The chief looked at me and said the person taking the can wasn’t an employee, and the same person had been seen doing it every February for years. He wouldn’t give me a name until I asked him to check the security footage from this year. He pulled it up, and there was a woman coming into the fire hall before sunrise, taking the coffee can, and leaving through the side door. I knew her. She was the woman who had organized our food drive for the first six years. I asked why she’d still have access, and he said she’d been removed from the volunteer list in 2014.
I went home and pulled out the old tally sheets. The first year the numbers went wrong was 2014 — exactly when she’d stopped volunteering. I called the food bank and asked them to check who had been submitting our donation paperwork each year. The woman on the phone said it was always the same name, and when she read it to me, I recognized it immediately. It wasn’t the volunteer’s name. It was my husband’s. My husband had been dead for three years by the time the latest certificate was issued.
I called the chief back and asked him to look at the footage again. He did, then asked me to come down to the hall. He had enlarged the woman’s face, and there was something else in the frame I’d missed. She wasn’t taking the can out empty. She was putting an envelope into it first. Inside was a photocopy of an old donation receipt from 2014, with my husband’s signature at the bottom. The chief turned it over and showed me what was written on the back in pencil. “She’ll keep doing it until somebody finally asks where the rest went.”
