The Pancake Money Nobody Could Find

What the bank had

She sat at my kitchen table. The same chair she sat in the week Walt died. I put a cup of coffee in front of her and she did not touch it.

She took her hand out of her coat. In it was a single sheet of paper, folded in thirds, the way you fold a letter. She laid it on the table between us and smoothed it flat with the heel of her hand. And she told me, in order, the way a person does when she has practiced it in the truck, what had happened.

She had not slept since Sunday. Dwayne had been up with his stitches and she had sat in the dark at their kitchen table with the bank statements for the auxiliary account spread out in front of her, because she could not stop looking at them. And at about three in the morning she had started thinking about the nineteen cents.

“I just kept thinking,” she said, “that in fourteen years you were never off. Not once. I kept thinking about you going back to the station at nine o’clock at night in your good coat to dig a nickel out of the lining of a cash box. And I thought, that woman did not take twenty-three hundred dollars.”

“You could have thought that three weeks ago.”

“I know,” Bernice said. “I know I could.”

“Then it came to me,” she said. “I’d asked the bank about a name. I had never asked about a number. So I was at the door of Pigeon Creek at a quarter to nine this morning, and when Rhonda opened it, I said, forget the auxiliary. Look at everything in the night drop for Saturday the eleventh. Any account. Any bag. Twenty-three hundred eighty-six dollars in cash.”

Rhonda Teague had pulled it up in about ten minutes.

It was there. The deposit had come in on the night of the eleventh, in a zipper bag, and it had been opened on Monday morning by two clerks in the back, just like it should have been. Two thousand three hundred eighty-six dollars even. But it had gone into the wrong account.

It had gone into the Elk Creek Township Volunteer Fire Department general fund.

I sat there. For about five seconds I could not make my mind work.

“How,” I said.

“The bag,” Bernice said. “It wasn’t ours. Ours has the auxiliary’s tag and it was in my purse in Evansville. You took one of the department’s off the shelf, and the department’s tag has the department’s number on it. The clerk keyed the deposit off the tag. She didn’t key it off your slip.”

“My slip was in the bag.”

“It was in the bag.” She put one finger on the paper in front of her. “She never read it.”

She unfolded the sheet.

It was a printed copy of an image from the bank’s system, black and white, a little grainy. A deposit slip. The date, October eleventh. “Elk Creek Fire Auxiliary.” An account number that was not the account number on the bag. A total of $2,386.00, with the sevens crossed.

It was my handwriting. Plain as day. Every letter of it mine.

I put my hand flat on the page.

I had expected a swell of triumph. What I felt was the odd, quiet thing you feel after a long fever, when you realize you can lie still and nothing hurts.

“Nadine Kessler does the department’s books,” Bernice said. “She saw the statement when it came on the first. She saw a big cash deposit on the thirteenth and she thought it was the township’s fire protection money. It comes around that time every year. She never looked twice. Nobody did. It’s been sitting right there in the department’s account for twenty-three days.”

“Twenty-three days,” I said.

“And nobody looked for it. Nobody looked for it except you, and you asked me to, and I told you I would, and I didn’t.”