The Talented Miss Farwell Page 6

  She might even have cried, then, a little or a lot, driving back home through Pierson. She might have given in to all the sadness, the confusion about what would come next. Why did she feel so young? She was assistant comptroller, not some little kid, not some orphan. She was twenty-two years old!

  The first thing Becky saw when she pulled around in front of the house was Ingrid’s VW bug. A blaze of gladness spread through her. She got out of her own car, stuffed full of lilies and gladiolas, and walked over to Ingrid, who was sitting in the passenger seat with the engine off and the overhead light on, flipping through Glamour magazine.

  Ingrid rolled down her window. She gestured to the brown paper grocery bag on the seat next to her. “Ritz crackers and a thing of that port wine cheese. Also Keebler cookies, the ones with M&M’s. Because I didn’t know if you’d want salty or sweet. Or both, because that would be the right answer. And . . .” Ingrid rummaged on the car floor and pulled up a glass bottle. Johnnie Walker Black. “Voilà. My dad’s. He was saving it for a special occasion probably. So, you know.”

  Becky had to use both hands to tug open the old car’s heavy freezing door. Ingrid broke into a foolishly huge smile. “I can just drop this stuff off,” she said, grabbing up the bag and bottle, scrambling to follow Becky to the house. “If you’re not, like, up for company.”

  “I’m never up for company,” Becky said, holding the front door open for Ingrid. “You pick whatever shows we watch, I just don’t want to talk. I’m sick of talking.” She watched Ingrid kick off her shoes and start tearing the wrapping off the booze. “Also I’m in an incredibly grouchy mood,” she added.

  “Tell me something I don’t know, Becky Farwell. Here’s your drink.”

  As wasn’t uncommon in Pierson, or in other small Midwestern cities, Hank Farwell’s death triggered a wave of town love to carry his only child through the difficulties that came afterward. Becky had her pick of invitations for Christmas and New Year’s, which she celebrated as a guest in multiple homes for multiple dinners, with the Beantons’ as the main event. Hank’s death propelled her to officially and finally close Farwell Agriculture Inc., and it perhaps nudged along a surprise salary bump at Town Hall. Her solitary circumstances, that tragic aura, and her grit—no quality more admired in Pierson—all of it combined to plant her firmly in the town’s psyche.

  Theoretically, she could have gone off to college then. No one would blame her. But she knew it was too late. Every week Karl ceded her some new responsibility. By now she was overseeing the entire team of in-house accountants and had been asked to sit in on senior management meetings about fiscal planning. She owned—and wore in regular rotation—four skirt suits and a dozen blouses.

  She and Ingrid had become—Becky could admit it now—friends. She bought a VCR so they could watch all the tapes Ingrid rented on weekends. She started stocking Entenmann’s Danish rings and Diet Dr Pepper and Tato Skins. On the nights they weren’t together Ingrid often called Becky on the phone, just to talk. It took a long time for Becky to understand this and then to come to enjoy it. They argued over the merits of WMMR (clearer reception, insipid afternoon DJ) versus WOHA (less likely to tune in, deeper cuts of George Strait and Randy Travis). They shared gossip about classmates, picking apart old high school beefs and infatuations. They compared stories about creepos at work. Becky got used to Ingrid’s tendency to turn all topics toward the men she was interested in and a repetitive speculation about whether or not they would call her. Becky’s role, she learned after an awkward bungling, was to insist against all evidence that yes, of course, fill-in-the-name would call. When Ingrid’s yawns began to break into her every other comment, Becky would try to end the call but Ingrid never wanted to. She liked to talk when she was sleepy. Plus, there was always more to say.

  Sometimes they went together to church, especially if there was a service project after coffee hour, like boxing up lunches for a shelter or tutoring kids in earth science or algebra. Both were hard workers and liked doing good for the town, especially if it came with lots of praise from others (Becky) or a buffet of baked goods (Ingrid). Pierson got used to the two of them together, and eventually Becky did too.

