Iris’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t have a perfume allergy.”
“It’s something I recently developed.”
Max flashed his annoying-as-shit megawatt smile and stood to pull out a chair. “My brother’s loss is my gain.” He leaned toward Charlotte, closed his eyes, and inhaled dramatically. “You smell amazing.”
I grumbled something about his unprofessionalism under my breath as the five of us sat down. It quickly became apparent that Charlotte was going to avoid eye contact with me, which I initially thought was perfect until I realized that when she wasn’t looking in my direction, it permitted me unlimited opportunity to stare at her face. She was so goddamn distracting. I had to force my eyes to pay attention to something else, so I studied our CPA.
Matthew Garamound had to be ten years older than my grandmother. His hair was silver, his skin tanned, and he always wore a tie with an American flag pin. He’d been the company’s CPA since Iris had opened her doors, and the four of us got together four times a year like clockwork—two weeks after the end of each quarter. Only we’d just had our quarterly meeting a month ago, and we never brought an assistant to these types of things.
After the waitress took our drink order, Matthew folded his hands on the table and cleared his throat. “So . . . you’re probably wondering why we’re getting together today.”
Max leaned to Charlotte and whispered, even though we could all hear him, “I’m actually wondering what perfume you’re wearing.”
I answered through gritted teeth. “How about you try to keep the harassment of employees limited to when you’re lying on the couch in their offices.”
Matthew looked between the two of us. While I sported a scowl, my comment seemed to please my little brother.
“Yes, well anyway,” Garamound continued, “I asked Iris and Charlotte to pull this meeting together today because I, unfortunately, have some bad news to deliver.”
I immediately assumed he was sick. “Everything okay with you, Matt?”
“Oh.” He realized what I thought. “Yes, yes. I’m fine. This is about the business and one of your employees. Namely, Dorothy.”
“Dorothy?” I furrowed my brow. “Dorothy’s sick?”
Iris took over the conversation. “No, Reed. Everyone’s health is just fine. Why don’t I start at the beginning? As you know, I’ve been having Charlotte compile a list of our cleaning vendors so that I could consolidate the number of partners we use and receive a bigger volume discount on services. As part of that project, I had her list all invoices paid for each vendor during the last sixty days.”
“Okay, yes, I knew she was working on that.”
“Well. She came across a few invoices that were paid wrong—a transposition in numbers. For example, one invoice was for $16,292, yet it was paid for $16,992. Another one was for $2,300, and it was paid for $3,200. None of them were off by a lot—all less than a thousand dollars each. But Charlotte noticed it on four different invoices, so she mentioned it to me. Now, Dorothy is almost as old as I am, and she’s been with me as long as you boys have been alive, so I assumed maybe she needed stronger glasses, and I went to speak to her.” My grandmother’s face fell, and I knew what was coming next. “She acted really strange. So I asked Matthew to look into some of the transactions.”
Garamound picked up where Grandmother left off. “I did an audit of her transactions over the last twelve months and found that she’d transposed numbers on fifty-three different invoices. Like the ones that Charlotte found, they weren’t very big mistakes and at first glance seemed to be a simple transposition of numbers. But the errors were never in our favor. In total, those fifty-three payments were overpaid by more than thirty-two thousand dollars. When I dug a little deeper, I found that each payment was being made to two different accounts—the right amount was going to the vendor, but there was a separate ACH payment being made for the difference, and all of that was funneled into one account.”
I exhaled a deep breath. “Dorothy has been skimming.”
Garamound nodded. “Unfortunately so. I haven’t gone back to the beginning of time—but it’s been going on for at least the last few years.”
“Jesus. Dorothy is like family.”
Iris had tears in her eyes. “She has a sick grandson.”
Swallowing that news, I tasted salt in my throat.
Charlotte chimed in, her own eyes about to overflow. “Choroidal metastasis. It’s extremely rare in children. She’s been taking him to Philadelphia for experimental treatment that isn’t covered by insurance.”
“I had no idea.”
The mood of lunch took a drastic turn after that. It was one thing to catch an employee stealing, but entirely another to catch a long-term one who had a damn good reason. We all agreed we needed to give the situation some thought and that we’d reconvene at the end of the week to discuss how to handle things.