Playing Dead in Dixie (11 page)

The old guys could laugh if they wanted to.  But he didn't find much about Carly to be funny.  The more he got to know her, the less he knew about her.  Maybe she wasn't the brassy con-artist he thought she was at first.  But she was still a woman with secrets.  Lots of them.

Dangerous ones.

He may not have brought her into the bosom of his family, but so far he'd done a damned poor job of running her out of it.  She'd tried to leave once and he'd stopped her.  She'd offered to leave against last night, and instead taking her up on it, he'd practically begged her to stay and let him help her deal with whatever—whoever—she was hiding from.

And he didn't even want to think about the way she'd felt in his arms, her mouth eager and hot beneath his, her arms holding him so tightly against her that he could feel her heart racing in tandem with his own.

He bit back an oath and slapped the vinyl square into the glue bed, ignoring his uncle's soft snicker.

THE LAST CUSTOMER LEFT at 5:55 p.m., taking with him not only the sink fixtures he'd come there to find in the first place but also a matching towel rack and toilet paper holder.

Carly locked up and closed out the cash register, noting with satisfaction that her last minute sales pitch had added almost forty dollars extra to the man's ticket.  And he'd actually seemed grateful for her suggestions.

She could get used to this sales business, she thought as she locked the register and carried the receipts back to Floyd's office.  An extrovert by nature, she never seemed to have trouble talking to anyone, friend or stranger.

In fact, the only person who seemed to leave her speechless was Wes Hollingsworth.

She pressed her lips together in a tight line and placed the bag of bills and coins on Floyd's desk.
You are not going to think about Wes Hollingsworth, remember?

She unlocked Floyd's top left hand drawer and found the bank pouch where he said she'd find it.  She counted the money, checking it against the register receipts.  Finding the cash total a few pennies short, she reached for the penny jar Floyd kept in office for just such an event and matched the total to the receipts.  Saving out a few bills and most of the coins to seed the cash drawer for tomorrow, she put the rest of the money in the pouch.

She zipped the pouch and unlocked the bottom drawer, where Floyd kept the money overnight until he could make the bank deposit the next morning.

And found a stack of ledger books.

Carly sat back, surprised.  Floyd had a computer in his office; she'd assumed that the books were kept on a bookkeeping program.  It was where she'd planned to look for the store's financial files.

It had been a while since she'd seen actual ledger books.

Hands trembling, she placed the bank pouch in the drawer and picked up the ledger book that lay at the top of the stack.

Okay.  Last change to change your mind.  You can put the book down and walk away.

It wasn't any of her business if the Stricklands were losing money hand over fist.  She wasn't going to be here to see them go under.  No business of hers at all.

But they'd been good to her.  Better than some of her own family had ever been.  The least she could do was try to figure out what was causing their financial woes.

She opened the ledger book.

Scanning the entries, she ascertained that the ledger contained an up-to-date listing of credits and debits.  The last entry had been made yesterday, in neat, feminine handwriting.  Definitely Sherry's; Carly had seen the woman sign a few purchase orders over the last week or so.

Nothing jumped out at her in the ledger book, no obvious discrepancies at first glance.  But a quick look-through definitely supported Floyd's assertion that the hardware store was having financial troubles.  The debits were higher than the credits on almost every page of this ledger.

A finger of suspicion crept up the back of her neck, although she hadn't found anything yet to suggest fraud.  Still, hadn't her Proactive Fraud Auditing professor told her she had one of the best noses for fraud he'd ever seen?

Right now, her nose was itching big time.

She picked up the next few ledgers and laid them on the desk in front of her.  The next two books showed similar losses, dating back over three months.  The remaining books, however, showed a small but discernible profit.

Carly's fraud radar kept going off, pinging hard against her spine.  She put the ledger books back in the drawer and locked it, trying the key in the other deep drawer on the right side of Floyd's desk.  It opened easily and she looked inside.  She didn't find any ledgers in that drawer, only a long row of files.  She flipped through a couple.  Vendor invoices and purchase orders, dating back a few months.  Nothing recent.

