Chapter 4: The Accounting Department Signature
The lamp on the mahogany desk threw a hard, amber cone of light across scattered sheets of paper. Outside the tall, shuttered windows of the study, the wind dragged dry pine needles against the glass. I sat on the edge of the heavy leather armchair, my gray uniform skirt smoothed flat beneath my palms, watching his hands.
He didn't look like a man who spent his nights wading through ledgers. His dark shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbows, revealing lean forearms and a faint white scar across his left wrist. He turned another page, the heavy cardstock rustling in the quiet room.
"Look at this," he said, his voice low and steady. He tapped a finger against a line of figures near the bottom of a quarterly disbursement report. "Direct deposit routing. This isn't our primary bank."
I leaned forward slightly, though I didn't dare step closer to the desk. "I don't know anything about routing numbers, sir. I only know what hits my account on Fridays."
"What hits your account is eighty-four dollars short every single week," he replied, lifting his gaze to meet mine. There was no anger in his eyes now, just a cold, methodical focus that made the air feel thin. "The ledger approved by corporate lists your full base rate. But the batch file sent to the bank three days later shows an adjustment. A manual override."
"A manual override?" I repeated the words, the shape of them foreign and heavy. "Can someone just change it?"
"If they have administrative credentials," he murmured, pulling a tablet toward him and tapping the glass screen with a stylus. "Let's see who touched the batch queue for region four. Every terminal leaves a footprint. Even when they think they're clearing the cache."
The silence in the study stretched, broken only by the soft click of his stylus against the screen and the distant hum of the estate's heating vents. I thought back to three weeks ago, when I had tried to ask the personnel office about my missing overtime. The woman behind the counter had barely looked up from her computer, telling me that union dues and insurance adjustments ate up the difference. When I mentioned I didn't have insurance, she had waved her hand and told me to take it up with corporate relations by mail. I never wrote the letter. A stamp cost fifty cents, and fifty cents bought a loaf of day-old bread at the gas station down the highway.
"They count on people being too tired to fight," I whispered, the words slipping out before I could bite them back.
He stopped tapping the screen. His dark eyes locked onto mine, the sharp line of his jaw tightening. "Who told you that?"
"Nobody told me," I said, looking down at my shoes. "You just learn it. If you complain about your check, your hours get cut next week. If your hours get cut, you fall behind on the room rent. It's easier to just keep your head down and eat cold rice in the dark."
He stood up from the desk, the leather chair rolling back a few inches against the Persian rug. He walked over to the liquor cabinet by the fireplace, poured a finger of amber liquid into a heavy glass, but didn't drink it. He just held it, staring into the dark amber surface.
"It stops tonight," he said. He didn't raise his voice, but the finality in it made my chest ache. "The system log shows the overrides originated from a terminal registered to Marcus Vance. Mid-level accounting. He handles the regional payroll batches before they go to the wire transfer service."
"Mr. Vance?" I remembered him—a tall, neat man in a tailored gray suit who walked through the hallways with a leather portfolio tucked under his arm, never making eye contact with anyone wearing a housekeeping uniform.
"He's been padding his own department's bonuses by skimming fractions of hourly wages across forty different estate service contracts," the boss said, setting the glass down untouched. "Small enough amounts that corporate auditors miss them in the macro spreadsheets. Big enough to fund a lifestyle off-site." He checked his watch—a heavy steel timepiece that caught the desk lamp's glare. "It's three in the morning. We confront him first thing when the finance office opens at eight."
Panic flared in my throat, hot and sharp. "Sir, if he's that high up, and I'm just—if I'm involved in this—they'll let me go. They'll say I was part of it, or that I'm causing trouble."
"You aren't going anywhere," he said, stepping closer until he was standing just feet from the armchair. "And you're not going back down to that staff dorm tonight."
I looked up, startled by the shift in his tone. "The dorms are where I live, sir."
May you like
"Not anymore," he replied, his gaze unyielding. "You're staying in the guest suite on the second floor for the rest of the week. Get your things from the pantry. I'll have security unlock the east wing quarters for you."
I opened my mouth to refuse—to tell him I couldn't possibly sleep in the rooms reserved for visiting dignitaries—but the look in his eyes forestalled every argument. It wasn't pity. It was the absolute, unshakeable authority of a man who had just realized his own house was rotting from the inside, and intended to tear it down to the studs.