  But the main reason she didn’t want to leave—or leave yet—had to do with the Activity. Because of the holidays coming fast after her father’s death Becky ended up out of the office for over a month. Each time she stopped by to check in, see if she could help out, Karl had turned her right back around and sent her away.

  All right. If she couldn’t be at the office, couldn’t keep a steely eye on the receipts and the budget items, what she could do was learn. By now she’d grown past the local art circles, the estate shows, and the small-time county galleries. She’d thumbed through every back issue of Midwest Art in the library and now drove around to newsstands to seek out magazines everyone in town would have scorned as uppity: Vanity Fair, Vogue, Bazaar, and even some oversized European publications that cost nearly ten dollars each. Here, the coverage of art was blue-chip, New York–based. Becky picked up on names and trends. She spent long winter afternoons sinking deep into images of oil paintings and shiny tubular sculptures and—wherever she could find them—prices, auction sales, records, and results. She lay in bed—her own bed, in the same small room—and thought about art. Buying art and selling art.

  7

  Pierson

  1987

  Town Hall’s basement ran the length of the block-long building, was barely heated, and functioned as a damp chaotic storage space everyone tried to forget about. No one wanted to go down there, what with all the jokes about bodies buried and black widow spider nests. But people had to, for extra chairs and holiday decorations and to dump boxes and boxes of files they weren’t allowed to throw away. Mostly staff begged the maintenance guy, Scotty, to do those jobs for them.

  Becky used to scoff at all such wimpiness but now that she’d spent two hours sunk in the clammy gloom, she had to admit it was creep central down here. That hulking structure shoved up against the north wall, for example, the bulbously shaped thing eight feet tall and shrouded by a cracked blue tarp, what the hell was that? Why did she keep eyeing it every few minutes, when she was supposed to be maximizing the time she’d found to sneak down here?

  Becky shifted her perch on the file box she sat on, angling away from the tarp-hidden monster. The lights buzzed and flickered, straight out of a horror movie, but that was why she had a flashlight. Clamping it under an armpit, she put the cover back on one box of files, made a tiny pencil hash mark to its lower corner, and shoved it over to make room for the next. If she kept a steady pace, she could get through two or three more before anyone upstairs noticed she was missing. Karl was out for the day, and the others thought she was delivering copies of the latest memo around the office.

  The sheer number of bank accounts held by Town Hall—past and present, closed or dormant or active or some kind of combination thereof—would have daunted much more experienced accountants. It was a running joke upstairs that the tax firm who’d reviewed their books for decades, and hadn’t flagged a single transaction since anyone could remember, didn’t actually exist. Becky sized up the magnitude of this chaos—this subterranean tunnel of interlocked funding sources—and grasped instantly how it worked in her favor. She bought a small spiral notebook and began to carry it with her to every meeting, budget session, and client dinner. She filled it with notes tracking every account ever mentioned, and compared those with whatever she could find in the current books and bank statements. Then she asked Scotty to carry up file boxes from the basement, so that she could—as she put it to Karl, who shook his head at the idealism and foolishness—“Brush up on institutional memory.” Get a handle on how things used to run. On her own time, of course. Personal career development.

  Karl was completely oblivious to the inner workings of the budget—how the town’s money got sorted and pumped through the various pipes and then shunted toward, or away from, categories of expenditure. He
was a people person, not a number cruncher. Happy to leave all those pesky details to Miss Farwell, if anyone asked. As long as the line items were accounted for in the spreadsheet he’d be a happy camper.

  Soon, Becky stopped asking Scotty and began to carry up files herself, two boxes at a time, the way she used to when helping her father with inventory. Today she’d simply gone to the files themselves, small spiral notebook in hand. It was easier, more direct, even if she couldn’t stop sneezing—from mold?—and jumped every time the ancient boiler hissed. Nothing wrong with being discreet, either.

  Becky was searching for something. Had been for the three months since she’d come back to the office. Although she still scooped up any wayward funds that came across her desk via someone’s stupid mistake, for the time being she had paused any real art buying or even shopping. The search had taken over, even though she didn’t know exactly what she was searching for—a combination, a path, a recipe. She’d know it when she found it.

