Funded At Nine Twelve

"Marjorie, it's a keying error. That's all it is."

Brent had snatched up Ivy's desk phone the second its little screen lit up with Group Office. Now he turned his back to us and dropped his voice. It did not drop far enough.

"No, it's not a void. It's a correction." A pause. "Because it looked like a duplicate, that's why." Another pause, longer. "You're calling Howard over a typo?"

He listened. The tan went out of his face in patches.

"Fine. I'll tell him."

He set the receiver down and stood with his palm flat on it.

Ivy had already clicked into the deal history. I watched her read it the way she had read every clause to me over the phone for three weeks, twice, out loud.

"Wire posted at 9:12 this morning," she whispered. "Paid in full. Two hundred eighty-six thousand, four hundred."

"Wires get pulled back," Brent said.

"Void at 1:47 p.m." Her finger stopped under a line. "Under your login."

"That's a clock, not a crime."

"That's seven minutes after Mr. Treadwell walked in." She looked up at him. "That's no slip of the finger. You sat down and took it."

Brent came around the desk. "Log out, Ivy. Right now."

Her hand stayed on the mouse. She scrolled down instead, and stopped again, and this time she frowned at me.

"The owner line on the registration is blank," she said. "You wrote in the notes that the owner would be named at delivery. I thought it was a typo. Every other line has your name on it."

"It's not a typo," I said.

"Cash buyer. No owner name." Brent said it to the Pembertons, who had drifted closer with their phones out. "You folks see where this is going."

Ivy looked at the log-out button. Click it and keep her job for three more days. Stay logged in and lose it this afternoon.

She stayed logged in.

That was when I took the envelope out of my inside pocket. Plain white, sealed, one corner bent from six hundred miles against my chest. I laid it flat across her keyboard.