Chapter 3 : Serena Downing's email arrived at 4:12. Mara opened it at the red light at the corner of Route 12 and Sunset Boulevard and had to pull into the church parking lot on the far side to actually read it, because there was an attachment, and t
*Ms. Ellison — attached is my scanned copy of the void-transfer form on file in the membership office. I've outlined the second signature field in red. I've also attached the membership office's procedures manual page 41 which governs counter-approval and unapplied credits. I'm sending this from my personal email and I'm asking you not to forward it to anyone except a lawyer or Mr. Whitfield. Please delete this email after you've saved the attachments. — S. Downing*
The form was clean. One page, single-sided, on Willow Bend letterhead, with the club seal and a spaced-out set of fields. SEAT UNDER REVIEW: ELLISON, DANIEL R. MEMBER NUMBER: [blank, she'd redact it later]. REASON FOR VOID: FAMILY REQUEST. REQUESTED BY: HOLLIS ELLISON, MEMBER #(redacted), SIGNATURE: a slanting forward-leaning hand she had known since she was nine. DATE: Sunday eleven weeks ago.
Below the signature line there was a second line.
COUNTER-APPROVED BY: someone's initials, written in a different hand — smaller, more upright, the ink a different shade of blue, the pen lighter, the pressure lighter. Two letters.
*T.A.*
Mara stared at it.
T.A. She did not know a T.A. at Willow Bend. She knew the board members' last names, sort of, from the plaques. She knew Hollis's board colleagues by sight. She couldn't put a T.A. to any face.
She forwarded the email to herself at her work address. She saved the attachments. She deleted the original, like Serena asked.
Then she texted the unknown number.
*Got it. Who is T.A.?*
The reply came in under a minute.
*I don't know. That's why I called you. I've been at the club two years and I've never seen those initials on anything. But the counter-approval has to be a board member or a senior staff member. Those are the only hands authorized for that field.*
*Can you look at the board roster?*
*I can't from my car. I can tomorrow morning when I go in. If I go in. I'm not sure yet.*
*Thank you.*
*Ms. Ellison, one more thing. The copy Mr. Whitfield has — the one in his office — he showed it to Renata this afternoon, after the meeting. Renata texted me. She said Whitfield's copy has the exact same second signature. T.A., blue ink, same hand.*
*So the board's copy is the fake.*
*Yes.*
Mara sat in the church parking lot with her hands on the wheel and thought: the board copy is the duplicate. That's the marked duplicate. Someone retyped the form so the board wouldn't see the second signature.
The question now was whose initials were T.A., and why the second signature had been added at all — because a void-transfer form, as far as she was learning, didn't normally need a counter-approval unless the seat had already been paid into for the current quarter. In other words, the counter-approval field existed specifically to handle the awkward case of a family seat that had money on it. And her seat had money on it.
Her money. Two quarters of it. Applied to Hollis Ellison's dues.
She drove home.
===
Her apartment was in the back half of a duplex on the north side of town, over a garage, and the only reason she could afford it was that her landlord was a retired veterinarian who liked her. It was one bedroom and one bathroom and a kitchen with a window over the sink that got the afternoon sun. She put her keys down on the counter and her phone down next to them and stood in the doorway of the kitchen for a long moment.
Then she went to the bedroom and pulled the plastic bin out of the closet.
It was the bin she never opened. Three years of Daniel's things — his jacket, his phone, his watch, the small wooden box of cufflinks, the cheap leather wallet with the initials burned into the inside. She had not opened it since she packed it the week after the funeral. She had told herself she never would.
She opened it.
She was looking for paper. Any paper. Twenty minutes of slow going through his wallet and his jacket pockets and the small wooden box and she found three things that mattered.
One, a receipt from 7-Eleven dated the week before he died, for a two-dollar coffee and a five-dollar roll of quarters, because Danny played the arcade machine at the roadhouse on Route 6 and he had never once in his life turned down a chance at the high score.
Two, a folded-out square of paper in the little back slot of the wallet where people keep the cards they don't want to lose — and this was a piece of Willow Bend stationary, hand-lined, four rows and two columns, with the heading *SUMMER STAFF — GRILL — 2019 SEASON*, and under it, a rotating duty list in Daniel's looped handwriting, the way he wrote when he was mad because the list had been changed again: *Sunday — Grill 12–6 — Ellison + Whitfield.*
Three, a small brass dining chit.
She had not known it was in there. It had been in the back slot of his wallet, against the folded staff paper, both of them in the small pocket with his membership card. The chit was old, more worn than the one she'd picked up this morning, and when she turned it over, the Thursday date stamp was not Thursday. It was a Sunday date stamp, four years ago, and the year was nine years back.
Nine years.
The member number written on it was in a handwriting that was not hers and not Hollis's.
It was Daniel's.
She held the chit up under the kitchen light and looked at it, and it took her a long time to understand what she was looking at. The number field read the same number that was on her current chit — her brother's member number, the one she was being accused of stealing. The initials at the bottom of the older chit read *D.E.* — Daniel Ellison, in his own hand, dated nine years ago, at the bottom of a chit for a lunch he had signed for in the grill room under a number that the club's procedure at the time allowed him to use because he was a legacy member's son dining on the family account.
And she had been holding it, since she brought the bin home, with the plastic bag in her hand, without knowing what she had.
Her phone rang. It was Renata Cole.
"Ms. Ellison," Renata said. Her voice was the same as it had been in the grill room. Cool. Exact. Not unkind. "I'd like you to meet me at the club at six forty tonight. Finton Whitfield will be here. Serena Downing has agreed to sit in on the meeting. You may bring anyone you want."
"May I bring someone from outside the club?"
A pause. "Yes."
"Someone who will take notes."
"Please," Renata said quickly. "Please do."
===
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All 8 chapters
- 1The palm landed before the words did.
- 2The parking lot at Willow Bend was laid out like everything else about the club — deliberately. There was the members' row, shaded, close to the door, with brass plaques for the old families. There was the guests' row, in the sun. And the
- 3Serena Downing's email arrived at 4:12. Mara opened it at the red light at the corner of Route 12 and Sunset Boulevard and had to pull into the church parking lot on the far side to actually read it, because there was an attachment, and t
- 4She called Dee.
- 5There was a second signature. There was a president who had known it for eleven weeks. There was a form in the board copy with a field retyped and a form in the membership office with the field intact. There was a chit in the plastic bin
- 6By nine-forty she was outside on the brick path between the clubhouse and the parking lot, standing under the shade of the porte-cochère with Dee beside her and both of them not saying anything.
- 7She did not call her father from the break room. She finished her shift. She drove home. She fed the cat that wasn't really hers — the one that had adopted the duplex — and she sat at her kitchen table with her laptop open and the screens
- 8Tuesday morning at eight forty, Mara pulled into the Willow Bend members' row parking lot and parked in the second spot from the door.
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