Because they’d stayed so long and drunk lots of extra coffee and after-dinner drinks, they all gave me some cash or a credit card at the end of the night, so I’d forgotten, burying the coincidence somewhere in my sleep-deprived subconscious.
Gus had an ancient, gigantic cash register on which he rang up his sales. He didn’t take credit cards, or checks for that matter. Chris and I were improvising. I ran credit cards through an app on my phone, and we kept cash in a cigar box that sat behind the bar. At the end of the night I hid it under my bed until I could get to the bank the next day to deposit whatever cash we weren’t keeping to make change.
I got down on my knees and felt under the bed until I pulled out the wooden cigar box. The four gift certificates were still in there, and as I suspected, the serial numbers were in order. The certificates looked real, but then I’d designed them based on a popular template I’d found on the web. The only thing that was off was the expiration date. Maine law prohibited expiration dates on gift cards. Yet there was a date on each one—November 30. Yesterday. Henry Caswell was the only person who had mentioned the date, but all the couples thought that their certificates were about to expire.
Heart pounding, I went to my desk. I fired up my laptop and looked at the spreadsheet I’d created to track the gift certificates. Gift certificates represented a liability to a business. Once you accepted the money, you owed the goods and they were carried on your books as a debt, so it was important to know how many were out there and for what amounts.
We hadn’t sold many. I’d started offering them only at the end of October. Sales had started slow but picked up as we got closer to Thanksgiving. I assumed it was because of the holidays. Gift certificates for a nice dinner were a great gift for an older parent or a couple on a tight budget who deserved a treat.
On my spreadsheet, I’d matched the purchaser with the serial number of the gift certificate. I’d created the gift certificates on my laptop. So as not to embarrass myself, I’d started the serial numbers at 100001 instead of 1. The four gift certificates I’d collected the night before had been sold during the first week of November as a part of a lot of five. That raised so many questions. First of all, who had bought them? I checked the app I used to process credit cards. It didn’t store or provide much information, just told me the credit card had been approved and gave me a transaction number. Yet I must have written down the name of the person who bought them. I had to have mailed the certificates to the purchaser somehow. I searched through the notebook I kept next to my computer, looking for the information. Nothing. Then I searched my e-mails and found nothing. I must have written the name and address on a scrap of paper and thrown it away.
I checked my phone. If the buyer hadn’t e-mailed, he or she must have called. But again, we were improvising, using my cell phone for reservations and other calls to Gus’s Too. As a result, I’d become even more attentive than usual about checking messages and deleting the ones I had dealt with.
As I’d feared, there were no calls on my phone from unknown numbers. I couldn’t find what I needed, because I’d thrown out a scrap of paper and cleaned out my voice mail box. Hoist by my own anal-retentive petard, as it were.
I called Lieutenant Binder but was sent straight to voice mail. I left a terse message about discovering something odd.
After thinking about it for a moment, I took most of the cash the customers had given me the night before and moved it to my wallet. I’d stop at the ATM to deposit it the next time I went out. I left the cigar box with the gift certificates in it on my desk, next to my laptop. That way I would be certain to remember to take them to the police station in the morning.
*
I went back to the couch, but exhausted as I was, I couldn’t settle. I realized I had to eat something for dinner. My refrigerator was cleared out for Gus as I’d promised, and the one downstairs was barricaded by crime scene tape. Over a mostly lazy weekend, we’d finished off the last bits of Thanksgiving turkey at my mother’s house. Her larder was as bare as my own. The supermarket closed at six in the off-season. It was almost seven.