I stared at the second name until the woman asked if I recognized it. I did, but only because I’d seen it once before on a Christmas card Dale had tucked into his Bible. It belonged to a woman who had stopped attending our church years ago. I asked why church offering money was going into an account with her name on it. The auditor said the account had been opened in 2017 and that deposits from the church matched withdrawals made within days of the cash shortages in my count sheets. Every missing amount had been withdrawn in cash, and every withdrawal had been made on a Monday afternoon — after Dale and I finished counting.
I went home and pulled out nineteen years of records. The old count sheets were clean until 2016, and then the amounts started drifting by two or three hundred dollars every week. I called Dale and asked him to come over because I wanted to show him something. He arrived angry, saying the audit was making everybody suspicious of everybody else. I put the account statement on the table. He looked at the second name and went completely quiet. Then he said she had nothing to do with the church. I asked why her account received almost exactly the amount that disappeared from our offering every week. He finally admitted he’d been “borrowing” the money, but he swore he’d intended to replace every dollar.
Then the auditor called while he was still sitting there. She said they’d found one more transfer, and this one wasn’t going into that woman’s account. It had gone somewhere else entirely. She read me the destination account number, and I recognized the last four digits because they belonged to a savings account my late husband had opened for our church building fund. I told her that account had been closed years ago. She said it hadn’t been closed. Someone had changed the account holder information in 2018 — and the new name on it was mine. I looked at Dale, and for the first time he wasn’t looking angry. He was looking afraid.
