I turned my car around and drove toward the house. Cayce kept his gaze on me the entire hundred yards, a hint of a scowl on his features visible when I got close enough to read his face.
He stepped off the porch when I hit the control for the trunk lid. By the time I was out of the car, he had the trunk fully open and was pulling out the banker’s box I had put some files in.
His entire body seemed stiff and I could only guess as to why. Since I didn’t want to argue with him when I came bearing such bad news, I apologized for everything I could think of, starting with the last delay.
“Sorry about the wait,” I said, holding the screen door as he carried the box into the kitchen. “I saw Elaine Montgomery’s SUV out back and…”
I hesitated over how to politely imply the woman was a known adulteress.
“Yeah,” he grunted as he placed the box on the table then his palms atop the lid. “I was going to talk to him about that, too. I don’t want Gordon pissed off at me. Once I add another vet to the practice, he indicated he’ll give me an on-call contract.”
My brows bobbed upward in appreciation. An on-call contract would give Cayce a monthly retainer fee even if none of the animals needed servicing.
“So you went there because Elaine was sniffing around?” he asked, repeating pretty much what I had just told him.
A flip response battered the back of my teeth about how I wasn’t interested in his buddy. But Jess had made the same mistake of thinking I was, so why not Cayce?
As it was, I could only half contain my snark.
“Yes,” I answered. “That’s all I went there for. We have an agreement, husband.”
His mouth quirked to the side, the squiggle it ended in evidencing displeasure. More displeasure was headed his way, so I took a seat and got down to business.
“We have a lot to go through,” I said, removing the lid from the top of the box and taking out a folder I had labeled as the first for discussion. “And I know you’re going to want to go straight to the heart of the matter, but I want to start with the easier things, so that’s where we’re starting.”
“Fine,” he grunted. “Is this going to require coffee or whiskey?”
Everything from my shoulders up shrugged. I was still trying to process that the condoms had been from Jess fucking someone, not Cayce. I was down to one legitimate reason on why it had made the least bit of sense for me to walk out after our one night together—his absence from my life after daddy died.
Having gone through all the records, I could understand why a proud man like Cayce, his new business starting out a failure and his personal income going down immediately, would have stayed away from me, especially since that business had been my father’s business. He couldn’t really talk to me about it without casting some aspersions on what kind of businessman my father had been.
“Let’s start with coffee,” I said when he remained immobile.
While he prepared the pot for brewing, I started with a small lecture.
“First off, you never should have paid me an average of two-fifty a month on the purchase contract. That meant an average monthly ‘profit’ of five thousand dollars, and you were nowhere close to that high a number. Knowing what some of your expenses were from our agreement, you went in the hole more than once this year.”
Pulling coffee mugs from the cupboard, he huffed. “Might have sold a few pints of blood. Looked into other donations, but…well…”
His cheeks reddened and I burst out laughing.
“Well, yeah. I looked into the girl version of that kind of transaction. Can’t say that I would have gone through with it, but family medical history made it a moot point.”
A faint smile played at the edges of his mouth.
“Your eggs will be fine when the time comes, baby girl.”
“Anyway,” I said, rushing forward before my own blush could color my cheeks. “Point is, you’re going to stop doing stuff like that. You were being more than fair with me. Truth is, daddy sold you a bankrupt business.”
His neurotic mouth returned to a flat line as he filled the mugs.
“And you’re being more than fair with your patients. Last time I tried to get daddy to raise his prices—which you’re still following—everything was thirty percent below comparably sized markets and fifty percent below Austin rates. And you’re making next to no margin on the monthly prescriptions for ticks and such. I bet people come in just for the medicine, with no office visit.”
“They were,” he confessed. “Six months ago, I made it so they had to have an exam on file with us some time during the last twelve months before they could buy the medicine.”
“Which would work better if your exam rates weren’t thirty-to-fifty percent below market.”
“Okay, you win on that one,” he said and placed a hot mug of coffee in front of me then took the seat alongside mine. “We’ll do a new price study, but ease people into it with something like an effective date notice. It’ll reduce downtime between visits before then.”
