Chapter 5 - The Money That Never Arrived|
The first call from Ward Freight came from a woman Naomi had never met.
Her name was Rosa Alvarez, and she had worked in payroll for seventeen years.
She reached Mara through the number on Naomi's notice to the company.
“I need to know whether this conversation goes back to Edmund,” she said.
Mara explained whom she represented and what she could promise.
Rosa took a long breath.
“Then ask her about the fire fund.”
Two years earlier, an electrical fire had torn through Ward Freight's west warehouse during an overnight shift.
One employee had died, and four had been badly injured.
Naomi remembered a memorial service, her father's lowered voice, and a photographer asking everyone to stand closer together.
She also remembered being told that insurance and a company relief fund would take care of the families.
Rosa brought copies of the payment schedules she had been instructed to process.
Several payments had never been released.
Other entries showed transfers to an outside company named Bridgehouse Advisory.
The description beside each transfer read settlement administration.
“We don't need administration,” Rosa said.
“We need Luis Mendoza's widow to stop getting collection letters.”
Naomi looked at the figures.
She could not tell what was criminal simply by looking at a spreadsheet.
She could tell that the same families appeared month after month beside the word deferred.
Mara asked Rosa how the copies had come into her possession and whether the originals still existed.
She made careful notes.
Nothing about the conversation felt like the triumphant discovery Naomi might once have imagined justice required.
It felt like a tired woman admitting she was afraid of losing her health insurance.
Among the documents supporting the payment schedules was a written shareholder consent dated six months earlier.
It authorized the outside administrator to receive and distribute the money.
Edmund's signature appeared at the bottom.
Beside it was Naomi's.
She touched the paper.
“I didn't sign this.”
Mara asked her to look at the whole document before answering again.
Naomi did.
The signature resembled hers closely enough to make her stomach turn.
But she had never seen the resolution, had never approved the payments it described, and had never heard of Bridgehouse Advisory until that afternoon.
“I didn't sign it,” she repeated.
Rosa closed her eyes.
“I hoped that was the answer.”
After Rosa left, Mara explained that a copy and a denial were the beginning of an inquiry, not proof of everything they suspected.
She would bring in a forensic accountant and preserve what they had.
Naomi understood the caution.
Still, she had to put both palms against the table to keep herself from standing up and driving to her father's house.
All her life, he had told her that the family name was something she could damage through carelessness.
He had apparently found uses for it she had never been allowed to consider.
That evening, June reheated soup while Naomi read a public notice about the warehouse fire.
There was a photograph of Luis beside a young boy in a Little League uniform.
She remembered the boy from the memorial.
He had kept checking the doorway.
Naomi put the phone down.
“I went home afterward,” she said.
June set a bowl in front of her.
“After what?”
“The service.”
She looked toward the dark shop below.
“I went home and let someone tell me it had all been handled.”
June sat opposite her.
“Now you're checking.”
Mara called before they finished eating.
An initial search of Bridgehouse's company filings had identified its managing member.
Serena Vale.
For several seconds, Naomi heard only the refrigerator starting in the corner.
She thought of the single initial lighting Duly's phone at the wedding.
Then she thought of the word deferred beside a dead man's family.
May you like
The affair had been reason enough to leave.
What she had found afterward would require her to do something more difficult than disappear.
