Leave It to Cleavage by Wendy Wax Read Free Book Online

the phone. She looked up at Carly, who was standing expectantly in the doorway. “Did you need anything else?” she asked the assistant.
    “Is everything all right?”
    “Yes. Yes, of course,” Miranda lied. “Um, that’ll be all.”
    Carly put a hand on the doorknob.
    “And will you close the door behind you?”
    She waited until Carly left the office, waited a few more seconds for the door to click shut, then waited another mind-numbing thirty seconds for the assistant to move away from the door.
    Miranda wanted to go home, put on her flannel pajamas, and get back in bed. A really stiff drink would be good, too.
    She picked up the phone and dialed the second company on the list.
    “Thank you for calling the Asheville Biltmore. How may I direct your call?”
    Miranda put the phone down quietly. She then dialed a Laundromat in Winston-Salem, a bowling alley in Macon, and a state prison in north Florida.
    Of the ten new accounts, all of which had allegedly placed and presumably been shipped orders over the last six months, not one was real.
    These nonexistent customers owed Ballantyne more than three million dollars—money the company needed to pay suppliers, create new inventory, and pay down their line of credit at Fidelity National.
    Miranda’s head was throbbing full force now, and she sincerely wished she and her laptop had never come out of the bathroom.
    Where had the goods gone? Had Tom intentionally created the fictitious customers so that he could sell the ordered goods to finance his new life? Or had he just been trying to make Ballantyne look better on paper and then fled when faced with an audit that would reveal the truth?
    She dug in her purse for a Tylenol as she considered both possibilities. As his wife, the distinction was important. As the person left holding the bag, Tom’s motivations couldn’t have mattered less.
    Not having the money or the goods was bad enough. Creating fictitious accounts and receivables was worse.
    Not to mention completely illegal.
     
    That afternoon Miranda tried to outswim her panic and fear in the country club swimming pool. It was mercifully empty and she swam full-out, kicking with all her strength, reaching with her arms, pulling with her cupped hands. She tried to make her mind as empty as the pool itself, tried to ditch the worst-case scenarios that kept playing out in her head, but she wasn’t having a whole lot of success.
    Normally the embryonic silence of the water buoyed and comforted her; swimming smoothed out her thoughts and produced a sense of well-being she found in no other place. But today her mind churned even faster than her feet and arms. Messages she didn’t want to hear echoed in her brain, crashing through the quiet and demanding her attention.
    We’re broke, we’re doomed, breathe. We’re broke, we’re doomed, breathe.
    She did a racing turn, pushed off the wall, and sliced through the water, and the message changed to:
It’s fraud, it’s over, breathe. It’s fraud, it’s over, breathe.
    You’re all they’ve got, gasp
.
    Up and down and back and forth she swam until her arms began to tire and her brain finally began to numb. The messages continued, but they didn’t echo quite so loudly. Her strokes slowed and her kick became a more steady flutter. She hadn’t found peace or any kind of answer, but she thought she might be able to pry herself out of the pool soon before all of her body parts were completely and irreversibly shriveled.
     
    Edith and Lois Turley delivered lunch to the police chief’s office. Blake had brought a small Caesar salad and half a rare roast beef sandwich from home, but when the elderly sisters showed up on the stroke of noon with a picnic basket stuffed with fried chicken, biscuits, and potato salad, he’d had no choice but to let them spread the feast out on the desk in front of him.
    It took him twenty minutes to put away enough food to satisfy the sharp-eyed duo, and another ten to ease them—and