She looked at her husband as if she had never seen him before.
Her fingers, wrapped around the tan Birkin, had gone white.
The bracelet no longer chimed.
« Marsha, » Gilbert said. His voice had changed. It was thin. « That is a coding matter. It is a complicated, technical, administrative… »
« Marsha, » Lillian said, still calm. « How many? »
I knew the answer.
I had pulled the report on my own time, at midnight in March, and I had never had the courage to open it again.
I opened it now.
« Two hundred and twelve accounts, » I said. « Approved by the committee. Held. Sent to collections anyway. Total, three million four hundred thousand dollars. »
The sound that went through the lobby was not a gasp.
It was lower than that.
It was the sound of sixty people doing arithmetic.
« Your incentive plan, » Lillian said to Gilbert, almost gently. « It pays on net collections over target, correct? »
He did not answer.
« A hundred and eighty-six thousand dollars this year, » she said. « I signed it myself. »
She stood.
She was a small woman, seventy-four, in a navy suit, and she crossed the lobby tile in four short steps and stopped directly in front of the chief financial officer of Dobbs County Memorial Hospital.
She held out her hand, palm up.
And I heard her say the two words that Gilbert Stroud had said to me ten minutes earlier.
« Badge. Now. »
Chapter 4: Peppermints
Gilbert Stroud looked at the open palm in front of him for a long time.
Then he looked at the room.
Sixty people were looking back.
There was nowhere to put his eyes that wasn’t a face.
His fingers went to the lanyard around his neck, and I watched the gold Rolex slide down his wrist as his hand shook, and he stared at it as though it belonged to somebody else.
He placed the badge in Lillian Rusk’s hand.
« Orville, » Lillian said, without turning her head.
Orville, our night-shift security guard, a big, soft-spoken man who’d been called twice that morning to remove a child, stepped out from beside the doors.
« Yes, ma’am. »
« Mr. Stroud is leaving the building. Please see that he has what he came with, and nothing from his office. »
« Yes, ma’am. »
He took Gilbert gently by the elbow, the way you would help an old man across ice.
They walked to the doors together.
