Unaccounted For

by Nan Willard Cappo

  “I knew then what he wanted. I told him to meet me at The Smokehouse. I’d been there once, when Gordon was thinking of buying it, and Ypsilanti felt far enough from Valeene that we wouldn’t run into anyone we knew. Apparently I was wrong about that—Ellie says the hostess knew your dad?”

  “From high school. An old girlfriend.”

  “He never mentioned it. He was alone—”

  Jagged lightning rent the sky outside and lit the room like a stage. Milo froze, waiting for thunder, and two seconds later it came. An enormous BOOM shook the windows and a downpour began, raindrops striking the glass like BBs. Hail the size of nickels, then quarters, battered the building. In less than a minute it stopped as abruptly as though God had pressed a switch. Ice balls coated the windowsills. Flashes of lightning continued, though the thunder claps grew less loud.

  Farnon crossed to the window to peer down at the parking lot. “Good God, that was some—

  “Tell me what my father said.”

  Farnon returned to his chair. “Of course. Where was I?”

  “At The Smokehouse.”

  “Yes. Your dad was sorry to tell me he’d uncovered a fraud. He’d brought documentation. It could only be Pearce, he said. Pearce had signed off on all of it, every quarter. Well, I acted shocked. I was shocked, and furious. If Gordon had been there I’d have strangled him. Did the IRS know about this, I asked Tim. He said of course not, nobody knew, he’d come straight to me. Then, right in the middle of the restaurant, while everyone around us is drinking and partying, he hands me that restitution schedule. He’d drawn it up to show how Wolverine could repay the tax and the penalties and still survive. He didn’t want to bring me a problem without a solution, see? That’s the kind of worker your dad was.”

  Milo was speechless, but Farnon didn’t seem to expect a response. “He said Gordon would have to go to jail. It didn’t enter his mind I could be involved.”

  Milo found his voice. “He admired you. He’d never dream you could be a thief.”

  The hail hadn’t made Farnon flinch, but this did. “Don’t you think I know that? It was then, that night, I saw how I’d been fooling myself. I’d persuaded myself it was no big deal. But I could see, from how seriously Tim took it, that the IRS would eat us alive. And I knew something Tim didn’t know—Gordon Pearce wouldn’t go down by himself.”

  Farnon picked up a gold letter opener from his desk and absently turned it over in his hands. “Tim wanted lawyers hired, the IRS told, Gordon hustled to prison—he wanted Wolverine made clean and safe again. And he wanted my name kept out of it. Loyal, that was your dad. And honest. But sometimes you can’t be both. He couldn’t see that. Kind of like you, Milo. Finally I said, Tim, you don’t understand. Gordon didn’t do this by himself.”

  Farnon studied his reflection in the letter opener. “He just…crumpled. It’s not so bad, I told him. We’re going to get that railcar money. We’ll pay the IRS out of that.

  “He wouldn’t let me finish. No, he said. Wolverine was breaking the law. He was sorry, and disappointed—very disappointed—to hear I was involved. But it couldn’t wait for the railcar money—if that would even be legal, which he doubted. If I didn’t act by the first week in January he’d call the IRS himself. He was like a different person. Grim. He just packed up all his papers and walked out.”

  Farnon set the letter opener down, carefully centering it on the desk. He raised his pale-blue gaze to Milo.

  “I followed him.”

  ***

  Chapter 22

  This time the lightning hit the flagpole. Something sizzled outside, and a flash brighter than any spotlight dazzled the room.

  Milo yelped, and Farnon leaped up. “That hit the roof!” He headed for the door and Milo jumped up too. He didn’t care if the plant burned down, Farnon wasn’t getting out of his sight.

  They took the stairs down to the fourth floor. “Hurry up. We don’t have much time,” Farnon said.

  This jerked Milo out of the trance Farnon’s story had put him in. What was the rush? And Zaffer! Where was he? Milo imagined how the hail must have pounded on the roof of the truck. He checked his phone to see if he’d missed a message. “NO SERVICE.”

  The first lightning flash that kicked off the hail—had it knocked out the cell phone tower? Did the Spy Pen even work? He tried to remember what Zaffer had said about UHF reception and line-of-sight, but couldn’t. Dammit. Was he the only one who’d heard Alf Farnon admit to tax fraud?

