“Honey, I ran this place for two solid years with a baby asleep in the bottom drawer of my desk.”Bonnie waved a hand.“The day a child can’t run loose in this office is the day I shut it down and quit my job.If you pull the chair out, she can spin in it to her heart’s content.Now.What do you need?”
Sunny told her about the restoration and her hope that there might be some original building records.Bonnie nodded briskly and was up and across the room almost before Sunny finished speaking.She unlocked the door to a good-sized conference room next door to her office.
“You’re in luck.The storage facility we normally store the old town records in is getting a new roof this week, and the whole town archive is in here.”
Sunny followed her into the crowded space.The long conference table had been tipped on its side, and a dozen wheeled fake-leather chairs were pushed up against it.The rest of the space was crammed with filing cabinets of various shapes and sizes.
Bonnie turned sideways and slid between two rows of cabinets to one in the back.She eased a drawer open beside her and returned with a flat archival folder gone soft as cloth at the corners.“Nineteen-oh-one through nineteen-oh-four building permits.Your house is in here.Those lumber barons filed everything in triplicate.I think they enjoyed watching the town clerk suffer.Have a look at this while I look for a set of blueprints.”
Bonnie dived back into the narrow rows of cabinets.
Sunny opened the folder and forgot, for a moment, to breathe.There it all was.A permit in a beautiful copperplate script, a materials manifest down to the board foot, and, folded into eighths and gone amber at the creases, a single elevation drawing of the front of Hank’s house.She could have wept over it.Whoever drew it had known precisely what he was doing, and a hundred and twenty years on, she was going to get to honor the architect’s vision.
Bonnie came back, carrying a cardboard tube.They took it back to Bonnie’s desk, and Sunny carefully extracted the technical drawings.The two of them unrolled them gently, and they were in surprisingly good shape.Folks back then had used acid free paper that didn’t break down and go brittle the way cheap, modern paper did.
Sunny pored over the drawings, enthralled.It was all here.Every measurement, every stud, every outlet and faucet and fixture.She took pictures of each one, checking her phone to make sure the images were clear before turning to the next one.
“You really love this stuff, don’t you?”Bonnie asked.
Sunny rerolled the drawings gently.“Blueprints and architectural renderings are honest.Most other paperwork can lie.But a structure will either stand and be safe or it won’t.”
Bonnie went still.“Come look at something,”
She led Sunny into the mayor’s inner office and opened a wide filing drawer.On one side was a stack of ledgers with the year stamped on their spine.On the other end was a second set of ledgers with the exact same years stamped on their spines.
“Lucas kept two sets of books the whole time he was running Cobbler Cove.”
Sunny’s professional soul recoiled and snapped to attention in the same instant.It was Hank’s shoebox, multiplied by a municipality and aged in oak.Years of it.
“It gets worse,” Bonnie told her, opening another drawer crammed with literally thousands of pieces of paper, receipts, bills, and even scrawled figures and writing on sticky notes.“There’s a software conversion to computerize the town’s books that somebody abandoned halfway through.I’ve found federal grants tracked on index cards and not a clean budget reconciliation in the whole lot.”
Sunny stared at her in shock.Government agencies might get a bad rap, but in general, they were meticulously run.
“Lucas is dying.He won’t be running for mayor this fall, which means we’ll have a new mayor for the first time in thirty years.I have no idea what financial information he submitted to the state every year, but it kept the state from coming in here and poking around.”
Sunny’s antenna for fraud and faked documents fired out a hard warning.
Bonnie continued, “The state’s going to want clean books out of us this fall, regardless of who takes his place.And I haven’t got a prayer of producing them.The man who could tell you where every dollar went for thirty years barely has enough breath to speak, even if he did want to tell anyone what he did with the cash.Which I highly doubt he wants to do.”
In her experience, most people who faked their books didn’t want to help an auditor.
Bonnie gestured at the two open drawers.“All of this needs an audit.And I’d prefer that it not be the IRS swooping in on us and slapping expensive fines on the town.Cobbler Cove’s budget is stretched thin already with re-opening the fire station and expanding the police force this year.”
She looked at Sunny squarely.“I can pay you part-time, and it won’t be much.But maybe I’d actually sleep at night if you straightened out the town’s finances.”
She had two jobs already, if she counted the renovation as a job, which it definitely was, plus three children out of school for the summer and a three-year-old holy terror.There already wasn’t nearly enough of herself to spread across any of it.She should say no.She had every reason in the world to say no.
But she looked at the disastrous mess in the drawer, and across at her three-year-old presiding over the mayor’s desk with the gravity of a hanging judge, and heard herself say, “I’ll need to see the bank statements first.”
“You’ll do it?”Bonnie asked quickly.
“I’ll do it.”
Bonnie stuck out a hand to shake on it, and her grip was firm and certain.“Gray says said I’d reorganize the Pearly Gates if Saint Peter gave me a week and a label maker.”
Sunny laughed.“I’d do the same thing.”
“Welcome to the payroll, Sunny.Such as it is.”
