Chapter 7: Carol
I didn't hang up.
"Who is this?" I said.
"You know who this is." The voice was steady.
Older.
Not angry — something colder than angry.
"Joe has already told you about me.
I can see you're both still at the house."
I looked at Joe.
Mouthed: *Carol.*
His face went rigid.
"You're watching the house," I said.
"I've been watching for a long time." A pause.
"Your mother was a careful woman.
But she made one mistake.
She trusted that the secret would d*e with her.
It won't."
"What do you want?"
"I want you to leave the deposit box alone.
Whatever Margaret left in there — it belongs to the past.
Open it, and you'll spend the next year of your life in a courtroom."
"On what grounds?"
"The money Joe st*le was never fully accounted for.
I have documentation.
The original company records.
If those come out, Joe faces charges.
And you — as his wife, as a joint beneficiary of your mother's estate — could be named in a civil suit."
Joe had moved to stand beside me.
He could hear her voice from the phone.
"That money was paid back," he said loudly.
"Margaret paid it back herself."
"Margaret paid three thousand dollars," Carol said.
"The total that went missing from that account over the following eighteen months was closer to forty thousand.
Joe wasn't the only one taking from it.
But he was the one who got protected.
The others didn't."
Silence.
I looked at Joe.
His mouth was open slightly.
"I didn't know that," he said.
"I swear to you, Ellen.
I took three thousand.
That was all."
"He's telling the truth about his part," Carol said.
"But his name is on the original audit report alongside the others.
Margaret buried that too.
It's all in the notebook."
"Then why haven't you gone to the police yourself?" I said.
A longer pause this time.
"Because I don't want Joe in prison," she said.
"I want him to know that I know.
I want him to live with it the way Diane lived with everything he put her through."
"He didn't kjll your sister, Carol."
"He didn't save her either."
The line was quiet for a moment.
Outside, the maple shifted in the wind.
I could see it through the kitchen window — enormous, dark, the hole I'd dug still open at its base.
"What do you want?" I said again.
"Specifically.
Tonight."
"I want you to walk away from the deposit box.
Let whatever Margaret left in there stay sealed.
And I want Joe to call me — directly — so we can have a conversation that is thirty years overdue."
"And if we don't?"
"Then I send the notebook to the detective who took your statement tonight.
And we see what happens next."
She hung up.
I set the phone down on the counter.
Joe sat back down at the table.
He put both hands flat on the surface and stared at them.
"Forty thousand dollars," I said.
"I didn't know."
"I believe you." I sat down across from him.
"But Carol has the notebook.
And if what she's saying is true, Mom knew about the larger amount and covered it up anyway."
"Why would she do that?"
I thought about my mother.
The woman who bluffed a twenty-five-year-old into silence with a worthless document.
The woman who planted a maple tree over a rusted box and tended it for twenty-seven years like a second child.
"Because she'd already decided you were worth protecting," I said.
"And once Margaret made a decision, she didn't unmake it."
Joe looked up at me.
His eyes were red at the edges.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"For all of it.
For the money.
For the silence.
For every Christmas morning I chose work over her table because I couldn't sit across from her knowing what she knew about me."
I didn't answer right away.
"We're going to the bank tomorrow," I said finally.
"Both of us."
"Carol said—"
"I heard what Carol said." I picked up my phone.
"And tomorrow I'm going to find out what my mother actually left us.
Because she didn't bury that box for Carol to win.
She buried it for me to find."
Joe was quiet for a long moment.
Then he said, "What if what's in the deposit box changes things between us?"
I looked at him across the table that had held twenty-seven years of careful silence.
"It already has," I said.
May you like
"That started tonight.
We just have to find out which direction it goes."
