Chapter 1 #4
The apartment they were crammed in now only had two tiny bedrooms. The twins took one, the girls had the other, and she was sleeping on the couch in the living room.
Sunny thought out loud, "The twins can share a room, Presley needs her own room and Lord knows she’s earned one. Chloe can bunk in with me. She usually ends up crawling into bed with me every night anyway.”
Sunny’s thoughts galloped right past any decision to take it or not, already laying it out. She stopped herself abruptly. "I shouldn’t say yes until I’ve seen it, should I?"
"You're absolutely right,” Natalie said comfortably. "I’ll walk you through it first thing tomorrow. And you're going to take it because it has a big fenced-in backyard with two excellent climbing trees, and your kids can walk to school from there. And it has an insulated and heated garage for your car, which, trust me, you’ll need next winter.”
Next winter? That sounded so . . . permanent.
But she had to admit, it was nice being with people who had no idea who her husband was or what he’d done.
They didn’t look at her and speculate on whether she was in on her husband’s embezzlement of tens of millions of dollars, and they wouldn’t slyly ask her every chance they got if she knew where the cash that hadn’t been recovered was hidden.
At the end of the school year, Presley had come home crying because one of the kids in her class told all the others that her father was a criminal and the other kids quit talking to her or sitting with her at lunch.
Sunny hadn’t figured out what to do about it, but she figured the harassment of Presley would only get worse when the kids came back to school this fall.
And soon enough, the kids around the twins would be old enough to understand the gossip and rumors about their dad.
Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea to spend a while in a small town far, far away from their family’s baggage.
She was yanked out of her thoughts by Bonnie, the one running the town, asking directly, "What do you do? As in marketable job skills?"
"I just finished up degree in forensic accounting."
She’d already had a college degree in history of design, so she’d only had to take accounting classes in night school to get a B.S.
in forensic accounting. It had taken her three years, going to school part-time year round to complete it, but she was very proud she pulled it off while raising four kids and working a full-time job as a scheduler for a trucking firm from home.
A small silence. Not unfriendly. Just blank.
"What’s the difference between a regular accountant and a forensic one?" the woman she thought was called Molly asked. “Are you an accountant for dead people?”
The women laughed, and Sunny smiled a little. “Sometimes. I’m a financial detective. I know how to combine accounting, auditing, and investigation to uncover fraud, trace hidden assets, and reconstruct financial records for legal proceedings.”
“There’s not much need for that in this neck of the woods,” Charlotte commented. “Not too many folks have enough money to hide, and those who do go out on the back acreage and bury it with a shovel. “
Sunny set her lemonade down. "It's a wonderful skill for exactly one kind of job and absolutely no use for getting a casserole to the table on time."
"Huh," said Bonnie, looking at her with new interest.
But it was Rose who went stock still.
After a moment, Rose turned to Tessa. "Hank was telling me just this morning that he’s drowning in paperwork? You’ve been at his place a lot. How bad is it?"
"Calling it drowning is generous. His office is buried under a tsunami of paper. All kinds of it. Bills, receipts, files, unopened letters. It’s a mess." Tessa set down her tea.
Rose nodded. “When I sprained my wrist, it took him two months to bill me and four phone calls between us for him to bill it right.”
Tessa shook her head. “The man is a genuinely gifted physician but his idea of a filing system is a shoebox. Reno says the back office looks like a paper recycling plant had a seizure."
Eight women turned to face her in unison, like a field of sunflowers tracking the sun.
Sunny looked from one of them to the next. She had a distinct but not unpleasant sensation of a current she hadn’t chosen to step into picking her up off her feet.
“Who is this Hank?” she asked the field of sunflowers.
"Hank Steele. He's the town doctor," the petite, delicate blonde called Grace responded.
"Good man. Quiet. You’ll get a half-dozen words out of him on a generous day, but they'll be the right words.
His office is in the front parlor of a big Edwardian house just down the street from here.
The one with the porch that's seen better days. "
Rose was already writing on a piece of paper in the notebook she’d carried in from the kitchen earlier. She tore it out. "Here’s the address. Go see him in the morning. Before the rental, even. Tell him Rose sent you."
"You don't know if he'll be awake."
“He will. Trust me.”
“Is he looking to hire someone?” Sunny asked doubtfully.
"He is," Rose said firmly. "He just hasn't gotten around to knowing it yet."