got to look at the books. If you hire someone to replace Dean, you’re not going to be making a damn thing. And you’ll be trusting a stranger.”
She felt as if he were trying to stuff her into a small closet. Dark, claustrophobic, the air thick and musty. She was grabbing for the door to prevent him closing it those last inches.
“So what are you suggesting?” She heard the rasp of her breathing, as if she were asthmatic. “That I run it?”
Worse than that idea was the slight curl of his lip and the pity in his eyes. Don’t be ridiculous, he might as well have said.
“No. I’m suggesting you sell it.”
She moved restlessly. “I don’t even know how…”
“So you’re going to take another nap and refuse to think about it?” he asked with raw contempt.
“No!” Her eyes filled with tears. Yes. He was stripping her bare, finding out how utterly incapable she was and holding up a mirror so she could be sure not to miss her own inadequacies. Clasping her arms around herself, she said, “Why won’t you leave me alone?”
“Because I owe it to Dean to make sure you don’t lose everything he worked so hard for. He’d expect me to be sure you’re all right.”
“I’m not all right!”
His voice softened. “I know. But you still have to make decisions. That’s the way it is.”
So, despite her nausea and the tears that kept flooding her eyes, Mindy sat down and pored over computer printouts. What salaries and taxes and benefits cost, the expense of keeping a fleet of Fenton Security pickups prowling dark corners of the city at night. She looked at income and outgo and Labor and Industry statistics, discovered how much Dean had been involuntarily contributing to build Safeco Field and the Seahawks Stadium. She saw personnel records and realized with dismay that the average security guard didn’t stay with the company more than eight or ten months. Dean had been hiring constantly, wasting money on training, then regularly having to let shirkers go.
“How,” she whispered at last, “did he make any money?”
“By cultivating clients and by making damn sure his guards were doing their job, not spending the night sipping coffee at a diner.”
“Oh.” Exhausted, she sat back. “Will anybody want to buy the business?”
“Sure. He’s in the black. Not many small businesses are.”
“Do I advertise it?”
Quinn frowned. “No. You might scare the clients.” He paused. Hesitated, she might have said, if it had been anyone but him. “Do you want me to ask around? There are plenty of cops with the same dream Dean had.”
“Please,” she said, but without the gratitude she would have felt two hours ago. Why couldn’t he just have made this offer then?
“All right.” He squared the pile of papers. “Now, the bills—”
“No!” Despite her tiredness, Mindy shot to her feet. “Not now. Maybe tomorrow.”
With scant sympathy, he said, “They’re piling up.”
The attorney had left half a dozen messages, too, and she didn’t want to talk to him, either.
“I did what you wanted. Now, will you just go?”
“All right.” He nodded. “We’ve made a start.”
A start, she thought hysterically.
After he left, she took a nap. Then she made herself listen to phone messages. Mick had questions, the attorney had questions, several people had left condolences. A reporter from the P.I. was still hoping for comments. After deleting them all, she carried to the table the basket into which she’d been throwing correspondence. Quinn was right; the bills were piling up.
The attorney had said she could continue to write checks to pay bills and daily expenses. Okay, she thought, she could do this. She’d paid her own until she’d married Dean, so it wasn’t like she didn’t know how to write out a check for the phone bill. And it would give her enormous pleasure the next time Quinn showed up to say, Oh, I’ve already done that.
She opened a tablet of paper and decided to list what she owed first. She didn’t even know what Dean paid for.
Mindy found a bank statement first and discovered that the mortgage was an automatic deduction. An enormous one. She stared at the amount with dismay. A neighbor had sold recently, and if this house was worth about the same… There must not be very much equity, or Dean wouldn’t have been making such big payments.
After a moment she shrugged. It wasn’t as if she had a choice.
A few lines down she spotted two more deductions, both car payments. His and hers. She’d driven a beater when she’d met Dean, and he’d insisted on buying her a new car. He’d worry about her, he’d said when she’d protested. And Dean had loved the Camaro he drove, but he still owed an awful lot on it. Thinking about the car, fire-truck red, sitting in the garage made her falter and blink back more tears.
Swallowing, she made herself go on, reaching for the next envelope and neatly slitting it open with the letter opener she’d found on Dean’s desk.
This one was a MasterCard. He owed $4,569. Mindy had never even had that big a credit limit before. She wrote the amount of the debt, the creditor and the payment on the second line, after the mortgage.
The gas bill was way higher than she’d expected, too, as was the water and sewer and the Nordstrom bill and bills for two different Visa cards. He owed a whole lot of money on the boat that occupied a third of the garage. He’d loved that boat, too, a white cabin cruiser he’d renamed The Mindy after he’d met her. He loved to take friends out on the Sound. Mindy, who didn’t swim very well, hadn’t actually enjoyed going out. She’d pretended she got queasy, but the truth was that panic had flooded her from the moment water opened between the dock and the hull.
The boat, at least, was easy—she’d sell it as soon as she could.
There was enough in the checking account to pay all the bills, but not much would be left over. Especially since some of these payments were already late, and the next month’s bills would be arriving soon. Dismayed, she recalculated a couple of times. She guessed she would have to call the attorney. Dean had had investments, hadn’t he? Maybe they could sell some stock, or cash in a CD, or something.
She debated whether to write a little note on each bill saying something to the effect that Dean Fenton had died unexpectedly, that the will was in probate and she, his wife—no, widow—would be the one now paying. But wasn’t that something the executor should do? Dean’s executor, of course, was Quinn, who in that capacity had every right to nag her and maybe even override her decisions. She didn’t know.
She opened the checkbook, but didn’t write anything for a long time. Dean L. and Mindy A. Fenton, the checks all said. Only, now it would just be Mindy A. She was responsible for all those debts. Debts she hadn’t even known they owed.
With shame she realized she should have known. Would have, if she’d ever asked or expressed