  They passed swiftly through the dim glass passageway, lit by emergency lights spaced far apart. Farnon unlocked the double doors to the roof.

  They stepped into a scene straight out of Blade Runner. At their back the main building towered. In front of them, hail lay thick on the matted ground cover, melting fast. Mist steamed from the surface and turned walkways and structures into an alien landscape, all shadow and smoke. The temperature had dropped at least fifteen degrees since Milo had arrived at the plant, but that didn’t cause the shiver up his spine. He’d been up here many times but now it was unrecognizable; he did not have his bearings.

  Farnon was locking the doors. “So we’re not interrupted.”

  “Who would interrupt us up here on the roof?” Milo said, just in case Zaffer could hear him. The Spy Pen won’t save you; it’ll just record the shot.

  “No one, now.”

  Farnon led the way across the paved picnic area. Onto a path through the nubby vegetation, his footing as sure as though he were walking into a staff meeting. He stopped at a pair of vertical skylights. These loomed head-high in the mist, glowing yellow like twin lighthouses. Or monster’s eyes, Milo thought, then got a grip on himself. It was only the lights from the plant floor below.

  Farnon peered in all directions, but nothing was burning or sparking on the roof. He gestured toward the wooden benches set between the big skylights. “We can finish our business up here.”

  Milo sat on the edge of his bench, facing Farnon, careful to leave himself enough room in which to leap clear. He’s really good at accidents. A faint shout of “Hey, watch where you’re throwing that!” floated up from the plant, and he took heart. People were right below them.

  “So you left the bar, and then what?” he asked.

  The fog was terrible. Farnon drove in it anyway. “I couldn’t stop thinking about what would happen. Any money scandal involving me, and Wolverine Motors was toast. No railcars, no fire trucks, and Valeene just another sad little Michigan town. Gutted. Half the people on the dole. Success breeds success, right? But failure breeds, too.

  “I called Tim’s cell phone. Wait, I said. We need to talk.”

  Milo interrupted. “The ten o’clock call. The one you told the police was about paperwork.”

  “That’s right. Now think, Milo. Would a murderer have called his victim, would he have left a trail for the cops? Of course not. Remember that.”

  Milo’s skin crawled. “Go on.”

  “He should have said no.” Farnon rested his elbows on his knees, his shirt a white blur in the gloom. “If he’d just said no…. But he said all right, he could barely see the road anyway. He’d pull over at the quarry and leave his flashers on. When I got there he wanted us to talk in his car, but I couldn’t sit still. So he got out and we talked there on the road. There hadn’t been another car for miles. I told him I’d been thinking, and he was right. Using railcar money would just raise questions. But there was a big payment coming from the DOD. We could pay the IRS out of that. Two months tops and we’d be square.”

  Farnon was staring down at his feet, seeing another foggy night, another Shoemaker. “Tim said, Alf, do you hear yourself? I almost lost my family to gambling, he said. I know about selling your soul to the devil. You don’t want to go down that road anymore.”

  He recited it word for word. As though he’d said it to himself more than once since that night. Despair echoed in his voice and in his face, blanched to a sickly hue by the skylights’ glow. “I was the president of
Wolverine Motors! I’d built it up, I’d taken the risks, saved the whole town without a penny of government help”—except those little loans from the IRS, Milo thought fleetingly—“and here was this gambler, this cashier, talking about my soul. I didn’t give a damn about my soul—it was my company that mattered. When he put his hand on my shoulder I pushed him away…I pushed him.”

  Farnon stared across at Milo. “He didn’t expect it. It was icy, he slipped. Fell backward like a tree going down. That shoulder of the road, you think it’s dirt but where Tim hit it was solid rock. I heard the crack like it was inside my head.

  “I know CPR, Milo, I did it right. I worked on him forever. Fifteen minutes, I timed it. But he’d died when he hit that rock.

  “No cars passed. I’d been watching, to stop one and ask for help. Then when I knew it was no good…I didn’t want anyone to come.”

  Below them the lights of the plant floor went out, and the roof was plunged into darkness.

