there already, laying out papers and ledgers.
She looked up as he entered and smiled, sending his heart into the stratosphere.
“Come and sit. I’m afraid there is a lot to make sense of,” Dorothy said.
Warren moved into the room and closed the door behind him. Then he took a seat opposite her at the coffee table. “I think you’d better start by giving me some context for all of this.” He gestured to the papers and ledgers.
Dorothy nodded. “It’s funny, but I forgot that you don’t know anything about what’s going on at the firm. I don’t know, it feels like we’re written to each other about so many things over the months.”
“True,” Warren said, nodding and taking in all of the paper. There was a lot, but he’d seen bigger messes in his accounting work. “But you didn’t mention any of this in your letters, did you?”
Dorothy shook her head and sighed. “I didn’t think it would be safe to.”
Their gazes locked, time stood still just for a heartbeat, and Warren saw tenderness in her eyes.
For just a minute, he felt sure she liked him as much as he liked her.
Then Dorothy blinked, breaking the spell.
She cleared her throat and looked away. For Warren, it felt as though the sun had disappeared behind a cloud.
“What do you know about the firm’s business?” Dorothy asked, finding her reading glasses in her bag.
Warren loved the way she suddenly looked like a librarian. “I know that, for a percentage of the profits, the firm offers financing to people who want to start businesses.”
“That’s it in a nutshell,” she agreed. “In reality, there are a lot of different ways that the company receives recompense. This makes it a bit of an accounting nightmare and seems to have left a lot of loopholes that things can slip through.”
“Ah, I think I’m beginning to see a glimmer of the picture here,” Warren said, picking up a pencil and sliding a notebook closer to himself. Opening the notebook to the first page, Warren began to write. “Please continue,” he said. “What do you think is going on at the firm?”
“The thing is, I don’t know for sure,” Dorothy said. She began to outline a scheme she had stumbled across purely by accident.
“I was doing a reconciliation for Mac on your account when I noticed that there were irregularities. It seemed there is more money moving through the accounts than there should be. Now, I only do this kind of report every quarter for Mac, so there was a lot of data to go through. Things seemed to be going well. It was early last year, and the mine was really starting to find its feet.”
Warren could recall the time. It was before El Aguila took such a personal interest in their little mine and town. Things were running smoothly and peacefully, with no one the wiser that anything was about to change.
“Anyway, there were some numbers that didn’t fit, so I checked and double-checked, and they turned out to be right, but in the wrong place. So, with a little investigation, I found that those figures had been copied from another account into the wrong ledger. A simple error that was quickly fixed.”
Warren nodded. “This kind of thing happens, I suppose, from time to time. Your accountants must deal with a lot of transactions for many different firms.”
“They do, and usually they only work with one account at a time, but somehow the mistake happened,” Dorothy said.
“I thought it was a one-time thing and let it go. I moved on to all the other tasks I had and thought nothing of it. Until a month or two later, when I found it happening again. Suddenly, a ledger for another company had extra lines of numbers. It was another of Mac’s accounts.
This time I went to show him the error. I told him what I had found before and how much work it took to unravel.
He was very concerned. He read something else in those figures, not just bad accounting but something more sinister. ”
“Thievery?” Warren hazarded a guess.
“Exactly,” Dorothy said. “Someone was moving money around through the ledgers, taking it from one account and adding it to another only to remove it and put it elsewhere. It was quite the paper trail initially, but it eventually disappeared. I couldn’t work out where the money went ultimately.”
“And then what? You went to Mac and …”
“And he went to Devlin and Harding and asked them about it. They said they knew nothing, that it had to be some sort of error. But it wasn’t.
I’m sure of that. It was far too well done for that.
Mac asked me to keep an eye on those ledgers, yours included, and I did.
But all of the funny transactions stopped showing up and I started to wonder.
“I thought maybe they had found another way to do it, and that’s when I discovered the document room. It’s where they store used-up scrap paper. When the shelves are full, they take them down to the furnace in the basement and burn the documents. It’s a good way to get rid of them.”
Warren raised an eyebrow. “Who would want to do such a thing? Why would they think they could get away with it?”
Dorothy shrugged. “That’s what I need to work out.
You see, I think that Devlin and Harding think that Mac has lost his mind.
Ever since there’s been trouble here with the hotel and Pine Hill, he’s been terribly distracted.
He thinks we’re all out to get him and he’s terribly paranoid.
I want to analyze all of this information and track the transactions from their source to their endpoint. ”
She picked up a sheaf of papers and looked at him apologetically. “I’m afraid when I got the last of the documents we need, I might have accidentally picked up a lot of unrelated things. I was in a terrible rush.”
“It’s fine,” Warren said. “I’m used to weeding out extraneous material. So, where do we begin? How do you want to do this?”
“I was hoping to have your advice on that. You’re the genius with figures.”
He grinned, pleased at the compliment. “Well, why don’t you show me our ledger? I think it will be a good place to start since I’m familiar with the transactions anyway.”
She nodded and, digging through the pile, pulled out the ledger for Unity.
Opening the ledger was like taking a walk down memory lane for Warren.
He remembered the initial capital investment, the long months when it had been all that kept them alive, and then the sudden, happy advent of the copper seam paying out at last. The ledger was sparsely populated in the beginning, but the entries grew as time went on.
It didn’t take long for Warren to begin to notice that something was wrong.
He’d worked with these numbers for so long that they were emblazoned in his brain like a brand.
There was a problem here, he was certain.
He took out his own ledger for the mine and compared notes.
Sure enough, there were slight differences in the figures.
Where he had a six, this ledger had a seven, that kind of thing.
Sometimes they transposed figures, putting them in the wrong columns or reversing the figures.
A sixty-eight would be recorded as an eighty-six.
Simple mistake or purposeful error? The more he worked through the figures, the more Warren thought it was the latter.
Bam! Bam! Bam!
Warren jumped and looked up from his calculations. “What the heck?”
Bam!
“Dorothy, are you in there?”
“Mac?” Dorothy responded, getting to her feet hurriedly. “Is there something the matter?”
A scraping sound filled the air, and the door opened, allowing Mac and Michael to come bursting into the room.
“We have news!” Mac announced.
Warren let out a sigh of relief. News he could handle.
Another gunfight might be a different story entirely.
He didn’t like violence but had come to expect it so often that he was almost comfortable with it.
That bothered him, and the less he had to use his weapons and fists, the better.
He chose to believe the accountant’s ledger was mightier than the sword on most occasions.
“Kyle and Alice are wrapping things up in Pennsylvania,” Michael said, smiling. “They should be here in a couple of days.”
“Oh, wonderful,” Warren smiled. “You’ll like Alice,” he told Dorothy. “She’s very kind.”