Things Go Flying (8 page)

“Hello, is this Harold Walker?”

“Yes,” said Harold.

“It's Patricia, from Credit International—”

“I'm very busy right now, so if you don't mind—”

“You owe us a great deal of money, Mr. Walker.”

Harold was absolutely certain he didn't owe anybody anything, but nevertheless, his mouth went dry and he was dead silent for a few seconds. Then he said, “I think you've made a mistake.”

“Oh I don't think so,” the woman on the other end countered. “You owe money on an Infiniti G-35 Sports Coupe.”

“I most certainly do not.”

“Right.”

Harold smiled grimly, which he appreciated that unfortunately she couldn't see, and said as if delivering a
coup de grace
, “I have a nine-year-old Camry that's in pieces all over some idiot mechanic's shop floor—I certainly do not have a sports car.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line, and then the woman said, sounding bored but threatening at the same time, “Mr. Walker, we're one of the most successful
legitimate
debt collections firms in the country. You might as well just give up now.”

Harold slammed the phone down, feeling the need to duck. It had to be a mistake. It was some other Harold Walker, not him, who had this bad debt. He already knew that there were other Harold Walkers in Toronto, because they'd turned up when the searches were done to buy their house.

Like he had time for this.

He resisted the urge to crawl underneath his solid desk and pull the phone down with him. He thought about calling Audrey but didn't want to upset her. Instead, he decided to begin with a call to his bank manager.

• • •

W
HEN SHE'D FINISHED
going through everybody's clothes, Audrey started on the furnace room—piling up stuff she wanted to get rid of against the wall. She'd changed into her old house-painting clothes, and she was filthy, so when the doorbell rang, she decided not to answer it. But the doorbell would
not
stop ringing, no matter how still and quiet she stood at the bottom of the basement stairs, listening.

She crept upstairs and peeked furtively around the edge of the living room curtains, expecting to see only the dark-suited Jehovah's Witnesses that regularly went in pairs up and down the street, getting short shrift at every door. But instead she saw—
that nitwit from the bank?

Who ever heard of an assistant bank manager making a house call? Audrey forgot that she hadn't intended to open the door to anyone, and yanked it open.

He looked back at her, his bland face startled, perhaps by the sudden force with which she'd opened the door. Or maybe he had the wrong house, Audrey thought hopefully. He'd made plenty of mistakes on their mortgage papers, she remembered that. They'd had to sign everything all over again.

“Mrs. Walker?” he said, flattening her fragile hopes as if clubbing them with a two-by-four. And right away, she just knew this was about their cleaned out account. About Dylan.
Would they insist on pressing charges? Could they do that?

“May I come in?”

She nodded grimly and stepped aside, wondering if she should call a lawyer. Not that she knew any lawyers anyway. She'd have to rely on the Yellow Pages, and everybody knew that a bad lawyer was worse than no lawyer at all. She thought about calling Harold, remembered about controlling his stress, and decided against it.

The man from the bank came into the vestibule and stopped, as if waiting for permission. She motioned him into the living room. He sat down carefully on the couch and placed his black briefcase on the floor at his feet. He looked nervous, and that made Audrey more fearful than ever.

“Perhaps we should wait for your husband.”

“He won't be back till six,” Audrey said. It was mid afternoon— maybe she could handle this herself. Maybe Harold didn't have to be involved at all. She tried to smooth her hair and to brush some of the dust off her jeans. “I've been cleaning the basement,” she said.

“You haven't spoken to him then?” the banker said, clearing his throat, and Audrey remembered that he had an irritating habit of clearing his throat, like a tic.

“No.”

“Oh.” The banker seemed surprised, looked at his watch. “He'll be here shortly. I've set up a meeting. There's something important we need to discuss.”

Something lurched in Audrey's stomach. So much for protecting Harold. Maybe she ought to call Dr. Goldfarb, have him on standby; there was no telling how Harold might react to finding out his youngest son was a thief. Audrey went on the offence.

“You probably don't know that the doctor has ordered that Harold have
absolutely no stress
right now?”

He shook his head, looking startled. “No, I had no idea.”

“He has a very bad heart,” Audrey lied. “This could kill him.”

“Oh,” the man said, some of the colour draining from his face.

At the sound of footsteps on the porch, they both turned to face the door. The door opened, and Harold appeared in the vestibule. He looked a little shell-shocked, Audrey thought, but he seemed to be breathing okay. She went over and gave him her usual welcome hug, and he kissed her on top of her head.

“Thank you for coming,” Harold said, shaking hands with the bank manager and then sitting down heavily in his La-Z-Boy chair. “But we could have gone to the bank.”

“No, really, that's fine. It's no trouble. Really.” He cleared his throat again in an extended way, and Audrey twitched in annoyance from her place at the opposite end of the couch. “Well,” he said, glancing nervously at Audrey. “I had a long talk with the bank's fraud department after we spoke on the phone earlier today,” he began, looking at Harold. Audrey's heart began to thump. “It's not good.” He gave a nervous little cough and said, “We are really
very
sorry about the mortgage.”

Audrey looked at Harold, her mind blank.

“What mortgage?” Audrey said.

Harold turned to Audrey. “Did you have the phone off the hook all day or what?”

Audrey blinked. “What mortgage?”

“I haven't had a chance to fill her in,” Harold explained to the banker.

“Oh. Right. Well, Mrs. Walker, to put it simply, your husband has—unfortunately—been a victim of identity theft.”

Audrey still didn't get it. She wondered if this was somehow connected to Harold's recent change in personality. She struggled through a fog of misapprehension to understand.

