“Damn right we do.” He rose carefully from the chair. “Come with me. If we’re going to get through this weekend, you need to understand what we’re actually dealing with.”
He led me to a small bedroom that had been converted into a storage room, the kind of space a household produces when there are things no one wants to deal with. But in the corner was a filing cabinet, locked, and Victor produced a key from his pocket and opened it and withdrew a thick, color-coded binder with the quiet satisfaction of a man retrieving something he has organized over a long period of time in anticipation of exactly this kind of examination.
“Forty years as an accountant,” he said, setting the binder on the desk. “I may be dying, but I can still spot a fraudulent ledger.”
He opened it to the first section.
The documentation was meticulous in the way of someone who understood that documentation was the difference between accusation and proof. Elaine was billing two thousand dollars a month for his specialized medical diet while feeding him canned soup and toast. A home health aide line item of fifteen hundred dollars per month for a nurse who had not visited in weeks, the money rerouted to what Victor described, with a weariness that went beyond bitterness, as Elaine’s therapy, which was a retail variety rather than a clinical one. Brady’s contributions were listed in a separate section under property management fees, a series of withdrawals from joint household accounts that had been accumulating across eighteen months with the patient incrementalism of someone who understood that small thefts are harder to notice than large ones.
“How long have you known?” I asked.
“I’ve suspected for two years. I’ve had the documentation for eight months.” He closed the binder. “I was waiting for a witness. Someone honest. Someone they had also used up.”
He reached into the back of the filing cabinet and withdrew a sealed manila envelope.
“Inside this are the drafts for a new trust, a new will, and a transfer of assets. They think I haven’t updated my documents because I’m too confused to manage it.” He slid the envelope across the desk to me. “Brady will come home expecting a house and an inheritance. I’d like to discuss whether that seems appropriate to you.”
I looked at the envelope. I thought about the note on the kitchen counter. The forty-two dollars and fifty cents. The empty refrigerator. The cold house. I thought about the photograph of my father that I kept on my nightstand, and the money he had left me that was now somewhere on a Caribbean cruise funding a drink package and a suite for a woman Brady had sworn meant nothing.
