Chapter 15
Sunny had spent three years trying to forget the name David Merrill. It took her nine days to find his money.
She did the work at the rental’s kitchen table after the children were asleep, in the hours she used to spend lying awake worrying about how to save a little money for an emergency car repair or surprise medical bill.
The work itself wasn’t glamorous. There was no green computer code raining down her laptop’s screen.
No handsome hacker or ominous soundtrack.
There were just databases. And dormancy schedules.
Unclaimed property registries, escheatment timelines, and the long, dull pipeline of what happens to money when everyone who knows about it dies or forgets it exists.
Money that sits untouched does, in fact, get noticed.
Banks are required by law to notice it. After enough years of silence they’re required to report it to the state, and the state is required to publish the owner’s name in a public list on the theory that somewhere out there, someone might be looking for it.
Sunny had recited that to a dozen clients in her career.
She’d never once imagined reciting them to herself.
The first few nights she worked methodically, state by state, in alphabetical order. When that turned up nothing, she stopped, sat back, and made herself do the harder thing. She made herself think like Winston.
She knew his patterns better than she knew his face anymore, and that fact alone made her stare at the kitchen wall for longer than the man deserved to have anyone think of him.
He’d liked prestige. He’d liked discretion that quietly advertised itself.
He would’ve wanted the money liquid but growing, parked somewhere with mahogany in the lobby and a man in a suit at a desk who said, Good morning, Mr. Merrill, without ever once glancing at a computer screen.
She was dead certain he would have opened the account very soon after he first started stealing money, years before anyone suspected a thing, while no one was watching him.
She found the thread on a database of non-European Union unclaimed property listings, published eleven months ago. MERRILL, DAVID A. A savings account at a small bank in the city of Kotor in Montenegro. The amount wasn’t listed. Amounts never were.
She sat looking at the name on her laptop screen for a long time.
She’d expected, when she let herself imagine this moment, to feel something like triumph.
What came instead was quieter and a good deal worse.
Recognition. He truly had been exactly the man she’d thought him to be, all the way to the end and past it.
The next morning she called Reno. She told him the name on the fake passport she’d destroyed and the name of the bank in Montenegro. She asked him to get Winston’s fingerprint card, mug shot photograph, and death certificate from the state of California and send them to the bank.
He agreed to find out what else the bank would need to confirm that David Merrill was, in fact, her deceased husband, Winston Perry. And he promised to help her recover the money if it was humanly possible to do so.
Reno said he would write up a request to the California court that prosecuted Winston to subpoena the account records of David Merrill so the amounts and dates of deposits could be compared against the money stolen from the shipping company and the dates it went missing.
She didn’t know how Reno pulled it off, but all of that happened in less than a week.
What came back from the California Bureau of Investigation confirmed that Winston Perry had, indeed, opened a bank account in Montenegro under the name of David Merrill. He’d done it nine years before his death and had made regular deposits small enough to draw no attention.
He’d used his fake passport and a notarized copy of a California driver’s license in the name of David Allen Merrill to open the account. The photograph on the license that Reno showed her was Winston’s face. Younger. Smiling the fundraiser smile.
The deposits, dozens of them, had all come in wire transfers routed through the same chain of shell companies Winston had sent money from the shipping company, disguised as legitimate business expenditures.
There was one detail she didn’t pass along to Reno or Hank because she was still deciding what to do with it.
The account had been opened the same month Presley was born.
While she’d been a struggling exhausted, first-time mom, getting no sleep and recovering from a hard delivery, her husband had been standing in a bank thousands of miles away, answering to another man’s name and planning his escape from her and his child.
It took a few more days for the bank in Montenegro to fax Reno an updated account statement.
The balance was three point one million dollars and change, parked in a variety of stocks, bonds, and index funds.
Left alone for the better part of a decade, it had done the one thing money does when everybody forgets about it. Grow.
