Deconstructed(73)

“You okay?” Griffin asked, abandoning the shortbread and iced tea. The old dog even looked concerned. “You look ill.”

“Actually, I’m not okay.” I swallowed hard and looked back at the brochure in my hand. “I can’t see Scott investing in this. Not if he knows it’s a scheme . . . which means he has other plans for the money he took from our accounts. He’s a banker, so he can move money around easily. He’s hiding it from me. He’s planning something.”

And then it hit me. Something I had seen when I had first riffled through his office those many weeks ago. That bank he’d gone to when we’d vacationed over Christmas. A brochure for Grand Cayman National Bank and Trust had fallen out of a folder. When I was at the spa, Scott had said he had a banking friend who worked there and he was going to visit him. But he’d lied. I knew where he’d put our savings, our retirement, and probably all the kickback money Donner Walker was paying him to steer fat cats his way.

“Oh my Lord,” I said, clutching my stomach, listing a bit in the rocking chair. The puzzle pieces lined up. The emptying of accounts. The Cayman bank. The passport in his desk drawer. The weight loss. The new girlfriend. Click. Click. Click.

Griffin and Skeet looked at each other as if they were afraid I might pass out. But I wasn’t passing out. Because the anger that flooded my body gave me the strength to stand, to fist my hands beside me, and to growl. “He’s going to leave the country.”

“Huh?” Griffin asked.

“Scott is taking his girlfriend and our money, and he’s leaving the country. I’m going to fucking kill him.”





CHAPTER NINETEEN


RUBY

We sat in Dak’s bar trying to grapple with what Cricket had discovered that afternoon. It wasn’t easy to catch hold of. Maybe because if Scott was colluding with Donner Walker to bilk people out of millions of dollars, Ty had to know what was going on. Which meant that the guy who’d romanced me for the past month was worse than a douche. He was a slimy, no-good pilferer of innocent people’s bank accounts.

How depressing.

“I don’t know what to do with this information. How can I get the money back? It’s probably now in a foreign bank,” Cricket said for the third time, jarring me out of how this whole hinky business was affecting my dating life. My poor boss now knew that not only was her husband cheating on her, but he was cheating his friends and customers.

How very depressing.

“We’re going to figure out what to do, Cricket. Juke said he’d be down in a minute. He’ll have some ideas or maybe know someone we can contact who can investigate what Donner Walker and Scott are up to.” I slid the glass of wine that the waitress, Shirley, had set on the table toward Cricket. I knew that alcohol didn’t solve problems, but Cricket had been vacillating between flushed pink with rage and white with horror. In this case, the wine would probably help.

Griffin had excused himself to go to his office to check on things. He’d left his bike outside, and I had marveled that Cricket had climbed on that death trap with him. I had a hard time reconciling the woman straddling a hog behind my cousin with my prissy boss who always sat with her knees together. I kept trying to picture them roaring up North Market, rattling across the Caddo Lake bridge, drinking longnecks at the Channel Marker, but that image escaped me.

Dak stood behind the bar, casting glances my way occasionally. There was something about a handsome guy behind a bar, towel flung over his shoulder, biceps singing a siren song, that made a girl look thrice.

“You’ve looked at him, like, ten times,” Cricket said, taking a gulp of chardonnay. “You have something going on?”

“No. I mean, we’re friends. We used to . . .” I stopped because I couldn’t really answer the question because I didn’t know what we were. He’d come over and watched American Idol with me before saying good night and disappearing into the darkness of my driveway. And then we had texted a few times throughout the day about who we thought would get voted off that night. This was something we used to do when we were dating in high school. Both of us had loved watching the talent show and choosing our favorites, then calling in votes and actively campaigning our friend groups to get more votes. And we had made crazy bets. Like if someone got voted off who one of us swore wouldn’t, there was a penalty of buying a Coke or wearing an awkward shirt to school. We’d had a lot of fun with our affectionate rivalry for those years we’d been together. Silly children.

But what was Dak to me now?

I was afraid to examine it too greatly. My heart had always been on the table when it came to Dakota Roberts, and I wasn’t sure I could stand having it sliced and diced again, even though deep, deep, deep down I longed for him. But I wasn’t ready to do anything more than have a cautious friendship, if even that.

Still, I couldn’t ignore that it had been easy to suggest that Griffin and Cricket meet me at the Bullpen after I closed Printemps, which I did early, at Cricket’s direction. Honestly, Tuesday was a super slow day anyway. We’d only had a few looky-loos who purchased nominal items and one sale of a bed from the online offerings. Both Cricket and I had been distracted and needed to attend to posting new items and prepping for the Junior League’s Spring Fling shopping event, where we would house a booth. That was a month away, but time was flying.