I asked the secretary to tell me the other signer’s name. It was the woman who had sat beside my bed for four days after my surgery, the same woman everyone kept calling a volunteer from the church. I remembered her bringing me soup and helping me walk to the bathroom, but I had never known her last name. The secretary pulled up the account and showed me copies of all five checks. Every one was made out to cash, and every one had been deposited within two days of the date written on it. The signatures looked different from one another, but the initials underneath were identical. I asked whether anyone had ever questioned them. She said the previous treasurer had approved everything.
I asked her to check who had authorized that woman on the account. My own name was listed as the person who added her. I had never signed anything for the church in 2023 because I was recovering at home. The secretary started looking through the original paperwork and found a membership form with my signature attached. I knew immediately it wasn’t mine. Then she found something worse: the church’s insurance file contained a copy of my medical records from the surgery, including my address and the dates I was hospitalized. I asked why the church needed those records. She said they didn’t. Someone had submitted them as supporting documentation for the offering.
I drove to the church that afternoon and asked the new pastor to sit with me. I put the five checks on his desk and asked who had received the money. He said he didn’t know, but when I showed him the signature of the second signer, his face changed. He told me she’d resigned three months earlier after someone discovered she’d been opening restricted files. I asked why nobody had told me. He said the former pastor had handled it privately. Then he pulled out an old envelope from his desk. Inside was a handwritten note from the former pastor dated two weeks after my surgery. It said the missing money wasn’t the real problem — the offering had been created because someone needed proof that I had received a large cash gift. At the bottom he’d written one sentence: “If she asks where the other seven thousand went, tell her to look at the property records.”