  Not pitch dark. Auxiliary lights shone faintly from below. As the last workers called goodnights to each other and started their cars, Milo’s eyes traced out Farnon’s hands in the gloom. Hero’s hands. Clasped now in supplication, but Milo saw them splayed against his father’s chest, driving home a furious push. No, Tim wouldn’t have seen that coming.

  Milo didn’t need Zaffer’s interrogation tricks. Farnon couldn’t stop now. “I panicked. I admit it. I phoned Gordon in Denver. He said calling 911 won’t do any good. You were just arguing with him in a bar—in my bar, for Chrissake. Your fingerprints are all over him…why should the cops think it was an accident? You’ll bring down the company, Alf.

  “He said to get rid of everything. The body, the car—send it all over the edge. Tim was dead. Nothing would help that. He said, do it for Ellie. You’re not a murderer, Alf—that’s what he said.” Farnon raised his eyes to Milo. “I’m not a murderer.”

  Milo felt sick.

  Farnon had put Tim’s body back in the car. Taken the papers out of his briefcase. Left the laptop and the cell phone, figuring they’d be ruined in the water. Rolled the driver’s window down to make the car sink. Started the engine, put the car in drive, watched it creep over the cliff.

  Then he drove home.

  Milo took a breath that felt like his first in a long time. “What’d you do with the bag?”

  “What bag?”

  “The one from Cabela’s.”

  Something moved in Farnon’s face. Something different from his monumental self-concern. “Threw it away at a gas station. It might’ve…Milo. I’m sorry.”

  “He’d have wanted us to have the stuff.” Milo stood up and turned his back. Farnon no longer felt like a threat. Milo didn’t want to look at him.

  Here it was, what he’d ached to know. If he could believe Farnon this time. Milo thought he could. Yes, Alf Farnon was the scariest of liars—the kind who came to believe in his own lies—but what would be the point of making this story up? It was worse than any lie. It protected nothing.

  Tim Shoemaker’s death had been an accident.

  Milo was very tired. He turned around. “In March, you said my dad was the embezzler. You made me think he’d taken the coward’s way out.”

  “You were already thinking it.”

  “I only wondered! I didn’t know! Why not just say you didn’t know, why invent that big story?” Anger gave him fresh energy. That crap Farnon fed him in March hadn’t been inspired out of panic. Farnon had turned a decent man into a thief and a coward in his son’s eyes, on purpose.

  “To protect you, Milo.” Farnon seemed surprised he had to ask. “If your doubts could bring you to me, and to the police and to ‘every bar between here and the quarry’—you told me that, remember?—you were a danger to yourself. If you didn’t find answers you would keep looking. Sooner or later you’d run into Gordon.” Farnon shook his head at the narrowness of that escape. “What happened to your dad—I never meant that. I could never plan to kill someone. It’s my damned temper, is all. But Gordon!” A rare trace of nervousness, even fear, sounded in Farnon’s voice. “He can be violent. If he felt threatened…. I thought if I confirmed your worst fears, you’d stop looking. And you believed me.”

  “Of course I did. You’re Alf Farnon.”

  Farnon nodded. “You even asked to work here! That took guts. I liked that. And I thought—why not? If you were here, under my eye, Gordon would see you were no threat to us, and…” He hesitated. Was that a trace of shame, at last? “I felt I owed it to Tim. To watch out for his son. It might sound crazy to you, now. But that’s what I thought.”

  “And the robbery at our house? The casino matches? That was just stupid. That’s what made me come see you in the first place.”

  “That was stupid. But I didn’t know about it till you told me.” Milo remembered the surprise Farnon had shown back in March upon learning of the robbery. “Gordon’s only a wiz at accounting scams. He’s not smart about people. When he got back from Denver on Christmas Eve he made me go over everything again. Then he said, ‘Too bad I wasn’t here. I could have talked him out of it.’ Which was nonsense—Tim never liked Gordon even before the tax business. I showed him the restitution schedule Tim drew up. You don’t change someone’s mind after they’ve spent weeks on a thing like that. ‘You were going back to jail, my friend,’ I told him. He couldn’t put it down. Said it was a road map to the whole scheme, but it only implicated him, not me. He said your father kept copies of everything. ‘It’s an exposure,’ he kept saying. I hadn’t heard about those waterproof drives, but Leslie gave him one right after New Year’s. The first I knew about that was from Ellie. Gordon goes his own way sometimes.”

