Chapter 14 #2
“His children need to be called. Each of them. If they want to see their father alive, it has to be now, and that news ought to come from a voice they know.” He paused. “Lucas says they won’t come.”
“He’s probably right.” Bonnie pulled open the bottom drawer of her desk and lifted out an address book.
Of course she had their phone numbers. She had everybody’s numbers.
She was the single most organized person in this entire town.
“Ellie might come. Trent might come if Ellie works on him. The others . . .” She stopped herself and smoothed one hand flat across the book’s cover.
“It doesn’t matter what I think. You’re right. They should be invited to come.”
“Today, if you can manage it.”
“I can manage that.” She looked up at him, her eyes dry and overly bright. “Thank you for being there for him, Hank. He may or may not be the man who killed my husband, but he’s a human being, and he’s staring down death all by himself. Somebody should be there with him at the end.”
“I’m his doctor. It’s my job to be there to the end.” Hank put his hat back on and left the office.
Bonnie sighed, opened the address book to the S’s, and picked up the phone.
By six that evening, Hank’s house had filled up the way it did most nights now. Supper was spaghetti for eight around Madison’s bargain table.
The twins spent the meal relitigating the laundry chute treaty.
Their position was that a big enough pile of pillows at the bottom changed the safety situation enough to justify being allowed to slide down the steep galvanized steel tube that ran from the third floor all the way down to the first. They lost their case on appeal.
Chloe announced from her booster seat that everyone at the table was now a horse. Madison and Presley had their heads together over Presley’s sketchbook, and whatever she was drawing in it made Madison laugh out loud twice.
Hank ate his spaghetti in the midst of it all, letting the noise wash over him like a warm, comfortable bath.
Odd how a man could sit at a deathbed in the morning and at a full supper table in the evening.
The distance between those two spaces was the whole reason houses like this one ever got built.
Entire generations of people were supposed to be born, grow up, grow old, and die within these walls.
It wasn’t until much later, when the kids had been hauled home and put to bed, and Sunny was back on the venerable excuse of the sticking pocket door, that the kettle started singing on the stove. And that was when the revelation that had been circling him all day finally came in for a landing.
He hadn’t told her that the night after she’d laid her whole story on this table, he’d sat up late with his laptop and read the public record of the Perry case, not to check her account because he’d believed every word of it.
But he couldn’t stomach being the one person in her life who knew less about what had been done to her than a stranger at a gas pump.
Whole columns had been written about Winston Perry’s expensive lifestyle, his charm, and his meteoric rise and fall.
But the woman who’d borne his children and survived him barely appeared in the press at all.
And when she was mentioned, she might as well have been furniture in Perry’s house for all the press cared about her.
Reading the casual dismissal of her had set a slow, angry coal to smoldering in Hank’s chest that hadn’t entirely gone out since.
But one plain fact from all the coverage of the scandal had lodged in his brain and stuck. Several million dollars of the stolen money had never been found.
When the Perry estate was liquidated and all the real estate, art, cars, and jewelry sold off, it turned out Perry had made enough money from legitimate investments over the years to cover the entire amount he’d stolen and clear his debt with the court.
But it had taken every penny of the estate to pay back the stolen money, fines, and legal fees.
A few newspapers reported rather gleefully that the widow and her children had been left with nothing.
Except, possibly, that missing money.
The court-appointed trustee who sold off everything Perry owned had searched for another bank account where the last several million dollars might be stashed but hadn’t found it.
The trustee said in an interview that Perry had probably gambled it away, frittered it on expensive vacations, or kept a high-priced mistress with it.
But regardless of what he’d done with it, the cash was gone.
It didn’t make sense to Hank, though, for Perry not to have a secret bank account somewhere with a decent chunk of change in it. He’d planned to flee the country and start a new life. Surely, he would have squirreled away enough to pay for that.
A man who’d already gone to the trouble of getting a fake passport in a new name wouldn’t have planned only half of his escape.
He would’ve also planned how he was going to go about starting over.
And doing that wouldn’t be cheap. If he had enough cash tucked away, he might skip getting a job.
But he would still need to get a place to live, arrange transportation, buy a new wardrobe, maybe get a new physical appearance in the form of plastic surgery.
Perry was an accountant, which made him a detail guy.
He would’ve crossed the T’s and dotted the I’s of any plan he made.
Plus, Perry was careful. After all, he got away with major theft for over a decade.
He would’ve prepared carefully not just to flee but also to start his new life.
Which meant he would’ve hidden his emergency cash carefully, too.
If he were Winston Perry, where would he have hidden his secret, rainy day fund?
Hank had been turning that over in the truck and between patients ever since Sunny sat at his kitchen table and told him everything.
The kettle whistled and Hank lifted it off the stove.
He had an idea about where the money might be, but he wasn’t sure Sunny would want to go looking for it. Not only did a secret account not exist, but Sunny very well might not want to risk yet another disappointment in her life where her former husband was concerned.
He’d promised her, the night she told him about Perry, that her past was her book and he would never pick the lock on it. Well, this was a page of that same book. Maybe he should leave it well enough alone.
But it was the flipside of the argument that decided him.
If he was right about where Perry had hidden it, the money was hers and the children’s, free and clear.
Perry’s restitution had been paid in full years ago.
The shipping company and its pension plan had been made whole.
The state and federal fines and lawyer’s fees were even paid.
If Sunny came into enough money to put her four kids through any college they chose, maybe it would take the fear out of her shoulders for good.
But, at the end of the day, it wasn’t even really about the money. It was the last door Perry had left standing open in her life. And maybe he could hand her the means to close it.
He made the tea and set her mug on the table, waiting for her to arrive.
She came in a few minutes later and sat down beside him. She took an appreciative sip of the hot tea, and he waited until she’d wrapped both hands around it to speak.
“I need to tell you something,” he said. “And when I’m done, I need you to tell me if I was out of line.”
She went still like a deer hearing a hunter’s steps close by. “All right.”
“After you told me about Winston, I read up on the case. The public record, court filings, news coverage.” He added, “I wasn’t checking your story. I believed you completely. But it didn’t sit right with me, knowing less about what was done to you than some stranger at a gas pump would.”
She absorbed that with two slow blinks. “That’s not out of line. It’s a little strange, knowing I’ve been read about by someone in Cobbler Cove. But I’m glad it was you and not anyone else. Go on.”
“I gather there’s still money missing from what Winston stole.”