Unaccounted For

by Nan Willard Cappo

  Alf Farnon brought in designers who knew fire trucks. The prototype of the first Scarlet Ghost went to trade shows and gathered crowds of firefighters and city supervisors. Orders followed, and the local banks made Farnon loans for more improvements. He installed a few robots for the painting, but assembling Scarlet Ghosts was a quieter, far less automated process than car-making. Fire trucks could sell for ten times the price of a car; every Scarlet Ghost was custom-built. A few workers grumbled. Why the fuss about perfection? What was wrong with good enough? But the grumbling died down quickly.

  Better a new way to work than no job at all.

  Soon Wolverine Motors was hiring again. Cautious home improvement projects blossomed. When Cabela’s, the fishing and hunting retailer, built a superstore in neighboring Dundee—200,000 square feet—people said it was because of the gun racks and boat hitches on the trucks and SUVs in the Wolverine employee parking lot. On one thing everyone agreed: Alf Farnon was The Hero of Valeene.

  “I was packed to move to Texas,” one worker said in the article. “Then Wolverine called me back, and now I’m building fire trucks. My kids can grow up near their grandparents, and I can keep fishing with my brothers at Luna Pier.” A photo showed him in a Detroit Tigers cap, leaning against a pickup with the bumper sticker “Wolverine Motors: Now We’re Smokin’.”

  Next to the article hung a print of the first Scarlet Ghost ever sold. Milo was admiring its extra long aerial extension ladder when a man’s face appeared in the glass.

  He turned around.

  “Milo?” The man extended a hand the size of an oven mitt. “Alf Farnon.”

  “Mr. Farnon.” Milo managed not to wince at the strength of the two-handed grip. He’d forgotten how big the man was. An inch or so taller than Milo’s six feet, and of stockier build. The fair hair might be showing gray, but the pink skin shone with pleasure, giving Farnon a disarmingly boyish air. He had a reassuring smile. As though you didn’t have to worry about saying whatever was in your head; he would understand.

  “Thank you for seeing me, sir.”

  “Of course, of course. Come in.”

  He led Milo into a corner office where a sea of Oriental carpet covered the floor beneath walls of windows. Farnon had the crow’s-nest view of his empire that a fireman might have on top of a Scarlet Ghost’s ladder. But the sight that drew Milo’s eye was close in: the roof of the main assembly plant three stories below. Seen from this angle it was much bigger than it appeared from the street, as long and wide as a football field, with head-high rolls of sod dotting its mossy surface. Raised skylights marched in pairs down its length, like little tollbooths on a freeway of grass.

  Farnon closed the door and gestured Milo toward a wing chair. He angled a second chair to face it. “How are you, son?” he asked sympathetically. “How’s your mother doing, and your little brothers?”

  “We’re fine, sir, thank you.” Milo didn’t correct him; Jenny would never know Mr. Farnon thought she was a boy.

  Farnon asked him about school, his college plans, and Milo answered at random. In the middle of saying he wasn’t sure what he’d be studying, he broke off. If he didn’t speak now he would lose his nerve.

  “I was hoping you could give me some answers about my father.”

  The benevolent smile in the pale-blue eyes sharpened to concentration. Farnon rested his elbows on the knees of his dark suit. “Ask away.”

  “The day of my dad’s funeral, someone robbed our house. While we were—”

  “I never heard that! Did they catch who did it?” Farnon sounded genuinely upset.

  “No sir. Well, they couldn’t, we didn’t report it. I don’t know whether you knew this, but there was a time…a few years ago my dad used to—”

  “Gamble?” Farnon smiled at Milo’s surprise. “He told me himself, the first time we met. It’s why I hired him, you know. That kind of honesty is rare. But surely the gambling was all in the past?”

  “We thought so.” Milo told of the matchbook from the casino, how his mother feared the police might get the wrong impression. Or the right one. Farnon’s face grew grave. Milo hadn’t been able to tell Zaffer, but to Alf Farnon he readily described the forensic accounting books, hidden behind false covers.

