“Yes. If Tara calls him tonight, that account will be empty by sunrise, and a forg*d signature with no money trail is a family dispute. With the trail, it’s a fel*ny.”
The air had gone cold.
Somewhere down the street, a dog barked at a garbage can.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing.” Jean looked at me for a long time. “Sleep in your own house. Say nothing. They need until tomorrow at one o’clock, when the bank’s branch records arrive and Wade’s account can be frozen at the same moment.”
“Tomorrow is Karen’s lunch.”
“Yes.” Her voice softened. “I know. I wouldn’t ask, Scott, if it were any other day.”
I looked at the lit window of my kitchen.
“She’ll be there. She’ll sit in the front row.”
“Let her.”
I wanted to say no.
I wanted to throw the purse, the pad, the pen, all of it, into the street.
Then Molly’s small shape appeared in the doorway behind me, her coat on, her backpack on her shoulder, the purple suitcase in her hand.
She was leaving with Jean for the night.
“Dad,” she said. “Are you going to be okay?”
I knelt and pulled her in.
“I should have listened sooner.”
“You listened,” Molly whispered. “You just took a long time.”
It is the kindest thing anyone has ever said to me.
I have never felt more ashamed.
At 2:14 that morning, I woke on the couch and heard a voice in the garage.
I walked barefoot across the cold kitchen tile.
The door to the garage was open an inch.
The air that slipped through smelled of motor oil and cut grass.
Tara stood by my workbench in her robe with her phone to her ear, her back to me.
“Wade, I said don’t touch it until Monday.” A pause. “Because everyone will be at St. Brendan’s. Nobody’s looking at accounts on a Saturday. I’m going to wear the watch. People trust a woman who wears a d*ad woman’s jewelry.”
Another pause.
“No, she’ll be there. Let Molly see how it feels.”
I did not breathe.
I did not move.
I stood in the dark with my hand against the doorframe and my heart going like a rented drill, and I made myself walk back to the couch without a sound.
In the morning, Tara came downstairs in a black dress and her good heels.
On her left wrist, gold against her pale skin, sat Karen’s Cartier.
She turned her arm in the light, almost shyly.
“Karen would have wanted me to wear it,” she said.
I said nothing.
At the church door, Molly stepped out of Jean’s car in her yellow dress, with the little sunflower pin her mother used to wear, and Tara bent to her, smiling for the benefit of the arriving mourners, and kissed her on the forehead.
“Today, sweetheart,” she murmured, “you’re going to tell everyone you’re sorry.”
Chapter 4: Where Would a Girl Like Her Get It?
St. Brendan’s fellowship hall smelled of coffee, lemon cake, and floor wax.
Eighty-some people sat at round tables under paper streamers the color of oatmeal.
Karen’s sixth memorial luncheon was a Hale and Calloway tradition by now: the Mass at eleven, then the long folding tables, the ham sandwiches, the old slideshow.
On the wall a screen showed Karen at twenty-six, laughing on a pier in Lake Geneva with her hair blowing across her face.
I had watched that photo come up six times.
I had never wanted to be anywhere else more than I did on that Saturday.
Tara had taken the head table.
She sat straight-backed in her black dress with Cole beside her, one hand resting lightly on the table, the gold watch catching the fluorescent light.
Molly sat at the far end with Jean.
She hadn’t touched her sandwich.
Detective Alvarez had texted me at 12:10.
Records on the way. 1:00 sharp. Don’t tip her.
I looked at the clock above the kitchen pass-through.
12:41.
“Sweetheart, you’re not eating,” Karen’s sister Beth said.
Beth was forty, a school nurse from Milwaukee with Karen’s eyes and Karen’s laugh.
She had come to every lunch, and every Christmas, and every one of Molly’s birthdays, and she always cried at the slideshow.
She bent toward Molly and lowered her voice.
