Nobody walked into Diane Halloran's office by accident. The storefront sat two doors north of the courthouse steps on the Corley square, in an Ohio town where everybody knew everybody's vehicle, so Margaret Ackerman parked hers around on Third and walked the block with the accordion file under one arm, the way she'd carried a nine-by-thirteen into a funeral lunch.
Thirty-eight at seven, wind out of the northwest, frost still lying in the shade along the courthouse lawn. One room, gold lettering on the glass, a coffee maker on the cabinet. Across the first-floor hall from the clerk of courts the recorder kept the tract index, so a woman here could end a marriage and pull a deed older than her own before lunch.
On the client side of the desk sat a cut-glass dish of butterscotch candies.
"Take one," Diane said.
"I don't want candy at nine in the morning."
"Nobody does. They sit there so people have something to do with their hands." Diane wrote the date across the top line of a yellow pad. "Tell it in order. Don't tell me what any of it means. That part's mine."
Margo unwound the elastic cord.
"September closed short. Two transfers out of the operating account, thirteen thousand five hundred fifty dollars, to a vendor card built in August with a post office box and no tax number. I didn't enter it."
"Go on."
"The box on that card is four eleven. It's also the statutory agent's box on this." She laid the printout down and turned it around. "Ackerman Comfort Group. Two members. My husband, and the girl I hired to answer the phones three years ago."
Diane read it twice. "And the stack?"
"Twelve months off the business card. A Columbus hotel, four times. A jeweler two hours east, twenty-two forty. Six hundred twelve a month to a Dayton lender, on a car her own insurance certificate has her driving. I wrote fleet on that woman's car twelve times."
"How did you come by them?"
"They come to the shop and I open them, first Saturday of the month, since Nick was in grade school."
"So they're records you have lawful access to in the ordinary course of your work." Diane underlined it twice. "Anybody asks you that, answer in those exact words."
"There's one more that isn't in here." Margo left the file shut. "Squared on his desk under his reading glasses, a nondisclosure agreement from Meridian Home Services. Their man signed in August. Roy's line is blank."
Diane's pen stopped moving. "That's a buyer."
"That's what a bookkeeper took it for."
"Three rules, and you'll hear them every visit." She held up a finger for each. "Don't confront him. Don't move a dollar — not into your own name, not out of an account, not one dollar. And write it down: what you saw, when, who else was standing there."
"I've done all three since the first night. I didn't know they had numbers on them."
"Then you're ahead of most who sit there." Diane took a butterscotch and did not unwrap it. "Now the one I need answered before you go."
She set the pen down flat and folded her hands over it.
"The building on Miller Pike. The six trucks. The bank loan. Whose names are on the paper?"
"Both of ours."
Diane's chin came up. "Both."
"Both." Margo let her glasses drop to the chain. "The ground and the building sit in a holding company, him and me, fifty-fifty. The loan's through Miami Valley on the square, from the year we put the addition on the shop, and it carries two personal guarantees. I typed it myself."
Diane put the pen down and left it there.
"Have you read it since the day you typed it?"
"I know what's in it. I put it in the order it's in."
"That is not the same question."
"No," Margo said. "It isn't."
"Then read it. Every page. Copy what you have a right to copy, leave the originals where they live, and carry nothing out of that building that isn't already yours." Diane sat back. "I won't dress this as a promise. A woman who signed a personal guarantee is no bystander to that loan, and a fifty-percent owner is not a thing a man sells around. He can try. It doesn't often get past a closing table."
"Often."
"I don't use the other word. Ask anybody on this square."
The retainer ran twenty-five hundred, billed against.
"From your own account," Diane said. "Not the business. Not the joint one."
"I have an account with nothing on it but my name. Opened it at nineteen, three thousand eight hundred in it, and not one paycheck of mine ever went in, because I have never had one." Margo wrote the check flat on the corner of the desk. "Twenty-four years."
Diane did not say she was sorry, which Margo put in her column.
Deb slid into a booth at the Bob Evans by the bypass at half past nine, scrubs with the cartoon molars on them, a Speedway cup carried in like it was allowed.
"Office doesn't open till ten Tuesdays. Order food. I'm watching."
The sunshine skillet ran nine seventy-nine, the coffee was bottomless, and the ticket came to eleven and change.
"So you did it."
"I retained an attorney."
Deb sat back, cup against her chin.
"Then hear what's chewed on me since Sunday. At Ada's. I asked did she still have that picture of the shop from when it was Grandpa Ed's old place."
"It was never his place."
"Which is why I said it." Deb turned her cup a half turn. "She went to stone. Hands folded in her lap, and twice inside a minute she asked did I want more noodles."
"She's eighty-two."
"She's eighty-two and she can tell you to the dollar what the collection came to at the ten-thirty."
Margo turned the ticket over and wrote on the back in pencil, small: SUN — ADA — HANDS. Then the day and the hour, because a note without one is a rumor.
"What's that?"
"Rule three."
Monday she had driven out Miller Pike to read the loan file before any lawyer and found the yard full. She drove out again after Deb and did not go in. Roy's truck sat at the door with the tailgate down; the silver crossover had the third spot. Through the front window the phone lights were going in a row, the first week the county's furnaces wake up, and Gil had four names on the rotation board with Nick's up twice. The fire safe stood six feet from her own chair with the loan binder inside it, and she could not get near it with the office full.
Thursday, then. Roy had the Cardinal class up in Lima and Ashlyn was driving her mother to Dayton — both on the office calendar in Margo's own hand.
She sat in the lot with the heater running and turned it over the way she turned a statement that would not tie. Twenty-four years of typing his name and hers onto the same lines, and not one page out there moved with only half of them. So he had to know it. A man does not build a whole autumn around a signature he believes he needs. Either that binder held something she had typed and never once understood, or it held something he had forgotten was sitting in it. What does a man have to believe about his wife's name to plan his entire exit around not needing it?
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