Chapter 17 of 19Ten Thousand in Cash

The deadline Arthur Vance had given her was three days out, and if Genevieve Martel missed it the quilt would go to the highest bidder. The inventory of Elspeth Finch's estate had to be signed and filed at his office on Main Street in Seneca Quay by Friday afternoon. Miss it, and the county would take the house at 12 Elm Street into probate, where the sewing table and the ledger books and the pinned-up story quilt would be appraised and sold to settle the claims against a dead woman's name. Beatrice Cole's lawyer had already asked once. Genna had three days and two boxes left.

The cellar stairs were the narrow kind you took sideways, and the boxes sat stacked along the fieldstone wall behind the furnace. Elspeth had labeled every one of them in pencil — Taxes, Receipts, Church Rummage, Seeds — and her handwriting had gotten smaller with the years. The last box on the shelf read Household '92–'95, and its tape had gone amber and brittle.

Genna cut the flaps with a paring knife and carried the box up to the kitchen, where the light was better. Under a bundle of utility bills and three warranties for appliances that had died before she ever set foot in Seneca Quay, at the bottom of the box, sat a stack of bank statements folded together and held with a rubber band that broke when she touched it.

Mabel Henderson came up the walk at half past nine with a half-gallon of milk from Stewart's in one hand, and she found Genna at the kitchen table with paper fanned across the whole of it.

"You found the warren," Mabel said, nodding at the cellar door.

"I found the last of it."

"Elspeth never threw out a receipt in her life. I told her once she'd save the wrapping off a ham sandwich."

"This isn't receipts." Genna let the statements fall open across the table. "Four years of bank statements."

"Seneca Savings, then." Mabel put the milk in the refrigerator and sat down across from her. "Same window, same teller, the second Tuesday of the month, every month."

"Because I need to know how much money Elspeth had in 1994."

"Not much." Mabel pulled a statement toward herself and turned it right side up. "House and quilts, that was the whole of it. She did sell one to a museum in Rochester, the year before I moved in. I never saw her spend a nickel of it."

"How would you know?"

"Because nothing changed here. She drove that same Buick until the wheels near came off, and she bought her groceries at Tops like everybody else. If Elspeth had money, she sat on it like a hen."

Genna turned a page toward her. "Sixty-one dollars to the gas company. Forty-three eighty-seven to Wegmans. That's most of a month."

"That's Elspeth."

Mabel left a little after ten with a warning about the frost. Genna waited until the car had faded off Elm Street, then spread the four years of statements across the table, oldest to newest.

The October 1994 statement was fourth from the back. Genna went down the page line by line. Gas company, sixty-one forty-two; Wegmans, forty-three eighty-seven; Tops, twenty-two and change; fifty dollars to the Methodist church. Nothing above eighty dollars either way, and nothing she could not have written down from memory.

Halfway down, the machine had typed a line with no check number beside it. The word CASH sat where a payee belonged, and the amount ran the width of the column: 10,000.00.

The entry was dated October eighteenth, the day after Sam Gable found the Wanderer adrift with no one aboard. The balance before it was eleven thousand and forty-three dollars; after it, one thousand and forty-three.

In four years, the largest sum Elspeth Finch had ever taken out at once was two hundred and sixty dollars, in March of 1993, for a sewing machine. In the margin of the November 1993 statement she had written Rochester — museum in pencil and drawn a small box around it. The margin beside the ten thousand dollars was empty.

She called Arthur Vance at his office and got him on the first try.

"Miss Martel. I take it one of the boxes gave up something."

"Seneca Savings, October 1994. A cash withdrawal of ten thousand dollars."

"The balance before it?"

"Eleven thousand and forty-three. After it, one thousand and forty-three."

"To that point," Arthur said, "Elspeth Finch never mentioned an obligation of that size to me, and I prepared her returns for eleven years."

"Could the bank tell me where the money went?"

"No. Cash leaves the window and stops being anything a bank can follow." A chair creaked. "I'll leave her 1994 return at the desk for you."

"I'll file the inventory Friday, with the statements listed."

"Friday at four. I'll hold the hour."

She called Chen's Hardware next.

"Genna. What's wrong?"

"Nothing. I need the date on the coroner's report you brought me."

Paper moved on his end. "Found at the commercial docks, October seventeenth. Filed the eighteenth. They looked at him once and closed the book."

"The eighteenth." She kept her finger on the statement. "Elspeth took ten thousand dollars in cash out of her account that same day."

She heard him set something down on the counter.

"Ten thousand," David said. "That isn't a sum you carry in a coat pocket."

"No. And money like that leaves a bank and stops being a fact. Nobody signs for it, and nobody deposits it."

"Or it went to somebody who wasn't going to ask for a receipt."

Genna turned the statement over. The back was blank. "Carol Ann Petty told me Elspeth mailed a heavy box to Arizona three days after Julian Croft disappeared. Saturday to Tuesday. That's the eighteenth."

David didn't answer right away. "Same day the county closed the file on a man with no name."

"Well." Genna heard him breathe out. "That turns the whole thing around, doesn't it."

Genna lined the statement up with the edge of a place mat. "It changes who I've been looking at. Three people in this town have guarded a secret for thirty years. Now there's a fourth, and she's the one who kept the record."

"Lock up tonight, and call me if a car you don't know comes up the street."

"I will."

She hung up and stacked the statements into one bundle with October 1994 on top.

For three weeks she had read the quilt as a confession. A woman at the end of her life, setting down in thread what the town had chosen to forget, so that the record would be honest even if the town was not. It had explained everything she had found, and it had made Elspeth Finch a witness.

Witnesses do not pay.

Ten thousand dollars in cash, drawn from an account that held eleven thousand, on the day the county closed its file on a nameless man at the docks, in the week Elspeth mailed a heavy box west and called it a family matter. Someone had been paid, or someone had been sent away. The money had come out of Elspeth Finch's own account, and the margin was blank.

Genna took the pen off the windowsill and wrote on the inventory sheet, under records reviewed: Seneca Savings statement, October 1994 — cash withdrawal, $10,000.

Then she sat with the page in her hand and let the number settle into the story where it belonged.

For thirty years, Elspeth Finch had kept the record of what happened to Julian Croft. She had also financed it, out of her own account, in cash, and left the reason blank.