  She was about to pack it in that afternoon—or was it evening by now?—when she glimpsed a file of records that looked different. Bank statements, like so many of the others, but these were from Midwest Credit Union. Huh. As far as Becky knew, those accounts had been closed. She checked her notebook, went back to lift the lids of a few other boxes. Town Hall’s many accounts were held at several banks, officially on the theory that the more widely spread out the financials were, the better. But Becky knew the real reason was probably neglect and carelessness. It was an extra step to officially close an account; easier to just start using a new one.

  The statements in Becky’s hands held as little as sixty dollars in one account, a hundred and ten in the other. She couldn’t remember seeing a current balance from Midwest listed on any recent budget documents. She couldn’t remember if Midwest Credit Union was even still in business!

  Whipping her arms in front of her as she went—horrible ticklish spiderwebs brushed her face and hair—Becky took the folder back upstairs to her office. The halls were quiet, everyone out at weekly happy hour. It was 6:30 pm—too late to speak to a customer rep. She dialed the number on the ancient statement anyway, holding her breath. After five rings, a machine picked up. “Thank you for calling Midwest Credit Union. We are now closed. Business hours are from 8:30 am until—” Becky hung up, energized.

  Maybe, she thought. Maybe this could work.

  Three weeks later she watched Karl present to the town council the “Streamlined Savings” proposal she’d carefully created. In a series of overhead acetates, with a color-coded flow chart, he pointed out how much money was wasted in keeping overlapping accounts. Karl—that is, Becky—had created a plan to realign them by subject area (Payroll, Building Ops, Park Security) and budget time frame (Tax, Reserve, Capital Development). With attentive research to which banks provided the best value, the reorganization could save an estimated eighteen to twenty percent on fees per year.

  The council seemed pleased, if not dramatically enthused, and authorized Accounting to go ahead with the project.

  “Don’t think this means an automatic raise,” Karl told her afterward, as they walked back to their corner of the office.

  You’re welcome, she wanted to say. “It’s just a better work flow,” she did say.

  “Uh huh,” Karl said.

  So the realigning of accounts was her cover. It was clear that Becky was taking the reins of Town Hall’s banking, and everyone seemed relieved they didn’t have to think about that mess anymore. She made sure to choose the most inopportune times to press Karl for his signature on various changes: closing accounts and renaming other ones. Harried, he’d grump and sigh but did what she told him to do, without a lot of close attention. In this way, Becky added herself as signatory to almost all the restructured accounts.

  At first, every account Becky set up or renamed was legitimate, and in familiar banks: Federal, First Bank, Chase. Becky waited for the secretaries to begin to recognize and nickname them, for the junior accountants to sigh loudly at the change (junior accountants sighed loudly at any change). She watched with pride as her new accounts accordioned in and out with money, a much smoother process than before. It was odd, the way she could still enjoy the well-performed functions of her actual job, when the job itself was already beginning to seem mildly beside the point.

  Just goes to show, Becky wanted to tell someone, how much college is worth, how differently things operate in the real world. A page from her textbook in that Accounting 101 night class often came back to her. A colored sidebar titled “Prudent Protocols,” in the chapter on financial controls. Segregation of duties was the upshot. The person who writes the checks is not the same person who deposits the checks.

  But Becky was!

  So much for all those professors, all that tuition people paid. After all, even if she hadn’t been stealing (Becky never used that word, so unsubtle), she would have been the designated person for all those duties. She had seen the same names on all the receipts in the basement files, her ghostly predecessors. This was the way Pierson had always run the town business. Was it her place to raise a hand and say, “Hey, we ought to do things the way textbooks tell us”? In her mind’s eye she saw the expression on her father’s face, on the faces of all the farming businessmen she’d known: a snort, a flash of scornful pity for folks who didn’t know how to pick up and get something done by their own damn self.