She read the figure to the penny, because she read everything to the penny, and the pennies were somehow the obscene part to her.
As soon as the account was proven and retitled, the whole of it would pass, by the cold, clean operation of law, to Winston Perry’s heirs.
Reno already had a copy of Winston’s will on the last laptop he’d practiced law on, and he found it and printed out a copy for her.
The original copy of the will was filed in the California, and he did the legwork to get notarized copies of it express mailed to her and the bank in Montenegro.
Reno called her two weeks to the day after she found the Montenegro bank account.
He was somber as he said, “I just wanted to let you know I’ve filed all the necessary documents with the California court to execute this final piece of Winston’s estate.
The court clerk said it should weeks, not months, for the money to be released to you. Then it will all finally be over.”
She never thought she’d see this day. The last piece of the puzzle was found.
In a few weeks, she would press it into its outline, and the final door would close on the sorry life of Winston Perry.
She looked out her kitchen window at the mountains going from gold to ash over the neighbor’s roofline.
“I think it’s safe to say you can stop sending me support checks every month once I have that money.”
“I don’t mind continuing them. You could put them in a savings account for the kids’ educations or pay off your own student loans.”
“I paid for my degree out of the money you sent me,” she told him. “Thank you for helping me recover this money and for everything you’ve done for me and the kids, Reno.”
“It’s the least I could do for you after . . .”
She cut him off gently. “The Merrill account predates your investigation by years. He started building his escape route long before you ever started poking around. I need you to hear that. Whatever finally broke Winston, it wasn’t your closing argument.
He was packed and ready to run long before you ever came looking for him. ”
Reno was silent, and she could all but hear Reno setting down the load of guilt and self-blame he’d been carrying for so long he’d stopped feeling the strap cutting into his shoulders.
When he finally spoke again, his voice had an emotional rasp in it that he covered with a joke about looking forward to stopping the checks to her every month.
Then he said, “Does Hank know?”
“Hank’s the one who figured out how to find the account. He gave it to me at his kitchen table like it was a cup of tea.”
Reno laughed, low and unsurprised. “Of course he did. That’s my brother for you. Been handing folks exactly what they need and walking off without accepting payment for it his whole life.” A beat. “Do me a favor, Sunny. Don’t let him walk away from you.”
She sat on the back porch steps after they hung up, listening to her sons argue happily about who got to climb which tree today and who was going to decide which one of them reached the highest spot first.
She had just handed Reno Steele a receipt, paid in full, for his oldest debt, and it had cost her nothing but the truth. It struck her, not for the first time, that if she could forgive everyone else their past sins, it did beg the question of why she couldn’t forgive herself for her own.
The confirmation from the bank in Montenegro arrived on a Tuesday in a heavy linen envelope that looked embarrassed to be in the rental’s dented mailbox.
The same day’s mail brought a second envelope, slim and white, from the Susan Vance Gallery, addressed in careful calligraphy to Miss Presley Carter.
Presley opened hers standing in the middle of the kitchen and inside was a check for six-hundred dollars, the proceeds of three drawings, sold to actual strangers who had walked into an actual gallery and paid actual money for her work.
Presley cradled the check in both hands the way she would hold a baby bird. Then she looked up and asked, with the gravity of a priest at a funeral, “Is six-hundred dollars enough to buy the twins the good telescope and still take everybody to Rose’s for supper?”
Sunny laughed. “Definitely.”
She held herself together until her daughter had gone pelting out to the back yard to inform her siblings of their coming good fortune.
Sunny stood alone at the counter with the two envelopes side by side and let her eyes sting.
One of those envelopes held the cleanest money she’d ever seen, earned in ink by her daughter’s young, sure hands. It was not the big envelope.
She carried around the heavy linen envelope in her purse for three days, like a stone.
She’d spent years doing single-mother on a tight budget math, weighing groceries against the electric bill against the twins’ shoes, which they outgrew on an alternating schedule she suspected them of coordinating.