Closing the drawer and locking it back, she placed the keys on the desk in front of her and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands.

Okay.  There were definite losses for the last three months.  Almost all profits for the months before that.  She'd need to see other ledgers, going back years instead of months, to work out whether the three month period of losses could be attributed to seasonal fluctuations or some other explainable economic factors.  Where would Floyd—or Sherry—keep them?

She looked around the office, her gaze falling on the file cabinet across the office.  She pushed away from the desk and crossed to the file cabinet.

Please don't be locked
.

She pressed the release catch on the drawer handle and pulled.  The drawer slid open with a soft whine.

Insider were more vendor invoices, going back to the previous year.  She tried the next drawer and found payroll files.  In the third drawer she found what she was looking for—twenty or so ledger books, lined up back-to-front in the file drawer.

She thumbed through quickly, looking for the summer months of the previous year.  Finding them, she left a piece of notepaper to mark where they'd been and carried them back to Floyd's desk.  Unlocking the desk drawer again, she pulled out the summer books from the current year and compared the totals to the totals from the previous year.

Whoa.

She blinked, rubbed her eyes, and checked again.

"Carly?"

Bonnie's voice, coming from somewhere out front, made Carly jump.  Nerves jangling, she grabbed the older ledger books and put them back in the file cabinet, thanking her lucky stars that she'd thought to mark their place.  She quickly shut the drawer and returned to Floyd's desk, sliding the more recent ledger books into the drawer just seconds before Bonnie opened the door to the office and walked in.

"There you are!"  Bonnie smiled at her.  "All finished up? I thought we could have a girls' night out, since Floyd is going to be out for a while more, helping Wes at his daddy's.  I thought we could drive over to Savannah and eat somewhere nice. How's that sound to you?"

"Sounds terrific."  Carly locked the desk drawer again and got up, tamping down a niggling sense of guilt.  She didn't really have anything to feel guilty about, did she?  It wasn't like
she
was the one trying to hurt the Stricklands.

But she thought maybe someone else was.

The difference in last summer's receipts and this summer's was striking, almost a twenty percent decrease.  Problem was, invoice payments had gone up more than twenty-eight percent over the same period.  That kind of jump in debit-to-credit ratio could have several different causes, market forces or bad purchasing practices, to name a couple.

But it could also be a sign of fraud.

She held out the keys to Bonnie and glanced down at her black slacks and burgundy blouse.  "Should we stop by the house and change clothes?"

Bonnie took the keys.  "What you're wearing is fine for the place I have in mind.  It's a little place near the river called Lulabelle's.  The food is wonderful but the atmosphere is casual.  You ever had soft-shelled crab?"  She waited for Carly to catch up and turned off the lights in the office.

"I love soft-shelled crab!"  Carly followed Bonnie out of the office, sparing a glance back at the file cabinet to make sure she'd shut it completely.  It was hard to see in the dark, but she thought she'd managed to close the drawer completely.

She hoped so, anyway.  She couldn't know for sure whether someone was defrauding the hardware store without spending more time looking through the books.

And she wouldn't get that chance if she did anything to make the Stricklands, or their hawk-eyed nephew, any more suspicious.

"Hey there, Miss Sherry."  The sound of Neely Boyd's voice carried from the bullpen into Wes's office, giving him just enough time to minimize the search window of the National Crime Information Center database before Sherry Clayton floated into the office on a cloud of Chanel No. 5.

"I need to talk to you about something, Wes.  D'you have a minute?"  Sherry didn't wait for an affirmative, settling herself prettily in the chair across from Wes's desk.

He swallowed a sigh.  "What can I do for you?"

"I've come across a dilemma, and I was hoping you could help me figure out how to proceed."  Sherry's voice lowered to a half-whisper.  "I don't actually have any proof . . ."

"Proof of what?"  Wes tried to keep the impatience from his voice.  It wasn't like Sherry Clayton was the only person in Bangor who liked to take her own sweet time telling a story, but Wes had other things to do.

