She looked at her husband. He said, “We had a confirmation number and everything. Two nights, lake side. The woman said you were shut for repairs and gave us a card for the other place.”
“What other place?”
“Cedar Hollow Lodge.” She said it slowly, because my face must have changed. “It was fine. It was just more money.”
They left without the jacket. I never found a jacket, and I turned that office inside out over the next two weeks.
I sat down at my desk and called the card processor and had them read me July. Six bookings. Six deposits taken and six rooms recorded as no-shows, which meant my own system had charged people for beds I had been told were empty while I was writing those same names into the occupancy sheet by hand.
I remember standing up so fast the chair went over.
The register was still in the bottom drawer where I’d put it in September. Ruth Salter had worked nights for twenty-two years and kept it in pen because the booking software dropped reservations every time the lake wind knocked the power. She quit three weeks before I chained the door, no notice, no argument, and left this on my desk with a note on top.
Nadine. Look at July before you sign anything. I’m sorry.
I had read that note and put the whole thing in a drawer, because in September I thought Ruth was quitting the way everybody quits a sinking thing, and I was too tired to be curious.
Now I opened it on the desk under the lamp. Ruth’s handwriting leans forward, small and even, one line per room, the way she had done it since I was thirty-four years old and she was training me.
Fourth of July week. Eleven rooms marked VACANT in her hand.
I had sold eleven rooms that week. I had turned away a family from Dubuque and felt sick about it. The regatta weekend, same thing, eleven vacant. The Ellison wedding in August, when I slept four hours in three days and paid Cady to clean rooms she swore had never been used.
I turned the pages back, my thumb sliding down the column, and my hand had started to shake in a way that made me angry at myself.
Then I noticed the register was thicker than it should have been. The guest pages ran out in September, but there were more pages behind them, and a column down the side that I had never asked her to keep.
The extra pages were a grid. Date, envelopes, amount, and a name in the last column.
The first line was the twelfth of March. Two envelopes. $150. C.S. The amounts climbed all summer, nine hundred to thirteen hundred a week by July, and every line, spring and summer both, ended the same way in the source column.
D.P.
Not a guest. Not a room. A payment.
I checked the dates against the occupancy sheets in my drawer. Every D.P. week was a week the register showed rooms empty. Eleven vacant over the Fourth. Eleven over the regatta. Twelve the week of the Ellison wedding, when I paid Cady to clean rooms she swore had never been slept in.
My first thought was that Ruth had robbed me. She kept the book. She wrote the column. Twenty-two years of nights, and I decided she had been taking cash out the back door and signing another man’s initials to cover it.
I ran the column twice on the calculator. Four thousand seven hundred dollars in August. My payroll that month was three thousand four hundred and ten, and I had covered half of it from savings.
Somebody had been paying my staff more than I paid them. The money had not come from the motel.
Unless it had.
Ruth’s cottage sits off Route 9 with a porch light that stays on all day. She answered in a housedress, glasses pushed into her hair, and didn’t look surprised.
“You kept a second set of books,” I said.
“I kept a register. The way I always kept it.”
“You kept a payoff log.”
She looked at the page and didn’t touch it. “Where did that come from?”
“The bottom drawer. Where you left it.”
“I gave you the page in July, with the note about July.”
“Then what does D.P. mean?”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s your handwriting.”
“It’s a register,” she said. “People write things in a register.”