  Milo felt a perverse flash of sympathy for Pearce. It must be frustrating to be stuck with a partner like Farnon, who for all his flexible conscience saw Wolverine Motors as a holy cause, not an unlocked storeroom to plunder. What a pair. He didn’t know which one was worse—the greedy thug, or the self-rationalizing coward.

  Farnon added, “When he couldn’t find the drive at your house he left the matches, to make it look like Tim had been gambling again. He thought that was real clever.”

  “It worked,” Milo said. “My mother wouldn’t call the police. She’d told my father if he ever gambled again she’d take us and leave. So when you told me Dad said she’d be devastated—that sounded true. Those matches convinced her he’d killed himself rather than face her.” They’d convinced Milo, too.

  Forgive me, Dad.

  The mist still hugged the roof, though in places it was starting to lift. Farnon glanced at his watch again. “I told Gordon I’d meet him to plan the ceremony for tomorrow. If I don’t go soon he’s likely to come looking for me. So—what are you going to do?”

  Milo was startled. “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve got the flash drive. And Gordon’s arson shouldn’t be hard to prove. Will you turn us in? Or will you give me a month—one month, I promise you, I’ll put it in writing—to get rid of Pearce? And get some good lawyers to negotiate with the IRS? I want Wolverine Motors to be on the up and up as much as anyone. But we need to do it quietly, with minimum damage. A lot of people depend on this company, Milo.”

  Milo stretched his arms over his head. It felt like he’d never get off this roof. “You think getting rid of Pearce will fix everything?”

  “I do. Everything that’s happened—the payroll taxes, your dad finding out—it all started with Pearce.”

  Milo whirled on him. “Nothing ‘happened’ to my dad except you,” he said harshly. “Take the blame for once, will you? You killed a man. You lost your temper, you pushed him, he died. You killed someone. I believe you didn’t mean to. Accidents do happen. But then you lied, Mr. Farnon. You covered it up.”

  What to say came easily, and only later did Milo recognize his father’s long-ago words to himself. “The lie was your choice, and it was a bad one. You’ve made choices all along the line. Tax fraud, arson—I saw Pearce beat a raccoon to d
eath! And I bet he’s done worse. You know what he’s capable of. Why else would you tell him where the flash drive was? It was never just Pearce. You were always in it, up to your neck.”

  He waited for Farnon to deny it, so he could berate him some more. But Farnon just sat there, infuriatingly, as though processing Milo’s words one at a time. Finally he nodded. “I was,” he said. “You’re right.”

  All down the roof, pairs of glass monitors kept watch like monolithic guards. Ironic, since the danger to Wolverine Motors came from inside; the shadows here beckoned like enemy traps. Did Alf Farnon deserve to be charged with manslaughter, and both he and Pearce take the fall for embezzlement on a grand, brazen scale?

  Of course they did.

  But that wasn’t the question Farnon was asking, and Milo knew it. “A lot of people depend on this company,” he’d said. He meant collateral damage. He wasn’t overstating his own importance, either. Alf Farnon was so integral to Wolverine it probably wouldn’t survive, not with him and Pearce in prison.

  Milo’s choice wasn’t the same one his father had faced. When Tim uncovered fraud, the president of Wolverine hadn’t killed anyone. The company might have weathered a plain embezzlement charge, especially with a handy ex-con to take the blame. But Tim’s death—manslaughter by the CEO, with the added taint of a hit-and-run—would sink the Hero of Valeene and his precious company. “Wolverine Motors” would become a punch line.

  Milo wandered away, using night vision to step over an open toolbox someone, probably Gus, had left by the bench. Coiled hoses crouched beside paths like malevolent dwarfs. The wind had started up again and was banging the temporary ladder rhythmically against the north wall. Down below him a car turned in at the main gate and stopped at Pinky’s booth. A wife picking up her husband after the nightshift.