“Sure. Like Jack Burdette did. You and Burdette were in this together, weren’t you? Why didn’t you jump up and leave when he did? You could of left with him.”
“Him,” Charlie Soames said. The mention of Burdette seemed to awaken something in him. He sat up straight, agitated now. “Why that man … that—”
“What about him?”
“He didn’t even tell me he was leaving. We agreed on it. He promised me. He wasn’t supposed to leave yet. Then he—”
“Sure,” Sealy said. “Then he.”
“But you don’t understand.”
“Don’t I?”
“No. Because we were waiting for it to amount to two hundred thousand. That’s why. And I kept telling him we ought to leave now. I told him we have to take it and get out now. Before the auditors find out, I said. They were getting suspicious. I could tell that. I knew they were. I tried to tell him. But my god, that man kept saying: ‘Just another fifty. Just another fifty.’ Like it was play money or something. Oh, he didn’t understand the risks. He didn’t understand anything. And it was his idea from the beginning. I let him talk me into it. But I was the one that had to do the books, wasn’t I? Not him. And he kept promising me: ‘Wait until it’s two hundred thousand, then we’ll leave together.’ That’s what he said. We agreed on that. He promised me. But then he—”
“Yeah,” Sealy said. “Well. You poor dumb old son of bitch. So he didn’t tell you he was leaving either.”
“I thought I could trust him.”
“Of course. Except you weren’t the only one in town that thought that, now were you?”
“I trusted him, though. And what was I going to do now? Where was I going to go? He had the money. He took everything. He withdrew it all out of the bank over in Sterling. And—”
“Sterling? You mean you kept the money over in Sterling?”
“That’s where we had our account. I thought it would be safer. But I still thought I could trust him. I still believed he was trustworthy.”
“That’s right,” Sealy said. “Because he promised you. Because you agreed on it.”
Soames stopped talking for a moment. He looked at the sheriff.
“But wouldn’t you have said he could be trusted? Didn’t you think Jack Burdette was a trustworthy man?”
“I don’t know,” Sealy said, “Probably. But I might of said the same thing about you too, Charlie. And now look at you. Jesus Christ, look how you turned out.”
*
By evening everyone in Holt County knew about the arrest of Charlie Soames. They had heard about the embezzlement of Co-op funds and about his three-year involvement in it. So the panic and outrage had already begun. The Co-op Elevator was owned in shares by half the people in the area and they all wanted blood.