“They will. Trust me.” The road to hell was paved with good intentions, and Alf Farnon owned the asphalt plant.
“Just testing you, Milo.” Was that a chuckle? The guy was unbelievable. “Don’t worry. By next week even The Wall Street Journal will know Pearce was robbing us blind—because that’s how I’ll tell it. He died, we brought someone in to do his reports, the fraud came out, we’re shocked. I’ll be scouring the country for the best tax guys I can find.”
Milo thought of Professor Keyes. “I know a good one.”
“Send me his name.” Farnon paused. “Milo. What would your dad say about this? About giving me a second chance?”
“He’d say for God’s sake don’t blow this one.”
“I envied him his son, you know.”
“You have a great daughter. Too good for you.” He’d saved this guy’s life. He could tell him some home truths. “She’d have shot Pearce to save you.”
“I saw that. Whose gun was that, anyway?”
“A friend’s.”
“Ah. Well, tell your friend he can find it in the bushes on the west side of the roof. Milo…” Here it came. Milo braced himself. “About Ellie… I’d hate for her to—”
“Coming!” Milo called. “Gotta go, the doctor’s here.” And he hung up on the Hero of Valeene.
Sunday evening, Gloria herded everyone out of his room so Milo could sleep. A tentative knock on the door a few minutes later made him tense up. Ellie?
“Come in,” he called.
But it was the police. One cop. A young one with acne scars whom Milo hadn’t met before. Maybe this guy had been absent for the training on interrogation techniques, because he didn’t ask any tough questions.
Yes, Milo told him, Pearce had slipped on the grass—it was wet—and bumped into the skylight. Milo had jumped forward to grab him.
“But he was too far over,” Milo said. “When I felt him pulling me in, I let go.”
“And that’s when you hurt your shoulder?”
“Yeah. Fell backwards and landed on a screwdriver. In a toolbox, sticking straight up. Bet you don’t see that in a hundred years.”
The cop studied him a moment but didn’t ask how the screwdriver had entered from the front. “Phillips head or flat?”
“Uh…Phillips head. New one. Sharp.”
The cop gave a sympathetic wince, made another note, and shut his notebook. “Must have been a defect in that skylight. Mr. Farnon saw it all, says you did a really brave thing there.” He winked. “Bet you don’t have to worry about your hospital bill. You guys at Wolverine make a great truck, you know that? My brother-in-law gave me a ride in that new Scarlet Ghost. That siren—awesome. Keep up the good work.”
Ellie came the next day just before lunch, in a sundress so vibrantly yellow it seemed to oscillate against the beige walls and raise the temperature in the room. She brought him sparklers. “I didn’t want you to miss the fireworks.”
“I thought I caught them,” Milo said.
“Are you all right? I mean, will you be?”
“Nothing some stitches and drugs can’t fix. Missed the heart, got some stuff that’s not crucial. I go home tomorrow.”
“Oh. Good.”
She sat down in the chair by his bed. She was wringing her hands but didn’t seem to realize it. “I still don’t know what happened. I know what I saw but I think I’m missing things.”
“Tell me the parts I don’t know.” Milo had been thinking hard about this conversation. What Ellie knew, what she shouldn’t know. What her father had told her. It was a minefield. “How’d you get up on the roof?”
She’d trailed Pearce from the restaurant to the plant; driven as close as she could, then followed him on foot behind the storage shed.
“When I got there he was slamming his trunk, like he’d done what he came for. And I saw Zaffer’s truck, but no Zaffer. Weren’t the two of you supposed to be at the police station?”
“We needed to talk to your dad.”
“Hmm.” She let it pass. “Well, then I saw Pearce’s gun. That was news. How does a felon even get a gun, anyway?” Milo shrugged, as though to say who knew what contacts rich felons had? “I tried to call you guys but my phone was out. So when he climbed that ladder, I gave him a few minutes, then I followed him.”
“That was gutsy.”
She gave him an impatient look. “He had a gun, Milo. Anyway, then I heard voices and…well, you know the rest.” She clasped her hands together. “You think he’d really have shot me?”
“I didn’t want to find out.”
“That was gutsy,” she mocked. “Sorry. I mean thank you. Daddy says when you told Pearce you had the flash drive he just snapped. Said he’d kill you and make it look like an accident.”