Like figure out who Carly Devlin really was.

"I was supposed to close up the hardware store last night, but I had to take Mama to the doctor."

"Yeah, I was there when Floyd asked Carly to close up for him last night."

"That's what I heard."  Sherry shook her head, her rosebud-pink lips pressed together and her brow furrowed.  "I don't like to accuse—I mean, I can't say it was necessarily her . . ."

Wes's gut tightened with apprehension.  "What happened?"

"I think someone went through the books last night."

Tension coiled at the base of Wes's spine.  Carly had mentioned that Floyd had turned down her offer to take a look at the books.

Had she done it anyway?

"How could you tell?" he asked.

"I noticed that one of the file cabinet drawers wasn't completely closed when I got into the office this morning.  I checked inside the drawer and found this."  Sherry handed Wes a piece of notepaper.  "This was stuck between a couple of ledger books."

Wes took the paper.  It was a standard piece of notepaper, cream-colored, with "Strickland Hardware" printed at the top.  "What makes you think this means anything?"

"It was sticking up, like a marker."

Wes frowned.  "I still don't see why that's alarming."

"It means someone marked that place in the books.  She must have taken one or more of the ledger books out and marked her place so she'd know where to put them back."

Wes still wasn't convinced, even though he had his own suspicions about Carly.  "What did Floyd say when you told him?"

Sherry was quiet a moment.

"You did tell him?"

Sherry made a face.  "He thinks she can do no wrong.  He wouldn't believe me."

Wes almost laughed at the sulky tone of her voice.  Poor little Sherry Sheffield Clayton.  So used to being the prettiest girl in town for all these years, wrapping men around her finger whenever she liked.  But time didn't stop.  At thirty-five, Sherry wasn't head cheerleader and homecoming queen anymore.  Just like he wasn't Bangor High's star quarterback anymore.

Things changed, whether you wanted them to or not.

"Okay, let's say she was looking at the books."  Wes still didn't think Sherry's accusation was supported by facts, but he also knew Carly well enough by now to know that if she really wanted to look at the books, she'd figure out a way to do it.  "Is there anything particularly wrong with that?  Could she mess them up in some way?"

"I don't know.  Maybe."  Sherry's forehead accordioned.  "She's not supposed to be nosing around in the books, Wes.  Why would she even want to?"

"She has an accounting degree.  Maybe she was curious."

"
She
has an accounting degree?"  Sherry looked at him as if he was insane.  "Did she tell you that?"

"Yes."

"And you actually believed her?"

He
had
believed it, without any evidence at all.  She could be a high school drop out for all he really knew about her.

His stomach coiled in a knot.

"What do you really know about her?  What do any of us know?"  Sherry leaned forward.  "Or are you as taken in by a pretty face as everybody else?"

He didn't even want to think about the answer to that question.  "Look, Carly locked up last night, which means she had access to probably hundreds of dollars from the cash register.  Right?"

"Yes . . ."

"Did she take any of it?"

"I don't think so.  Floyd checked over the receipts and the money and didn't see anything strange.  No strange gaps in the register receipts."

"Well, if Carly were really up to no good, don't you think she'd have taken money?  What could she gain from looking at the books?"

Sherry sat back.  "I don't know."

"Were any ledger books missing?"

"No," she admitted.

"Then I don't really know what you think I can do."

"You could talk to Floyd.  I don't think he should let her close up anymore."

Not a bad idea, Wes conceded silently.  There was really no need for Carly to be left alone in the store, was there?

But when he brought the subject up with Floyd later that day as his uncle was closing up, Floyd looked at him as if he was crazy.

"She did a real good job of closing up.  She matched up all the receipts perfectly, even made a note for me that she'd had to add in six cents from the penny jar to make up a cash discrepancy."  Floyd zipped the bank pouch and laid it on the desk in front of him.  "She does it a heck of a lot better than Josh Scarborough.  He never writes down when he dips into the jar, and half the time when I check the receipts in the morning, he's two or three dollars off."