The Money Man (The Consultants #1) - Nancy Herkness

Chapter 1

Alice Thurber was losing her mind—or at least the part of her mind that she used to add and subtract. She stared at the computer screen, willing the $3.37 discrepancy to resolve itself into perfect balance. But no matter how often she ran the numbers, her client, the Mane Attraction, still had a shortfall of $3.37 for the month of February.

She felt a tremor of panic ripple through her, making her suck in a breath to calm herself. Never before in all the years she’d been a bookkeeper had she been unable to find the problem in a client’s books. Yet in the past six months, four of her clients had tiny errors that she could not account for.

“Gosh darn it!” She shoved her rolling chair back from the desk in her newly redecorated home office. One of her two cats, Sylvester, the Duke of Salford, gave her a regal glare from his bed on the multilevel cat tree that stood beside her desk. As she started to pace between the matching cream-painted desk and credenza, his golden eyes closed again.

A few months ago, the first discrepancy had shown up in the books of Sparkle, a special-occasion dress boutique. She’d combed through all the debits and credits but found no explanation. However, the owner had dismissed her concerns, assuring Alice that she didn’t care about a few dollars of shortfall. Alice had reluctantly let it go because she simply didn’t have time to go through every piece of paperwork.

But it nagged at her pride. And at her need for control.

The second discrepancy appeared the next month at Work It Out, the gym where her friend Dawn was a personal trainer. The gym owner dismissed the problem as someone forgetting to fill out the proper paperwork when they took money out of petty cash, but Alice couldn’t let it go so easily. Because now it wasn’t just her pride taking a hit. Her worldview was beginning to tilt.

She’d chosen her career in bookkeeping for a reason: numbers were objective and reliable, unlike her parents. She could count on two and two always adding up to four. Until now . . . with her own clients.

However, it wasn’t until Nowak Plumbing Supply showed a $4.12 shortfall that Alice began to freak out. Especially because the owner complained loudly. Of course, that was because Alice had talked his son into switching from paper ledgers to a computerized system and the older man didn’t trust computers.

The panic swelled into her throat as she wondered if he was right.

She tugged at the collar of her white cotton blouse as she felt the unpleasant sensation of being dragged back into the crazy unpredictability of her childhood, a life she had hated and that she had carefully constructed her adult career to avoid. Her stepfather’s fortunes had fluctuated so wildly that Alice never knew when she’d get pulled out of summer camp or ballet class for nonpayment of the bill. Her mother’s moods changed right along with their monetary status, so Alice also never knew what kind of parent she’d be dealing with at school pickup time. Alice had sought and found comfort in the predictable outcomes of algebra and geometry as a barrier to the constant zigzagging of her life.

And now her beloved reliable numbers were becoming as untrustworthy as her parents.

She bent over the long work surface and scanned through the pages of debits and credits, unable to believe her own calculations. Which made the panic rise up again, this time twisting her stomach into a knot.

“Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!” she muttered, flipping back the long brown ponytail that had fallen over her shoulder.

Of course, she’d double-checked with the banks to see if their records agreed with the monthly balances. They did. The same with the credit card companies. No obvious issues.

She paced back to the computer and stared at it. Was it possible that the software was the problem? It was a relatively new package that several businesses had bought in the last six months or so. The program’s creator, Myron Barsky, had held a sales seminar at the local hotel, which Alice had attended as a service to her clients. She had been impressed with the software so when seven of her clients decided to purchase BalanceTrakR, she had no problem with that. In fact, she’d gone through the training webinars and set up the system for those clients.

But the numbers were telling their own story once again. Seven clients were using the software.