Chapter 13 - EMMA’S NOTEBOOK
Emma brought down a spiral notebook covered in stickers.
Claire recognized it.
Emma usually used it to track bracelet orders and dog-walking payments.
She opened to a page near the middle.
Dates ran down the left side.
Amounts on the right.
Some were circled.
Some had question marks.
“You wrote these?”
Emma nodded.
“I started when Grandma borrowed the two hundred.”
Claire read the first line.
MARCH 3 — $200 — GRANDMA.
Then:
MARCH 14 — $75 — ?
MARCH 22 — $418 — CCM PEDIATRICS.
APRIL 2 — $2,100 — HOUSE?
APRIL 18 — $65 — GAS.
MAY 1 — $2,100 — HOUSE?
Claire looked up.
“You knew about the mortgage payments?”
“Not exactly.”
Emma sat beside Josh.
“Grandma said money would come into my account sometimes and I shouldn’t worry because it was grown-up money.”
Claire closed her eyes for half a second.
“Did she tell you not to tell me?”
“She said you were already stressed.”
Josh muttered something under his breath.
Claire looked at him.
“Not now.”
He nodded.
Claire kept reading.
There were deposits too.
$4,600.
$3,200.
$1,700.
Then withdrawals.
Emma had tried to calculate whether the balance returned to where it started.
She had even written:
MY MONEY SHOULD = 2436.18
Claire pressed her thumb against the paper.
“Why didn’t you tell me when the numbers didn’t match?”
Emma shrugged.
“You were doing taxes.”
Claire almost laughed.
Taxes.
Three nights at the dining table with a laptop and W-2 forms had been enough for a child to decide her mother was too busy to hear that adults were using her bank account.
Josh leaned forward.
“What’s CCM Pediatrics?”
Emma shook her head.
Claire knew.
She didn’t want to.
But she knew.
Tara’s son Mason had asthma.
He had spent one night in Children’s Mercy South the previous winter after a respiratory infection triggered an attack.
Claire took out her phone.
Tara answered immediately.
“What now?”
Claire put her on speaker.
“March twenty-second. Four hundred eighteen dollars. CCM Pediatrics.”
Tara went quiet.
“Mason.”
“Why did Emma pay Mason’s medical bill?”
“She didn’t.”
“It came out of her account.”
“I put money in first.”
“Why did you use her account at all?”
Tara exhaled.
“My operating account was negative. Insurance hadn’t processed the claim. Mason’s inhaler prescription was held up because the old balance had gone to collections.”
Claire looked at Emma.
Emma was staring at the floor.
“You could have called me.”
“You were angry about the wedding money.”
“So you stole from a child instead?”
“I had a kid wheezing in the back seat.”
Josh said, “Tara, you had other options.”
“Really, Josh?”
Her voice sharpened.
“You want to compare parenting decisions tonight?”
Josh stopped.
Claire said, “The salon wasn’t an inhaler.”
Silence.
“No.”
“Say it.”
“The salon wasn’t an emergency.”
“Then why?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not good enough.”
Tara’s voice cracked.
“I had a bridal consultation at two. I looked like I hadn’t slept in a month because I hadn’t. My gray roots were four inches long. My nails were wrecked. I had a bride who kept asking whether Honeycomb was going out of business.”
“So you spent Emma’s money to look successful?”
“I used the wrong card.”
“You still had it.”
Another silence.
“Yes.”
Claire ended the call.
Emma whispered, “Is Mason okay?”
Claire looked at her daughter.
That was Emma.
Still worried about her cousin.
“He’s okay.”
Emma turned the notebook.
“There’s one I didn’t understand.”
Near the bottom of the page was a deposit.
JUNE 6 — +$9,000.
“That’s a lot,” Emma said.
Claire nodded.
“Then look what happened the next day.”
JUNE 7 — -$8,700.
The description beside it was partly cut off.
PIONEER MUTUAL CLAIM.
Josh leaned closer.
“That’s insurance.”
Claire called Angela at the bank even though it was after hours and left a message.
At 8:14, Angela called back from home.
“I checked the transaction.”
“What was it?”
“An insurance settlement check deposited through mobile banking.”
“Whose insurance?”
Angela paused.
“It was issued to Marlene Bennett.”
Claire looked at Emma’s notebook again.
“Why would my mother put an insurance settlement into Emma’s account?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“Where did the eight thousand seven hundred go?”
Angela gave her the recipient.
Midwest Commerce Funding.
Claire stared across the room at Josh.
It hadn’t been Emma’s money paying everything.
Her daughter’s account had become something worse.
A hiding place.
May you like
And the person hiding money in it wasn’t Tara.
It was Marlene.
