Page 71 of Accidentally Mine
“Thanks, but—”
“Aw, come on!What can be so urgent that you can’t take a half-hour to grab a sandwich?”
“I really can’t.”I looked down at my aunt’s threadbare carpet covered completely with papers and stabbed at one with my toe.“I have so many papers from my father’s company to go through that I can’t possibly.”
“Your father’s company?”
I threw my hand over my mouth.Why the hell did I tell her that?Great going, Roselynn.Way to cut ties and keep things under wraps.“Yeah.You know.Not a big deal,” I said, trying to play it off.“He died, and I’m probably going to sell it.But it will take most of my time, so I’m afraid I can’t leave just now.”
“Brent told me you were dealing with something like this,” she said as I tried to remember whether I’d told him about my father.“You know that’s what I live for, right?Paperwork.I can help you.”
Right.Brent had mentioned his sister was an accountant.I sighed.I was never going to get done with this on my own.I didn’t understand half of it.I wasn’t even sure a team of accountants could help.But Claudia could get me much closer.
“Come on,” she probed.“I’ll bring the sandwiches to you, and then you and I can go through the stuff.You want it done fast, don’t you?”
No, Ineededit done fast.
I swallowed, feeling a noose tightening around my neck.But it wasn’t because of Claudia.She was a friend.And right now, I needed all the friends I could get.But this was the last time I’d accept her kindness.It wasn’t fair to let her go out of her way for me when I couldn’t ever repay her.
“All right,” I finally agreed reluctantly.“But I’m heading to my father’s office right now.Can you meet me there?”
She agreed.I gave her the company address at Red Line Village and told her I’d see her around noon.Then I spent the whole time boxing up the papers and wishing I hadn’t agreed to meet her.This could only be bad.Maybe I should’ve just let Steve handle it and split.
I got into my father’s office around eleven and started going through more and more papers.It seemed insurmountable.And not only that, when I booted up his computer to look through the financials he kept there, it seemed pretty obvious that the company’s accounting had fallen apart.
My father had been successfully running Reece Associates for over twenty-five years, and back when I handled the accounts, he was pulling in money like crazy, and had a place for everything.The numbers looked wonky.How had my father let the company fall apart like this in such a short time?What had happened?
As I was sitting at my dad’s desk with my head buried in my hands, Claudia showed up, toting a paper bag.I wandered out as I heard the door to her car slam and met her in the front office area.
“Hi!”she said brightly, coming in and setting the bag on the counter.She pulled out sandwiches and a couple of bottled waters.“I got us turkey and cheese subs.Hope that’s okay, and holy shit, this place is a mess!”
She dropped the sandwiches on the counter and stopped in the doorway to my dad’s office, horrified.She picked up a piece of paper.“What was your father’s accounting department doing?”
I shrugged.“I don’t exactly know.Not much of anything, obviously.”
“All right.”She dropped her Michael Kors purse on the floor, peeled the blazer off her shoulders, and rolled up her sleeves.“Believe me.I love stuff like this.Have you been organizing?What I need for you to do is give me everything in date order.Doesn’t matter what it is: receipts, bills, invoices.Oldest stuff first.Where on the computer is the accounting kept?”
“Quickbooks,” I said, motioning her to my father’s office computer.
She opened it up, and we got to work, digging through the mess.We ate our sandwiches as we worked, and the only time she spoke was when she asked questions about the business.From the smile on her face, though, I could tell she was enjoying it.
After a few hours of digging, she sat back in my father’s chair and stretched.“Wow,” she said, sounding a little shell-shocked.
I didn’t want to ask her if she’d ever seen a company’s books that were this out of whack, because I knew the answer.“Is it fixable?”
“Everything’s fixable,” she said, lacing her fingers behind her head.“But what I’m seeing here is gross mismanagement, and not only that, massive debt.”
“Debt?”I repeated, confused.I shook my head.“No.My father’s company was doing really well.”
She pointed at the computer.“Sometimes debt can creep up on people.Over a hundred million dollars.”
“A hundredmillion?”My mouth dropped open.That wasn’t possible.I lifted a pile of contracts off of the table.“Look at this one.This one is sixty million for a school.And here’s another for three-hundred million for the hotel in the Back Bay.This one for Red Line Village was a billion-dollar project.These are for this year alone.How could there be debt?”
She sighed.“I’m sorry, Roselynn.Sometimes…” She looked down at something on the screen and frowned.
I tiptoed over the piles of paper and went to her side of the desk to see what she was looking at.Large negative numbers in the red column.“What?What are those?”
“Do you know why your father would’ve been withdrawing millions of dollars at a time for a company called SJM Holdings?I can’t seem to find any paperwork on that, and when I googled them, I couldn’t find them.”