“This could happen to anyone,” the banker assured her, meaning to soothe. Meaning to exculpate himself and the bank, too. “It happens all the time. You wouldn't
believe
how common this is these days.” He chuckled, gamely trying to make light of the situation, but his effort fell flat.

“What are you talking about?” Audrey said.

“Well,”—he cleared his throat again, as if girding his loins—“in a nutshell, someone has managed to obtain sufficient personal information on your husband to undertake various financial transactions in his name. It happens all the time. Usually, it's simple credit card fraud. Someone gets enough of your personal information and applies for a credit card in your name.” As Audrey stared, appalled, he warmed to his subject. “Or, even better, they go through your blue box and pull out letters with pre-approved credit card offers. They send them in with a change of address, and start spending. Because of the change of address, you don't get the bills, and it can go on for some time.”

Audrey looked at Harold.

“I bet you don't shred those pre-approved credit card offers, do you?” the banker said.

“We don't have a shredder,” Harold admitted tersely.

“Anyway, you mentioned your wallet went missing. At a funeral?”

Harold nodded.

“That's probably what started it all. As I told you over the phone, you should
never
keep your social insurance number in your wallet,” the banker said. “Or your birth certificate.”

Audrey stared at the banker, not quite getting it. “But I cancelled all his credit cards.”

“I'm afraid that's really not enough.” He looked back at Harold. “We didn't know anything about it until you called us about the sports car problem.”

“Sports car problem,” Audrey echoed.

“In your case, we seem to be dealing with something quite complex. What we have here, actually, is an account takeover—whoever targeted you managed to gain access to all of your financial accounts.”

For Audrey, a connection was made.

“They drained your personal account and your joint account a few days ago, at about the same time they put a mortgage on this house.”

Audrey was struck dumb or else she would have said,
“How is that possible?”

“And, I should warn you—he cleared his throat apologetically— this may be just the tip of the iceberg.”

Audrey began to feel light-headed. She heard, as if from a great distance, “Don't worry—” But then she fainted, so she missed the part where he said, “You won't be liable.”

• • •

E
VEN THOUGH HE WAS
grounded and he didn't have access to a car anymore, John finally decided to call Nicole anyway. It had been over a week since he'd seen her, but it had taken him this long to get up the nerve. He had to come right home every day after school, but maybe he could cut classes and meet her for a coffee somewhere.

He couldn't remember much of what they'd talked about at the funeral home, but he could picture her perfectly. He'd been fantasizing about her almost non-stop. He sensed—from her worldliness, from her parents' expensive car—that she was one of those private school girls from uptown, Havergal maybe, or Branksome Hall, and the idea both excited and terrified him. He wasn't in that league but figured maybe she could tell. Maybe she was attracted to him because he was the kind of boy her father wouldn't approve of. He thought of how he must have looked to her when she first saw him standing on the street corner in his black suit, pissed off at the world. This was the fond drift of John's thoughts since meeting Nicole at the funeral. But the difficulty was that he wasn't a bad boy, a rebel, at all. He was scared, confused, and cautious to a fault, like his dad. But he was also taut with desire and longing.

Practically every night, he saw his father sprawled in his La-Z-Boy looking as if he'd given up. John couldn't stand the sight of him looking so defeated. These days, whenever his mother said,
you're just like your father
, he wanted to punch a hole in a wall. John had to fight against being nothing. Dylan didn't have to fight that fight—somehow he'd been born cocky and resilient. The truth was John wished he was more like his little brother, which was humiliating.

So John decided that if it was a bad boy Nicole wanted, that's what he'd try to give her.

He practised a few times in his head before he actually called her. “Hey, babe.” “Nicole,” he imagined saying in a gruff, sexy voice, which he could pull off if he was concentrating. But when he finally got up the nerve to make the call (while he was walking home from school—he had to be moving, and he needed privacy, he couldn't do this from home) what he said was, “May I please speak to Nicole?” even though it was her voice that answered and it was probably her cell phone number she'd given him and no one else would have answered it anyway. He felt like an ass.

But she said, “Speaking.”

“It's John,” he said, forgetting for the moment how utterly common his name was.

“John who?”

“We met recently, at a funeral . . .” he trailed off, hoping that she remembered. She was all he'd been thinking about, but a girl like her probably had so much going on she wouldn't have given him a second thought.
Why had he even—?

“It's been a while, John.” She sounded ticked.

“I got into some trouble,” he said. It was true—there was his car accident, his adventure with Roy, being grounded.

“What kind of trouble?” Now she sounded interested, less ticked off.

“I trashed a car, got charged.” He left this out there for her imagination to run with. “You know.”

“Cool.”

“You want to get together?”

“Sure.”

He was thinking coffee, during the day, and wondering how that was going to sound after what he'd just said, when she said, “I know a place.” And the way she said it, so playful and suggestive, was so exciting he could hardly stand it.

“Yeah?” And now his voice was gruff and sexy without his even thinking about it, because he was thinking about being with her, and before he knew what hit him, he'd made a date to meet her a couple of nights later at 11 o'clock.

• • •

A
FTER THE BANKER
left, Audrey lay down on the couch with a cold, wet washcloth that Harold brought her folded neatly on her forehead. Harold sat on the couch with her feet in his lap, idly giving her feet little presses while he stared out the living room window.

This was how John found them when he got home from school.

“Everything all right?” he asked.

Audrey lifted one limp hand without opening her eyes and waved him off.

John went into the kitchen and fixed himself a ham and cheese sandwich, thinking about Nicole and how he was going to manage to sneak out of the house to meet her without getting caught.

CHAPTER FIVE