Chapter 3 - Skeletons in the Drywall
The headquarters of Vance Construction had not changed in two decades, save for the pervasive smell of neglect. What had once been a bustling, cedar-paneled hub of suburban commerce now looked like a mausoleum for mid-level greed. The lobby carpet was frayed at the edges, water stains bloomed like brown flowers across the ceiling tiles, and the framed photographs of Arthur shaking hands with local mayors were coated in a fine layer of dust.
At eight o’clock on Wednesday morning, my tactical audit team—four forensic accountants in matching dark suits, carrying encrypted laptops—strode through the glass doors. I walked at the front.
Arthur was waiting in the executive boardroom, looking as though he hadn't slept in seventy-two hours. Beside him stood Celeste, wearing a beige cashmere turtleneck that couldn't conceal the tension coiled in her neck.
"Maya," Arthur said, attempting a smile that died instantly. "We’ve set up the conference room for your people. But really, this is excessive. Our chief financial officer, Greg Miller, has prepared a complete summary of our current liabilities—"
"Greg Miller was fired six months ago, Arthur," I interrupted without breaking stride. "You haven't had a certified CPA on payroll since 2021. You’ve been using an offshore bookkeeping service out of Belize to falsify your debt-to-income ratios."
Celeste stepped forward, blocking the corridor leading to the records room. "This is harassment. You’re humiliating your father in front of his remaining staff."
"Marcus," I said, glancing at my assistant.
Marcus immediately stepped forward, holding out an eight-page document stamped by the Cook County Circuit Court. "This is a court-ordered preservation of corporate assets and evidentiary audit clearance, signed at 7:15 AM pursuant to Ms. Vance's acquisition of the primary debt instrument. If you interfere with the team, Mrs. Vance, two deputies waiting downstairs will escort you from the premises."
Celeste took a step back, her mouth tightening into a thin, bloodless slit.
"The basement archives," I instructed my lead auditor, David Chen. "Start with the 2003 through 2005 paper boxes. The ones marked *Client Escrow - Residential Division*."
"Why those?" Arthur blurted out, a bead of sweat tracing the deep crevice beside his nose. "Those accounts were closed out nearly two decades ago! The IRS audited us back then and found nothing!"
"The IRS audited for underreported income, Arthur," I said, walking past him into his corner office. "They didn't audit for forgery."
Arthur’s office was an altar to Celeste’s vanity. Oil portraits of her hung on the wood-paneled walls. Receipts from Aspen ski resorts and Bal Harbour boutiques peeked out from unsecured manila folders on his desk. The company was drowning because Celeste had treated its operating accounts as her personal ATM, and Arthur had been too weak, too infatuated, or too terrified to stop her.
By three in the afternoon, the audit team had systematically dissected the past five years of financial hemorrhage. Vance Construction was worse than broke; it was an open crime scene of ghost payrolls, inflated subcontractor bids, and kickbacks paid to local zoning officials.
Then David Chen knocked on Arthur's office door.
"Maya," David said quietly. "You need to see this. We found the 2004 physical transfer slips in the secondary vault behind the boiler."
I stood up immediately. Arthur rose as well, reaching for his chest as if his heart had skipped a beat. "Those are private company archives! You have no right—"
"I own your debt, Arthur. I own everything down to the pens in your desk," I said, walking past him.
In the basement, beneath the humming, fluorescent tubes that flickered like dying stars, the air was cold and smelled of damp cardboard. On a folding metal table sat three gray banker's boxes labeled *N. Vance - 2004 Inquiries.*
Inside were the original physical invoices that Celeste had used twenty years ago to accuse my mother of embezzling eighty-five thousand dollars from the Highland Lakes church construction fund.
I put on a pair of white cotton gloves and carefully lifted the top folder.
The invoices were there. Printed on old dot-matrix paper, bearing my mother’s unmistakable signature in blue ink at the bottom of each payment authorization. The signature that had convinced the police, the local newspapers, and the town that Nora Vance was a thief.
I pulled a high-intensity ultraviolet forensic light from my pocket and switched it on.
Under the specific waveband of light, the paper told a completely different story. Around the edges of Nora’s signature, faint impressions appeared—mechanical tracing grooves left by a ballpoint stylus pressed into carbon transfer paper. And in the upper right-hand corner of the underlying routing slip, illuminated beneath the blue glow, was an errant fingerprint left in oil-based cosmetic foundation.
David leaned in. "The signature was mechanically transferred from Nora Vance’s employment contract. But look at the handwritten bank routing numbers, Maya."
I adjusted the magnifying glass. The numbers were written in an exaggerated, back-slanting script. The number '7' had a distinctive European crossbar.
"Nora never crossed her sevens," I whispered. My pulse hammered in my ears like a war drum. "She learned bookkeeping at a Chicago community college. She hated European crossbars. She used to scold me when I tried to write them in middle school."
There was only one person in Arthur Vance’s circle who wrote with an affected European crossbar.
Celeste had spent two years at a finishing school in Switzerland in her early twenties. Every holiday card she had ever sent to our house—before she became my father’s mistress—had been signed with that pretentious, crossed-seven flourish.
"Get Mrs. Brenda Gable on the phone," I instructed David.
"Who is Brenda Gable?" David asked.
May you like
"The bookkeeper Arthur hired to replace my mother twenty years ago," I said, staring at the glowing ink. "The one he fired three weeks later when she started asking questions."
***
