Артур Порджес - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 121, No. 2. Whole No. 738, February 2003

She cross-checked them with the Urbanick files, and then put her head in her hands.

The sums matched the Urbanicks’ mortgage payment, their car payment, and all their credit-card payments. The repossessed car was only the beginning of their worries. Soon they’d lose their home and any credit rating they had.

Soon they would be out on the street, alone and without resources.

All because of Rick. He had been stealing from them, causing all their trouble, just like Urbanick said.

How long she sat in that back room with the pale fluorescent light, the uncomfortable chair, and the sleeping laptop screen, she did not know. Either the Tums had worked on the knot in her stomach or she had moved beyond the pain.

A hundred crazy thoughts ran through her head, all of them starting with the wish that she had let Charles Urbanick charge upstairs and take care of Rick. It would have been so simple — and she craved simple, because everything had suddenly become hard.

Or not so suddenly. She couldn’t believe how she had deluded herself, thinking Rick was someone she could trust, someone she could love. Those mornings, listening to the car’s muffler rev and hard rock blast through the windows, she had come to realize how much she had grown to dislike her husband and how unwilling she had been to acknowledge that.

Nineteen houses and a bright orange kitchen. Clients who were not allowed into her house because she couldn’t afford to have the showplace that interior decorators usually had. Dreams set aside, forgotten, or lost.

And Rick’s insistence on taking over the finances of her business, giving him the veneer of respectability — her respectability — to ruin even more lives.

The worst of it was, Ada had taught him this. In the early days of her business, she had shown him how to access credit files, how to use social security numbers to make certain a client was as solvent as they claimed to be, how to snoop into people’s lives.

When they’d taken the house on Oak, Rick had said no one would force them to move again. Ada had thought he was going to change, to suck it up and live with the noises that had bothered him.

She hadn’t expected him to strike back.

Ada put her head in her hands. She couldn’t ignore this anymore. She knew what she had to do.

She hadn’t really thought that all those sudden moves, all that uprooting, always following Rick’s whims, had merely been practice for this moment. But maybe she had been waiting for it — the chance to escape, to start fresh. Maybe she had known it was going to come all along — that at some point, her relationship with Rick would force her to lose everything she once cared for.

The problem was, she had lost everything a long time ago. She had only realized it now.

For the first time in years, she took action on her own initiative. She used the Internet to close all of her joint credit-card accounts. She had the bills sent to Rick. Her hands were shaking, but she didn’t stop.

It took only a few clicks of the mouse to delete her name from all of the billing records for the home phone and the other utilities. She canceled her cell phone, effective the next morning, and she closed all the store’s utility accounts. She drafted an e-mail letter to her current clients, recommending a rival interior decoration service, and set her e-mail program to mail the letter in the morning.

Changing that much of her life took less than an hour.

Then she called Gavin Markham, a client of hers who was also one of the best attorneys in town. She set an appointment with him for later in the afternoon, without explaining why she wanted to see him.

Finally, she made three copies of the 1996 disk. She put all three in her purse and stood.

Not much to take with her. Nothing really. Just the bank account information, her purse, and the laptop itself.

After she’d gathered her things, she closed and locked the door to her shop, refusing to let herself say goodbye. She hadn’t really felt at home here, just as she hadn’t felt at home in the orange kitchen or in the last five houses. When had she detached so thoroughly that she started skating through life, seeing nothing, having no dreams?

She wasn’t sure she wanted to answer that question.

After she left the store, she moved as quickly as she could. First she went to her personal bank, and moved all but fifty dollars from the joint savings account into the joint checking account. Ten thousand, six hundred and eighty-five dollars, waiting to be used.

Then she took all but a hundred dollars from the joint account where Rick had been storing Urbanick’s money. She left the hundred dollars so that no one would notify Rick that the account had been closed. She had the bank give her the rest in a money order, thousands of dollars taken from a family who had done nothing more than live their lives, without intending to bother a soul.

Finally, she went to the business’s bank and closed her shop accounts effective on Friday — letting the bank know about the outstanding checks and making sure the bank would pay them.

The rest of the store’s reserves she took in a personal money order, carefully folding it and setting it in her wallet.

Now her time was limited. Rick might try to use the accounts and he would figure out what she had done.

She had to be quick and she had to be smart.

Gavin Markham’s office was as familiar as her own. The Chagall print she’d snared for him at an estate auction was the focal point of the room. His mahogany desk, off to the side, seemed like an afterthought. A wall of windows brought in filtered daylight, and the plants in front of them made the place comfortable despite the expensive trappings.

Markham met her in his shirt sleeves. Files stacked on top of his desk meant she’d interrupted him in the middle of preparing for a case.

“What’s wrong, Ada?” he asked. “You sounded upset on the phone.”

And from the way he was peering at her, she must have looked upset as well. Maybe she wasn’t as calm as she was pretending to be.

She sat in the original Eames chair she had found at a flea market. Gavin sat on the edge of his desk, arms crossed. He clearly wasn’t going to treat her the way he would treat a normal client.

He was treating her like a friend.

His kindness made her hands shake. She took a few deep breaths, then reached inside her purse, removing two of the 1996 disks, her wallet, and her checkbook.

She slid the disks to him and explained what she had found. Then she took out the money order she’d made from the Urbanicks’ funds and handed it to Gavin.

“I want you to go to the police for me,” she said, “and turn in Rick. Then I want you to return the Urbanicks’ money, and contact their creditors. Everything is documented on this disk. I made one copy for you and another for the police.”

Then, without looking up, so that she wouldn’t have to see his reaction, she opened her checkbook and wrote him a check for ten thousand dollars. As she signed, she had an odd prescient flash: This would be the last time she would use her married name. In the future, she would have a new name, a made-up one, maybe, but one that would get her a fresh start somewhere else.

Her mouth was dry. She had loved Rick once. She wasn’t sure what had happened to that love, but it had been part of her. It still was, like the memory of summer sunsets and the promise of a bright future if she only followed all the rules.

“Ada?” Gavin said.

She looked up. He was watching her with concern.

She handed him the check. “This is your retainer plus,” she said. “Put it in some kind of account and take what you need for my case from it. I’ll let you know where I’m going so that you can send me the monthly accounting. I’m sure this’ll cost a lot, because I want you to start divorce proceedings, too — effective immediately.”