  “And the casino was one he used to go to, back before he got this job. So I wondered…I needed to ask you…whether my dad might have borrowed…well, taken...money, to pay his debts. From—” he started to say “Wolverine” but changed it at the last second “—work.”

  He sat back. Tell me I’m deranged. Delusional. That my father was a good man and I should be ashamed.

  “Your dad was a good man.” The words were an exact echo of Milo’s prayer, yet they failed to reassure him. Something in Farnon’s manner seemed odd. Careful.

  “I know that. I know he was. But even a good man might not be good all the time. I just wondered—did anyone who worked with him maybe say anything, or notice anything different, toward the end?”

  Farnon’s silence was unnerving. Milo hastened to break it. “I realize you wouldn’t know, personally, Mr. Farnon, but Dad reported to Mr. Pearce. Maybe I could talk to him?”

  In the pale eyes before him a calculation of some kind was going on. Farnon got up and went to the door. Opened it. “Margaret, tell Ed Boyle I’ll see him at eleven, will you?”

  He closed the door and came back to his chair. Studied Milo as though he was a potential hire. “Tim always said you were sharp. You’re gutsy, too, aren’t you? All right, Milo. All right. This isn’t easy. But you’re his son. You deserve the truth.”

  He looked off to the right, as though drawing strength for his next words from the view of his domain. Milo’s pulse quickened.

  “Your dad embezzled more than a million dollars from Wolverine Motors.”

  ***

  Chapter 4

  Milo sat stupefied.

  There’d been some discrepancies in the payroll accounts that Tim oversaw the previous autumn, Farnon said. Certain totals did not add up. Tim’s immediate supervisor, Gordon Pearce, noticed it first. He double-checked entries, account balances, the audit trail. Finally, a week before Christmas, he brought his findings to Alf Farnon. Over six months, one million dollars had vanished from the accounts that Tim Shoemaker—and only Tim—managed.

  Milo roused himself. “A million dollars?” His voice sounded far away.

  “I didn’t want to believe it,” Farnon said. “But the evidence was there, the money was gone, and only your dad could have signed off on it. Or covered it up so well. It was pure accident Gordon found it at all. A very neat plan—it might have gone on for years. We’ve changed our process since, as you can imagine.”

  They decided that Pearce, as Tim’s supervisor, should confront him. Farnon asked Pearce to wait until after Christmas—“Let his family have one more holiday together”—then fire him before the plant started up again in January.

  “I didn’t want to be the one, see?” A slight sheen had appeared on Farnon’s forehead, which he blotted with his palm.

  Then something inexplicable happened. Tim went to Pearce and confessed. “I don’t know if he sensed Gordon was getting suspicious or what. He said he’d invested the money and could get it back. But he’d need a few weeks; he asked Gordon not to fire him. His wife would be devastated.”

  Devastated. Milo thought of what his mother told him the night they’d discovered the double set of books. “Devastated” was right. And easier to hear than shorter, plainer words. I love you. I will leave you. I stole a million dollars.

  “Gordon said he’d need to discuss that with me.” Farnon hesitated, watching Milo. “I’m afraid he told your dad he would vote against keeping him on. Gordon takes embezzlement…personally.” He stood up again, this time crossing the thick carpet to a cabinet on the far side of the office, where he flipped through files concealed behind handsome polished drawers.

  Milo examined his hands against the dark leather of the chair as though he might be te
sted on how many fingers he had. It was true, what he’d feared. He longed to be thirty minutes younger, to have pulled up to the plant and then driven away, chickened out. His mother hadn’t wanted to know and she’d been right.

  Farnon returned. “Your father gave Gordon this.”

  Milo took the papers numbly. Three typed pages stapled together, starting with page three. Columns of dates and dollar amounts. The header on each page read, “Restitution Schedule—T. Shoemaker” and a date: December 22. The pages were grayish and limp as suede from handling. The handwritten notes in the margins were the tiny, precise, and instantly recognizable printing of Tim Shoemaker.

