“Josh had five thousand dollars in his personal savings the year before,” I said. “Where did it go?”
“I saw the zero on that paper, Eric, and it does not make sense,” Noah said, his voice dropping.
He set the slip of paper down next to the fountain pen I had placed on the table.
“We need to ask Ruth,” Noah said. “She has the ledger from those years.”
Elm Lane was dark, the streetlamps casting long orange shadows through the bare branches of the maples. Grandma Ruth’s cottage sat behind a low boxwood hedge, the windows dark except for a single lamp in the back.
We walked up the wooden steps to her porch. The yellow porch light above the door hummed with a low, dry buzz that sounded like an insect caught in a screen.
I knocked three times on the screen door frame. Inside, a floorboard creaked, followed by the soft, shuffling sound of slippered feet on the carpet.
