The account wasn’t Earlene’s. The name on it belonged to a man none of us recognized, and when we asked Earlene who he was, she said she’d been told years ago that it was the account the neighborhood used for association expenses. I asked why the account had never been in the association’s name, and she said the bank had required a personal account because we weren’t incorporated anymore. The retired accountant from down the street shook his head and asked her whether she’d ever withdrawn money for anything other than street lights, mowing, and snow removal. She said no. Then he asked whether she’d kept receipts for every expense. She said she had. She opened the shoebox and started laying them out on the table, one year at a time. The receipts for the street lights were there. The mowing invoices were there. The snow removal was there. But the deposits into the account were consistently higher than the expenses by several thousand dollars every year.
We added everything up because the numbers were too large to ignore. Forty-one houses, two hundred dollars a year, twenty-one years. That’s more than one hundred and seventy thousand dollars collected after the association had supposedly ceased to exist. Earlene kept saying the money was there because she had never spent it, but the bank statements showed withdrawals that didn’t match any of the receipts. There were twelve withdrawals over the previous five years, all for exactly the same amount, and every one was made on a Friday. I asked her what those were for. She said she didn’t know. The accountant asked whether anyone else had access to the account, and she said only she did. Then he asked her to call the bank and request the signature card. She made the call from the kitchen while everyone listened. The bank employee asked her to confirm the account holder’s name, and Earlene gave the name she’d just read to us. The employee said, “Yes, that’s correct,” and then asked Earlene why she was calling because her name wasn’t listed anywhere on the account.
Earlene sat down and looked genuinely frightened for the first time. The bank agreed to send the original account-opening documents because the account was old, and they arrived the following week. There was one signature on the paperwork, dated 2003, and it wasn’t Earlene’s. It belonged to the man who had been president of our neighborhood association that year. He’d moved away in 2004 and nobody had heard from him since. But the account hadn’t been closed when he left. It had simply kept receiving our dues, because Earlene had been depositing every check into it for twenty-one years. Then the accountant noticed something even stranger in the old statements. Every time money disappeared from the account, it went to the same local bank branch — and the person authorized to withdraw it was the former president’s wife, who still lived three streets away and had been attending our neighborhood meetings for twenty years without ever telling anyone she had access to the account.
