“I’m not going to kill myself to try to keep this up,” she’d said, and then she had pocketed Annabel’s money, the money for the dress.
Annabel didn’t know if she was happy to have the dress or not. She only knew that Mallory was happy to have sold it to her. She thought that what Mallory was doing was insane.
What she was thinking of doing was insane, too, but that was a more complicated thing. Deciding that you’d rather be rich than poor should have been a no-brainer. Annabel paused in the hall outside Ruth Grandmere’s office and looked around. The administrative hall at the club was always mostly deserted. It was as if none of the members wanted to be seen in the vicinity of the actual work that had to be done to keep the club running. Annabel knocked on Ruth Grandmere’s door and looked inside. The office was empty, but there was what seemed to be a propped-up white card at the end of her desk. Annabel went in and read it.
Mortimer, it said. I’m in Sally Martindale’s office.
Annabel backed out into the hall. That was odd. She had seen Ruth walking around a little while ago, and she had simply assumed that something had happened to change the schedule. Ruth was never on duty at the same time as Thomas Mortimer.
Sally Martindale had the bursar’s office. Something had happened to her marriage, and now she had to work at the club. Annabel couldn’t imagine that any more than she could imagine Mallory in nursing school. She went down the hall and found that the bursar’s door was open. She stuck her head inside and saw that Ruth Grandmere was alone. She felt instantaneously better. She had to talk to someone. The situation was getting critical. She couldn’t have talked to Sally Martindale to save her life.
Ruth Grandmere was sitting at Sally Martindale’s desk, bent toward a computer screen, with a frown on her face. Annabel knocked tentatively on the open door. Then, when Ruth didn’t budge, she knocked again.
This time, Ruth heard. She turned away from whatever was engaging her attention, but for a moment it was as if she couldn’t recognize the person in the doorway. It made Annabel feel very strange, as if she had ceased to exist. Then Ruth seemed to snap to attention, and her gaze cleared, and she smiled.
“Annabel, hello. I’m sorry. I’m afraid I’m a little distracted.”
“That’s all right,” Annabel said.
“I wish I understood more about computers than I do,” Ruth Grandmere said. “And more about money. It seems odd to me, to get to my age and understand so little about money. Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“Do you often take money out of your account here? In cash, is what I’m talking about. Do you take money out frequently?”
“I don’t take it at all. I just charge stuff.”
“But what about when you’ve run short of cash?”
“I don’t think I ever have. Not out of here. And in town you, can use the ATM.”
“Yes,” Ruth said. “Yes, you can.” She looked back at the console, tapped a few keys, and waited. Then she shook her head again and sighed. “You didn’t take one hundred twenty-five dollars out of your account last August twenty-second?”
“On August twenty-second, I was in Martha’s Vineyard. We’re always on the Vineyard in August. We go to stay with my grandparents.”
“Do you? I didn’t realize it was all of August. Good God, but this is a mess, isn’t it? I don’t know what we’re going to do about it.”
“Do about what?”
Ruth Grandmere seemed to come to again. This time, she looked sheepish.
“Don’t mind me,” she said. “I’m just rambling on. It isn’t very important, really. We’ve just got a lot of computer mess-up in the records, and they’ll all have to be straightened out. Was there something you wanted that I could help you with?”
Annabel shifted from one foot to another. The idea of Ruth Grandmere working on Sally Martindale’s computer was intriguing. Where was Sally Martindale? How messed up could the records get, that Ruth would come in when she was supposed to be off-duty just to get them straightened out?
Annabel looked at the floor, and then at the ceiling.
“The thing is,” she said. “It’s about Kayla.”
“Kayla?”
“I was going to ask for your advice,” Annabel said. “I mean, you know what my mother is like. She can’t keep her head about anything, really. And so I didn’t want to ask her. But I thought you might have an idea.”
“If there’s something important going on in your life,” Ruth Grandmere said, “you should talk to your parents, no matter how hard it is. I know what it’s like around here, Annabel. I know that it’s sometimes very hard for young people to go to their parents with a problem when their parents have spent years, spent years—”