  Milo rubbed his thumb over these, as though they might channel his father’s thoughts into his own brain.

  “I’m a good judge of character!” Farnon’s outburst startled him. “At least I thought I was. Gordon told me for months I’d be sorry I hired an ex-gambler. Which is ironic, when you think—anyway, I liked to throw it back at him how wrong he’d been about Shoemaker. Your dad fit in here, he did good work. And I just…liked him. Everyone liked him.”

  Through the humiliation cementing his feet to the floor, keeping him here to be tortured, Milo heard the plea for forgiveness. The benefactor Tim Shoemaker had wronged was asking Tim’s son for understanding. As though Farnon had somehow been at fault. Milo felt a bizarre bond between them. His father had betrayed them both, yet they felt guilty.

  “He was so crazy about his kids!” Farnon said, as though paternal pride was indisputable proof of a man’s integrity. “He took you hunting, didn’t he? And fishing? Oh, we heard all about it at the finance meetings. Stalking small game, getting lost in the woods—like one of those survival shows. I’ll tell you, Milo, it made me realize how much I’ve missed.” Farnon’s glance strayed toward a silver frame on his desk. “I’d have liked a son I could buy snazzy satellite watches for. High-tech gear, waterproof this, shockproof that,” he continued wistfully. “I’d have taken him camping.”

  Inside Milo gales of shame howled and made speech impossible. Perhaps Farnon sensed this; he tugged the stapled sheets out of Milo’s slack grip. “If Tim had come to me…I hadn’t really decided, see? But he never said a word. I even called him that night, late, and left him a message asking him to stop by the plant the next morning. For a talk. He knew why. Maybe that’s what pushed him…well, who knows. When he didn’t show up I figured he didn’t want to face me, I let it go. Later, when I heard he was missing, I assumed he’d skipped town with the money. The police asked me about that call—they checked his cell phone records—and I just told them I’d needed some year-end numbers I couldn’t find. No point ruining his reputation—and to tell you the truth,” his mouth twisted ruefully, “it wouldn’t have done Wolverine any good for people to know we’d been scammed by a clever accountant. An ex-gambler, yet. When they found Tim’s car I realized…he’d taken a different way out.”

  Fresh shock ripped through Milo. Of course. Of course his father had killed himself, rather than beg his hero for yet another chance.

  Milo made himself look up. “We thought he might have stopped for a drink. In the fog. And gotten turned around, somehow. He didn’t drink much….The autopsy said he died from a blow to the head on the way down—but I figured he must have been drunk to even be at the quarry. I traced him to Cabela’s—we checked his credit cards, he’d bought something there at 7:30—and then I went to every bar between there and the quarry, asking if anyone had seen him.”

  Farnon’s pale eyes blinked at this but Milo plowed on. He needed Farnon to understand. “I had to know. There wasn’t a note, see, or any reason….” Christ. Had his mother been right about the life insurance, too? Had Tim staged an “accident,” and not left a note, so his family would get the insurance? One last scheme? Damn it, Dad! You could have mailed us a letter! We wouldn’t have told! Milo would have traded ten times the money for a decent note. “That life-insurance policy….”

  Farnon made a tsking noise, interpreting Milo’s words as awkward gratitude. “Children shouldn’t suffer for what their fathers do. In fact, I hope you won’t even tell your mother about this, Milo. Tim wouldn’t want her to know. I mean—that was the whole point….”

  Of killing himself. “No,” Mile croaked. “I mean, you’re right. I won’t.”

  “I was glad when you called. Not to tell you this, of course. You were never supposed to know about this. But I wanted to meet Tim’s son again.”

  This is your lucky day, then. Milo counted four ticks of the little gold clock on the desk.

  “It sounds like it was gamblers who robbed your house. That would explain where the money went.”

  The money. Milo had forgotten that for a moment. Certainly no “investments,” and no million dollars, had surfaced in his father’s bank accounts.

  “You never asked my mother about it, if there was any left?”

