The Liberation of Alice Love - Abby McDonald [19]
“Well?” she asked, her earlier outrage fading to a chilled resignation. “Do you know what happened, Mr.—”
“Call me Rodney.” He pulled at his tie, a sheen of sweat now coating his forehead.
“Rodney,” she repeated quietly. Apparently they were now bonded by disaster. There was another pause.
“It, uh, appears that the money was transferred by telephone.” Rodney’s disapproving demeanor was now limp, the expression in his eyes, defeated. It was hardly reassuring, Alice noted, as if from outside herself. “You—I mean, the caller identified themselves as you. They cleared all the usual security checks,” he added quickly, as if that somehow made it less of a monumental failing.
“But…” Alice tried to reengage her brain. “Where did the money go? You must have some record of that, at least. Can’t you just…cancel the transaction?”
Rodney exhaled. “They asked for priority handling, for convenience. The transfer cleared this morning.”
Alice stared. It took them forever to process a simple check deposit, but that kind of money could disappear overnight?
“So, what…? I mean, what happens now?”
Rodney exhaled a shaky breath. “Well, uh, we’ll be contacting the recipient branch, to follow up. But it was a numbered account, in the Caribbean…”
“The Caribbean!” Alice yelped. “And that didn’t flag any warnings?”
Rodney quivered. “I suppose the assistant thought it was payment for a flat. So many developers are based overseas these days…”
Alice opened her mouth, but Rodney pressed on. “I understand, you must be feeling stress, but please, Ms. Love, do try to stay calm.” He pulled out a pocket pack of tissues and began to mop his face. Alice couldn’t believe this.
“But…What…?” she grappled to find sense again. “Is that it? I mean, you can get it back, can’t you?”
“I…We’ll have to investigate. But it’s not just your savings, your credit score has plummeted,” he explained. “For it to fall so quickly, you would have had to have defaulted payments on other cards or loans in the past few months.”
She shook her head. This wasn’t happening. “I have one credit card.” Alice fumbled with her purse, laying the small square of plastic out on the desk to prove it. “And I’m never late with payment. Never!” She looked at Rodney pleadingly. “You believe me, don’t you? This isn’t me!”
He looked back, helpless. “I can’t…I mean, there will be an investigation, and I’m sure…But I can’t say anything right now. It’s out of my hands.”
“Then whom do I talk to?” Alice demanded, horrified to hear her voice break. She sucked in a breath and tried to stay composed. “Just give me their names, and numbers, and I’ll call. I need to sort this out!”
“Someone from the head office will be contacting you.” Rodney swallowed. “We’ll see what we can do.”
***
His words taunted her for the rest of the day. Her savings were gone, just vanished into nothing, but she still couldn’t quite process the truth. Alice half expected an apologetic call, explaining that it had just been a clerical error, some terrible mix-up, but none came. By the time she arrived on Julian’s doorstep that evening, her scattered panic had given way to a sharp kind of terror.
“What am I going to do?”
He barely had time to usher her into the narrow hallway before Alice found herself retelling the entire sorry mess, words tumbling out of her mouth as if saying them out loud would somehow make it all less absurd. But it didn’t. “They say the account is protected against this kind of thing. I don’t understand—how could it happen?”
She forced herself to take a breath, staring blankly at Julian under the bright spotlights. Usually, she found his sparse, minimalist flat a refuge, but now it just seemed to mock her with a neatness and order that were far, far from her reach. “The bank won’t get a handle on this for days, and he was saying all these things about credit scores and defaults, and—” She broke down, finally surrendering to the tears that had been building ever since she heard the awful news.
“Shhh, hey, Aly, it’ll be OK.” Julian enveloped her in a