Leaning over to look in the box, he flipped through the folders. The one I had already taken out was the only one with a different number. It was the softball folder.
“Are we done with the easy stuff?”
“Other than implementing it, yes,” I answered softly.
Standing up, I took the box off the table, pulled out the remaining folders and arranged them according to the order in which I wanted him to examine the contents.
“I want to know if you see what I see.” I picked up my mug of coffee then gave his shoulder a quick pat. “I’m going to drink this out on the porch while you look things over.”
Half an hour later, Cayce joined me on the porch with two small tumblers of whiskey. He handed one to me then took a drink of the other.
“Ellen, really?”
“I triple checked everything.” I took a small sip of the whiskey, its burn immediate. “I really wanted to be wrong.”
“More than a thousand a month…sometimes twice that,” he said, voice low as he rubbed at his arm. “Last person I would have suspected. All the things she does for charity.”
He sighed, the sound so wounded I wanted to wrap an arm around his shoulder.
“If you think about it,” I started. “It may be how she does a lot of those things. All the money she raised after the Browers’ house burned down? If you look at the dates, she dug deep into the till the three weeks following the fire.”
Cayce leaned forward, his forearms planted against his legs. He took a drink of the whiskey then stared into the dark amber liquid.
“So I take this to the prosecutor?”
I felt the pinch of tears threatening. I wasn’t sure if they were for Cayce, my father, or for Ellen. As hard as my nose stung, it was probably for the three of them. Daddy had likely died thinking he failed Cayce and me. Cayce would have to spend a lot of time digging himself out of the hole and face the consequences of whatever he decided. Ellen, the cause of all this, couldn’t wipe her own bottom after the stroke.
“Ash?” he asked, swirling the whiskey in his glass. “I’d really like to know what you think I should do.”
I took one more sip of my drink and handed the rest to him.
“You do nothing,” I said. “We both know Ellen is done working for anyone. We also know you can’t claw back any of the money unless she has a secret bank account or something. Your business insurance doesn’t cover employee malfeasance against the practice itself—which you should look at changing the policy.”
He nodded and took another drink. “I see what you’re saying, but that’s all civil law, not criminal.”
“No doubt what she did was a crime,” I agreed. “So let’s say you go to the prosecutor with what I’ve found. Your business gets out in public even if he doesn’t agree to file charges—and he may not given her current condition. Maybe Ellen has another heart attack because of all this getting out. Marcus quits out of solidarity, but who wants to hire a thief’s grandson? And all the charities that Ellen really did help, even if it was with your money and daddy’s, they freeze her and the rest of her family out.”
I let everything I had said, especially the last of it, sink in. Ellen was going to have a lot of out-of-pocket costs. She needed in-home care. If the community didn’t rally around her, most of the burden would fall to her teenaged grandson.
“So I keep my mouth shut to protect Ellen and her family?”
He polished off the whiskey then coughed—maybe at how much he had swallowed, maybe at all I was asking him to swallow.
I patted him on the back, my hand lingering as I pressed on. “This isn’t much different from what happened with Mayhew’s truck stop.”
Cayce snorted. “You mean the one that’s all shuttered up?”
“One and the same.”
We were still very much a small town. We loved our scandals, but it didn’t matter which side of the scandal a person was on, an aura of guilt followed them afterward.
The cuckold, the dupe, the fool…
I rubbed at Cayce’s back while I rummaged for some way to make the bitter pill I was asking him to take a touch sweeter.
“Daddy wouldn’t want you to prosecute,” I said at last. “He would forgive Ellen this trespass. Sick as she is, I don’t think he would even confront her.”
Cayce nodded, but then he turned and looked at me with fresh trouble brewing in his gaze.
“Love, how can you counsel me about what your daddy would do when you still haven’t read his letter?”
I pulled my hand back to my lap and watched Old Man Bixby drive by. He honked, we waved and then we went into the house.
A few hours later, I retired upstairs for the night without answering Cayce’s question.