Again Milo had occasion to admire her father’s skill at telling just part of the truth. So far, she knew nothing he couldn’t agree to. “Yeah. So it was good you showed up. It distracted him.”
“But you don’t really have the flash drive.”
“No. That got burned.” Regret pierced him. He’d have liked to see one last message from his father, even about corporate fraud restitution. “I just said I did to make him talk. In hindsight, maybe not the best idea.”
“He’d have had to kill you both! How did he think he’d get away with that?”
Milo took a page out of Farnon’s book and used just as much truth as he needed. “He said people would think I’d jumped. That your dad would die a hero, trying to save a suicidal boy. He must have had a lot to lose.”
“Why were you even up on the roof?”
What had Alf told her? “Zaffer and I decided the cops would pay more attention if your dad told them about Pearce. I went upstairs to ask him while Zaffer waited outside. The storm came then, so your dad and I went to see if lightning hit the roof. That’s when Pearce showed. Took us by surprise.”
“But why?” she demanded. “Why did he want you both dead?”
“What did your dad say?”
“I’m asking you! He says it upsets him to talk about it and I should stop asking. Yet he expects me to go along with what he told the press about Pearce falling through the skylight—like that could happen.”
“So why did you? Go along with it, I mean.”
She eyed him cagily. “Why did you? The cops came here, didn’t they?”
“You first.”
“Isn’t it obvious? Pearce was going to shoot me! My dad didn’t realize his own strength. He wasn’t trying to kill him. He was just so angry he got carried away,” she said, and she couldn’t hide the pride in her voice. Her father had defended her. He must love her. “Pearce brought it on himself.” She leaned forward imploringly. “Didn’t he? Tell me the truth, Milo.”
Tell me the truth.
How had they gotten here, in this funhouse pit of ladders, where only some of the rungs were real? Maybe arguing with Tim Shoemaker, Farnon had been so angry he really had gotten carried away. But there’d been nothing accidental about Gordon Pearce’s end. “He was a bad guy, all right.”
“Why didn’t you tell the police he was trying to kill you?”
“Because…their heads would have exploded.”
A faint smile eased some of the tension from her face. “Yeah. Me too.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Milo was admiring the way the sun played over her hair when she said, “Did Pearce murder your dad?”
Fighting for his life on the roof was beginning to feel easier than this conversation. “Remember when Leslie said the Executive Committee was in Denver?” Milo asked. Ellie nodded. “Pearce was with them. So he couldn’t have been at The Smokehouse that night. Nobody murdered my dad. He died by accident.”
It was almost scary how good he was at this. But then he’d studied with a master.
“But the funeral robbery. You and Zaffer were so sure…”
“Oh, that was Pearce; we were right about that. He told your father about it,” when? “…on the phone,
Friday night.”
Ellie’s voice grew sharp. “Pearce told Daddy he’d robbed your house?”
“Uh. Kind of. He was trying to frame my dad as the embezzler. He told your father he’d just looked in our house to see if he could find any of the missing money.”
She still looked outraged at the suggestion her father might have known for as long as a day that Pearce had broken the law while working at Wolverine. No, Milo didn’t have to worry she might guess the truth about Alf Farnon.
Outside in the hall nurses were calling to each other; visitors were bidding good-bye to a patient in the room next door. A strong smell of meatloaf heralded the lunch trays.
Ellie was still puzzled. “But then—who was your dad meeting that night? Who was the fellow from work?”
Milo wrinkled his forehead as though he’d been considering that exact same matter. “I don’t know if he was meeting anyone. Or if he just told Janine that. I mean, here he runs into his old girlfriend while he’s at a bar working on his laptop, two days before Christmas. Maybe he said that so he wouldn’t look like a nerd.”
“Milo.” Ellie wore the same Stop Screwing Around expression his English teacher used to get when he told her he had nothing to write about. “What was he doing at a bar that Gordon Pearce just bought? Forty miles from home? That’s one coincidence too many.”
“I don’t think it was coincidence,” Milo said with an airy confidence he was beginning to feel. So this was how Farnon did it. You invented lies so much better than reality you could will them true. “I don’t think Pearce was paranoid all the time—I bet my father did suspect him. My dad was a good accountant, you know. It’s how his mind worked. He probably suspected Pearce was laundering money, and somehow Pearce caught on. Why else would he be so frantic to find that flash drive?”
