My Boss’s Cousin Tried To Frame Me For Embezzlement — He Didn’t Know I Kept The Receipts

Part 1

The portrait had been turned before breakfast.

I had not done it myself.

I only noticed the gap in the air where the painted eyes had watched the hall for eleven years.

I felt in the sudden blankness of the plaster something very much like relief.

My name is Megan Hughes.

I am the house steward of the Mitchell estate.

It is a title invented for me when the old owner decided that a woman who could hold six account books in her head simultaneously ought to have a formal name for what she did.

I was twenty-six when I took the position.

I am twenty-nine now in the present fact.

Neither number had anything to do with the way I stood in the entrance hall with my hands folded behind my back.

I looked at the empty hook on the wall as though it were an entry in a ledger that did not balance.

“Someone will tell him,” Brenda Clarke said from the doorway of the linen passage.

Brenda was the housekeeper, sixty years of age, and as sharp as broken crockery.

She delivered the statement the way one might say the river will flood as a fact of weather requiring preparation.

The portrait was removed by young Tyler between eight and half past on the instruction of Brian Lawson.

Brian told the boy it was wanted for cleaning.

Brenda paused to brush an invisible speck of dust from her apron.

She informed me that the paint was not damp and it certainly did not require cleaning.

I turned this over in my mind with the care I gave to numbers that did not add.

Brian Lawson was the owner’s cousin and his estate manager by appointment if not by practice.

He was a man who smiled most warmly when delivering news that pained him least.

He had been at the estate throughout the winter while Greg Mitchell remained in his town residence.

Greg was expected to return for the autumn audit in exactly three days.

I would lay before him every account ledger and every contract of the past twelve months.

The accounts were immaculate and I was on the whole not afraid of anything I could see clearly.

“Put the portrait back,” I said.

Brenda informed me that it had been removed entirely to the old game larder.

Brian had the larder locked and said he held the key at Greg’s instruction.

I looked at the empty hook for another long moment.

I thought about Brian Lawson and his particular use of the phrase regarding instructions whenever he wished to do a thing without taking the blame.

We would leave the hook empty until Greg arrived to inquire about it himself.

Brenda looked at me with the expression of a woman who has watched several versions of this story before.

She mentioned the accounts from the western farms that Brian had amended in August.

She did not think the figures were correct.

I had thought the exact same thing since September.

I had been waiting for something I could prove rather than something I could merely feel.

Numbers had a texture to me that was finer than visible.

It was a resistance under the fingertip like the grain in wood.

The western farm accounts had felt wrong since the day Brian handed them to me with his warmest smile.

“I will need the original receipts from before August,” I said.

Brenda produced from her pocket a small folded packet that rustled like old paper.

I took it without expression and tucked it into my own apron with equal care.

We looked at each other in the manner of people who have understood each other for years and do not require further words.

I spent the first day spreading the receipts on the library table after supper when the house had quieted.

The original tallies ran to eleven pages of careful summer additions by the tenant farmers themselves.

Beside them I laid the amended pages Brian had given me.

I worked for two hours in the candlelight.

The amended figures were neat and precise and in several places entirely impossible.

They were not wrong in a way that might be an error.

They were wrong in a way that required intent.

The difference between the two sets of figures amounted to a sum that made me set the pen down.

“Still at it,” a voice said from the doorway.

I did not startle because I had heard the footstep in the hall.

Brian Lawson stepped into the library with the unhurried ease of a man walking through a house he considers his own.

He moved to the fireplace and rested an arm on the mantelpiece in a highly practiced pose.

He wanted to speak with me before his cousin arrived.

He claimed there had been some confusion about certain accounts containing errors he introduced in revision.

He suggested it would be simpler for everyone if I attributed the irregularities to my own incompetence.

I folded my hands on the table.

I asked what simplicity would be worth in his estimate.

He named a generous figure that amounted to roughly four years of my salary.

I told him I had considered it the moment he said it and the answer was no.

The smile did not move from his face but his eyes went remarkably flat.

He reminded me that Greg had particular biases against women in positions of my kind.

He threatened to stop framing my reports favorably to ensure my dismissal.

I looked at the receipts on the table and wished him a good night.

The second day brought rain and Greg Mitchell a full day early.

He was taller than his portrait suggested and broader through the shoulders.

His hands possessed calluses I had not expected from a town man.

He looked at the empty hook in the front hall and asked where his portrait had gone.

I informed him that Brian had it removed to the locked game larder.

Greg turned to look at me with a sudden and very specific attention.

He asked what Brian had asked me to decline the morning before.

I realized immediately that Greg was not a man who missed things.

I told him Brian had offered me money to attribute irregularities in the western farm accounts to my error rather than his design.

A silence fell between us that possessed the specific quality of a large thing being set down carefully.

He asked if I had declined.

I told him I had and invited him to the library to see the accounts.

He read the documents for a long time.

He possessed the same quality with numbers that I did.

He did not scan the pages but rather absorbed them.

He recognized that I had been building a case.

He apologized for being prepared to be dissatisfied with my audit based on Brian’s lies.

I told him I was merely filing information.

I asked for access to the game larder and requested he give me until morning.

He placed the key on the desk and left me alone.

Midnight finally brought complete silence to the house.

The dark corridors yielded to the glow of my single lantern.

At last, the heavy wooden door of the game larder stood before me.

The iron key slid into the lock and turned with a heavy click.