  “Earth to Becky. Hello in there?” Ingrid snapped her fingers. They were in line at Hefeweisen’s, and it was finally their turn to order.

  “What. Oh. Uh . . . whatever you’re having.”

  “Bratwurst for two, extra slaw.” Ingrid shrugged. “What’s up? You are out of it, lady.”

  They paid for their sandwiches and ate at a crowded counter, with two root beers. Becky had followed Ingrid from store to store this Saturday, trying on clothes without much heart. The problem of how to set up the Midwest account, the real one, without notice, had taken over her every waking moment. Should she slide it by Karl, like the others? What if he noticed the unusual bank, had questions about whether Midwest was even still open and why they still held accounts there? Why would Becky want to keep an account there, of all places?

  Also there was the mail problem. Becky spent a day lurking around the office mailboxes, pretending to study some papers, to figure out the reason she’d never come across any of the Midwest statements. The postal carrier dropped off the day’s mail around 11 am, with a thunk inside the ground-floor hall. One of the secretaries lugged the piles upstairs—taking her sweet time, Becky noticed—to sort into each person’s labeled wood box. At the end of the sorting the secretary dumped a handful of mail down below the boxes, onto a messy shelf Becky had never paid attention to before. After the woman left, Becky moved in.

  Return to Sender. Not at This Address. Forward. Redirect. Piles of mail addressed to names Becky knew hadn’t been working in the office for years. Magazines with no specific addressee, office product catalogues, mailers and circulars, and . . . bank statements. There. She plucked out an envelope bearing Midwest’s cheesy old logo and ugly font. “Mr. Theodore Reed, Financials,” was mass-typed onto the envelope. Ted Reed hadn’t been here since the seventies, as far as Becky knew. And they hadn’t had a separate Financials Department ever. No wonder the statements had gone missing. The secretaries must have been dumping this monthly envelope into the junk drawer for years!

  “Ooh, hurts so good,” Ingrid said, crunching on the last of her salt and vinegar chips. “I either hate-love these or love-hate them.”

  “Disgusting,” Becky said automatically.

  “Oh shut up. Want to get a cookie at Brel’s?”

  “I don’t have time. Can you drop me—”

  “Fine, fine, after a couple errands, okay?” Ingrid loved to drive around Pierson with Becky, picking up a few groceries or stopping to check out a sale. I have to get out of that house, she would say, meaning her parents’. But she made no moves to get her own place,
so Becky knew they really didn’t drive her as crazy as she claimed.

  Becky, who didn’t actually have any particular place to be, let Ingrid take her all over town, waiting in the car while her friend went in and out of the pharmacy and then the bookstore. It wasn’t until they were waiting for an oil change that Becky noticed the rubber-banded pack of envelopes and one Country Kitchen shoved up on the dashboard.

  “What’s this?”

  “My folks’ mail. Didn’t I tell you? Assholes keep knocking over the mailbox at fifty miles an hour—I think it’s on purpose but my dad sees the best in people. Anyway until they get something else set up they’re doing ‘Hold for Pickup’ and I’m doing the pickup.” Ingrid fussed with her sunglasses in the rearview mirror, pushing them up over her hair and then down again. “Let’s see if Top 40 is over already.”

  “So you’re renting a box or something?”

  “They’re way too cheap for that. No, if you ask, the post office will hold your shit, at least for a while. Gives me another thing to do on Saturdays, I guess.”

  Huh. Becky pretended to be interested in Country Kitchen’s recipe of the month, Southwestern Potato Tots, while she thought things over furiously. When Ingrid proposed milkshakes next, she said fine.

  The next week, Becky caught the mail carrier on the stairs.

  “I’ll take that,” she said, cheerfully reaching into the woman’s corrugated plastic box to scoop up the armful of mail. “Heading that way anyway.” Next day, she mimed a smoke break, lingering around the outdoor ashtray, and did the same thing. If the carrier minded, she didn’t say anything. Why should she?

  The fifth or so time Becky sorted the mail before the secretary could get to it, the woman asked if she had a problem with the previous system.