Ellie held his gaze a long moment. Milo gazed stoically back. Eventually she stood up and walked over to the window, her back to him, her hands on her waist, the stance of someone thinking hard. She was so slight. He would miss her.
She turned back and crossed her arms in front of her. “I’m going to Spain after all. With Daddy. Maybe as soon as next week.”
“Wow. What about the railcar launch?”
“Ed Boyle’s going to handle it. I think Daddy’s really shaken up, finding out his judgment was so off about Pearce. What? Did I say something funny?”
Milo turned his snort into a sneeze, and grabbed for the tissue box. “I think this air conditioning is giving me a cold.”
“Hmm.” She paused. “Will I see you when we get back?”
“If you come down to Payroll.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Ellie. I’m going to college after all, in September.” The Great Farnon could just make some phone calls before he left for Spain. A Timothy Shoemaker Memorial Scholarship in Accounting had a nice ring. “We’ll be in two different cities.”
“So?” Her hair gleamed like molten copper.
How could you date someone who didn’t know her father had killed yours? And who could never know?
Milo understood now why he’d pulled Farnon from the brink of death. He’d had two days lying in bed to figure it out. It hadn’t been entirely an instinctive response, though it felt like it at the time. Bum, liar, and self-deluder he might be, but Alf Farnon was all Ellie had. He was her father. She loved him. It wasn’t something you could turn off. At least, Milo had never managed it. And a chickenshit living father was still better than a noble dead one—especially if you didn’t know he was chickenshit. On this topic Milo had the edge in experience.
“Listen, last week, what happened with us…I shouldn’t have let it.”
She gave this the scathing look it deserved. “I don’t remember holding a gun to your head. So. I hear you might be working for Daddy next year. Scared he might not want his executive gopher dating his daughter?”
He’d forgotten about the EA business. Under her scornful eye Milo felt weak and reckless at once. Dammit, wasn’t he a survival expert? He’d survived an awful lot. Surely he could swim clear of the sea of lies into which Alf Farnon had plunged him. Build something with Ellie that was theirs, separate from their fathers. Why should the cowardly Alf be the only person she had?
“That’s not it at all.” He took her hand with his uninjured arm. Maybe they could save each other. “It’s just that…you’re too old for me.”
She let him pull her closer. A reluctant smile tugged at her mouth, and those changeable eyes lightened to gold. “Not to mention a better fighter. Your wrestling skills? Pathetic.”
“Maybe,” he conceded. “Whereas your shooting is Olympic quality.”
“It was dark!”
She tried to jerk her hand away, but he held on. “Of course, in ten years the age gap won’t matter so much. Even in, say, seven years, I might be willing to consider—”
As a kiss it wasn’t his smoothest, given the girl had to make the first move. Again. Ellie steadied herself against his bandaged shoulder. But that was better than a screwdriver in the chest—Milo wasn’t complaining.
For a while. “Ouch,” he said, coming up for air.
“Whiner.” She sat back but kept hold of his hand. “Seven years is a long time. How about three weeks? I’ll be back from Spain by then. Will three weeks close the age gap?”
“I’m feeling older by the second,” Milo assured her.
He would live with a secret. People did that all the time.
After she left he lay still for a while, smiling at nothing, remembering the silky feel of her hair. Then he sighed and picked up the phone on the night stand.
“Information? Could I have the number for the Internal Revenue Service in Detroit, please?”
Milo wrote the number on the tissue box. He sincerely hoped he wouldn’t need it. But with Farnons it was best to be prepared.
###
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Edite Kroll, Emily Cappo,
Pat Fleck, Beth Willard Miller, Paula Schaffner,
Christine LePorte, Margaret VanFossan,
and the hard-working staff at Tadmar Press.
About the Author
Nan Willard Cappo's first novel was CHEATING LESSONS (Simon & Schuster/Atheneum), an Edgar Award nominee for best Young Adult Mystery, Junior Library Guild selection, and an ALA Popular Paperback for Young Adults. She likes to write about ordinary people forced to make extraordinary choices--preferably dangerous ones. UNACCOUNTED FOR was plotted during long drives through southeast Michigan for her day job, selling education materials to schools. Like Hemingway, she took a few liberties with local geography (usually by accident) and hopes sharp-eyed readers will excuse this. Visit her at http://www.nancappo.com/
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
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Unaccounted For Page 23