  Farnon recoiled. “No, no. We decided, Gordon and I, to say nothing to anyone. We did file an insurance claim for inside embezzlement, so at some point I’ll need to explain that to the board. But they’ll be discreet. They’re good people.”

  It was a stupid thing to think just then, but Milo hoped the fraud insurer was a different company from the one that held the policy on Tim’s life. Spread the damage around.

  He got to his feet. From here he could see the photo in the silver frame. A groundbreaking, a group of men with Farnon in the center holding a shovel. “Thank you for telling me this, Mr. Farnon. I wish I could….” Turn back time? “I want to apologize for my father. We thought he’d licked the gambling but I guess—he didn’t.”

  “Son, I’m sorrier than I can say. If there’s anything I can ever do.…”

  The gold clock ticked eight times. Long enough for a car to roll off a cliff. For a person’s life to change.

  But this change would be Milo’s choice.

  “There is something,” he said. Farnon looked attentive. “I want to come work for you.”

  “A summer job? I think we could arrange—”

  “No. Permanent. I want to pay you back.”

  “Now Milo. There’s no need for that, we were insured. Your dad meant you to go to college, I know he did.”

  Milo’s voice was as cold as quarry water in December. “Then he should have stuck around.”

  He drove back through town, past the middle school where his mother was teaching, past the high school where Zaffer was probably eating lunch and wondering where Milo was. In the park the air was full of the drizzle that had begun earlier, and he had the place to himself. He walked the sodden woodchip paths he and Zaffer liked to run.

  He’d wanted someone to blame. Someone else, he told God.

  Why didn’t you love us enough to live? Did you think we’d hate you if we found out? And now it wasn’t God he was talking to. “We’d have gotten over it!” he shouted. His words were sucked into the banks of the swollen stream rushing through the park. “We’d have survived that!”

  Though maybe not. Would his mother have stuck with Tim once she’d found out? …if he ever gambled again, I would leave him...take the children….He believed me. That fiery look she could get. Anyone would believe her.

  Maybe if she’d been softer, less scary….But Milo shook his head, this time at himself. That was bullshit. No one made you steal. Or gamble. His mother had it wrong. Those weren’t sicknesses—they were choices.

  When Milo turned sixteen and had had his driver’s license for all of three weeks, he borrowed his mother’s car to go to a basketball game up at the church. That’s what he told his parents. What he really did was pick up Zaffer and two other friends, none of whom could drive yet, and go to a concert in Ann Arbor. On the way home, with everyone laughing and turning up the radio, Milo misjudged the space between the car and a guardrail and skidded for ten feet, tearing off the passenger-side mirror and scraping the side from front fender to rear bumper. No one was hurt, beyond a lot of swearing, and the car still ran. Which was a stroke
of luck, because if he’d had to call the police he’d have had his license suspended for driving after midnight.

  His parents were dumbfounded. This wasn’t their Milo. They grounded him and made him pay the insurance deductible out of his savings. His father asked, “You know why you’re being punished, don’t you?”

  “Because I can’t drive for crap. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s not it. Accidents happen. It’s the lie, Milo T. The lie was your choice, and it was a bad one.”

  His father knew about choices.

  Milo circled the slides and swings in the center of the park while the fine mist beaded up on his letter jacket. Character introspection was not his forte, as his English teachers could attest. It came hard now. But come it must, or he would not make sense to himself.

  “I want to come work for you,” he’d told Farnon. He still meant it. And not just to punish his father, by giving up college. In a way it was for his father, for the man he’d been before the gambling dragged him down. Milo wasn’t the Shoemaker who stole the million, but he was a Shoemaker. How could he trot off to college as planned, as though he didn’t know his tuition had been paid by fraud and suicide? No wonder his dad hadn’t left a note.

  Somehow, Alf Farnon understood. Milo had seen it in that startled, approving smile. Felt it in that bone-crushing handshake.

  “I won’t let you work for free,” he’d said. Given Milo a rueful smile. “But you can start in June.”

  Now Milo breathed the park’s wet, chilly air deep into his lungs. It would be good to work for a winner.