“Honey, there are all kinds of reasons that people split up, even after they get married. Maybe Courtney turned into a royal bitch once she had the ring on her finger.”
Alice knew that Natalie spoke from hard experience. The salon owner had spent twelve years in an abusive marriage. Before the wedding, Natalie’s then-fiancé had showered her with charm and compliments. But after they were married her ex had turned controlling, manipulative, and emotionally abusive. Natalie once said it would have been better if he’d been physically abusive because she would have left the moment he hit her. Instead she stayed until thoughts of committing suicide woke her up to the fact that her husband was about to destroy her.
It was hard to believe. Natalie seemed so secure in herself, as though she knew exactly who she was and what she wanted. But Alice understood that her friend’s serenity was hard won.
Somehow Natalie seemed to know what Alice was thinking. “No, I don’t think Derek turned into a jerk after he got engaged,” she said. “Because you wouldn’t be attracted to him if he were that kind of person.”
“You don’t think I’m blinded by his incredible good looks?”
“We’ve already established that his looks are more likely to drive you away, so there must be something else there that you’re jonesing for.”
Alice had been telling herself that it was pure lust—a crazy opportunity to play out a fantasy—so Natalie’s words sent a tiny shock wave through her. Other than their mutual love of numbers, what else would make her dream of Derek?
“Besides, you need to get out more,” Natalie said, “so you don’t turn into a crazy cat lady.”
Alice threw an edamame pod at her friend and stopped worrying about Derek.
An hour later, Alice emptied the envelope onto her desk. Twenty-six rubber-banded bundles of credit card slips tumbled across the wood surface, causing Audley to waken from his slumber beside her computer and begin batting the bundles onto the floor.
“Hey, buddy, don’t make my job harder than it already is,” Alice said, picking up the gray tabby and depositing him on the floor before retrieving the three fallen packets. She unwound the rubber band from the first one and discovered that it was wrapped in a log of all the credit card transactions with the total from that day, printed off from the BalanceTrakR software. A note at the bottom, written in Natalie’s neat cursive, stated, “All present and accounted for.” Followed by her initials. That meant that Natalie had checked each slip against each listed line item.
Alice trusted her friend’s accuracy because, after all, it was Natalie’s business. Maybe she wouldn’t have to go through every single one of more than a thousand charge slips for the month.
She unwrapped the bundles and smoothed out each day’s tally sheet, carefully winding the rubber bands back around the supporting credit card slips and laying them out in date order. Pulling her favorite calculator over, she added up each day’s total, running the numbers twice, first forward, then backward. The two totals matched.
She got up to pull the BalanceTrakR paperwork and the bank statement from the Mane Attraction pile, flipping through the pages as she strolled back to her desk. She found the total credit card charges for the month on the BalanceTrakR printout and laid it down beside her hand-calculated totals.
For a moment, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes before sitting down hard in her chair. Seating her glasses firmly on her nose, she looked again.
There was a difference of $3.37.
She rocked back in her chair. How could that be possible? The software was disagreeing with its own daily totals.
Seizing the bank statement, she added up the deposits from the credit card companies. The Mane Attraction received major credit card deposits once a week rather than daily, so it didn’t take long to come up with the total.
It matched the monthly BalanceTrakR statement.
Somewhere between the credit card charges being entered into BalanceTrakR and the total being transmitted to the bank that processed the charges, $3.37 had disappeared.
Alice’s brain felt like it was going to explode as she tried to figure out how that could happen. Although she was familiar with the process of credit card transactions, she realized that figuring out where the error occurred was beyond her capabilities.
She dialed Derek’s cell number.
“Alice, what a pleasure.” He sounded sincere. “I’m about to go into a meeting. Can I call you back in about an hour?”
“Yes, of course, but I found the discrepancy.” She couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice. “It’s in the credit card charges.”
“The credit card charges?” His astonishment came through the phone. “But those are processed directly through the software. We checked the totals more than once.”
“I know, but there must be some weird bug in BalanceTrakR. That’s why I called.”
“We’re going to need Leland’s help,” Derek said, sounding a little disgruntled about it. “I’m sorry to ask you this but could you come to the KRG office in New York this evening with all your documentation? I’ll send a car for you.”
Alice’s heart leaped, which annoyed her. “What time?”
There was a pause as though he was thinking. “The car will be there at seven if that works for you.”
Since her plans for the rest of the day consisted of feeding the cats, matching a thousand charge slips to their listing on BalanceTrakR, and taking the self-defense class with Dawn, that would work for her. Any other time she would have regretted missing the self-defense class because Anthony, the fake attacker, was so cute. However, Derek was much cuter. “I’ll see you this evening,” she said.
“Great work,” Derek said, the admiration in his voice warming her.
She sat with the phone cradled in her hand for a few seconds, as though she could hold his compliment that way. A founding partner of an international consulting firm thought she was good at her job.
A very good-looking founding partner.
“Get a grip,” she muttered and dropped the phone on the desk. With a tingling sense of excitement, she picked up the first packet of charge slips and removed the rubber band. Somewhere in these little rectangles of paper lay a clue to the missing money and she couldn’t wait to find it.
Two hours later, the excitement had died down. So far the paper receipts matched the transaction list. She closed her eyes and tilted her head to rest on the chair’s back. The scrawled tips were especially difficult to decipher at times, and she wondered how the receptionist decided how much to key in. She’d gotten through about two-thirds of the little packets, which meant that finishing them would take another hour.
With a groan, she sat forward and opened her eyes, grabbing another bunch of receipts. She matched up the first ten. The eleventh made her blink. The handwriting was a little scrawled but perfectly clear. And it was $3.37 more than BalanceTrakR said it should be.
“Bingo!” she shouted, fists raised in the air. Audley bolted off the credenza where he’d been peacefully snoozing.
Except she still had no idea of what weird bug was living in the bowels of the software and eating a few dollars and cents from one transaction among thousands.