Chapter 2 - THE MISSING WAGES
I stared at the payroll screen until the numbers blurred.
Blackwell Domestic Services reported that June Carter earned $4,800 every month.
June had just told me she received $2,050.
The difference was not a clerical error.
It was theft.
“How long have you worked through the agency?” I asked.
June looked ashamed, as if she had done something wrong.
“Almost three years, sir.”
“Three years?”
She nodded.
“Did they ever give you pay stubs?”
“They send them by email. But I don’t understand all the deductions.”
“Show me.”
Her fingers trembled as she pulled a cracked phone from her uniform pocket. The screen was covered in spiderweb fractures. She opened her email and found a message from Blackwell Domestic Services.
The document looked official.
Too official.
There were deductions for “housing support,” “agency compliance,” “uniform maintenance,” “transportation fees,” and something called “family liability insurance.”
June did not receive housing.
She bought her own uniform.
She took two buses to Lake Forest every morning.
And the so-called insurance fee was nearly six hundred dollars a month.
“They said it was standard,” she whispered. “They said if I complained, they’d put me on the no-hire list.”
My jaw tightened.
“Who told you that?”
“The supervisor. Mr. Harlan Voss.”
The name hit me like ice water.
Harlan Voss had worked beside me for fifteen years. He ran Blackwell Domestic Services, Blackwell Hospitality Staffing, and several payroll operations connected to my hotels.
He was more than an executive.
He had been my friend.
He sat beside me at my wife Evelyn’s funeral.
He had held my shoulder when I could not speak.
And apparently, while I was grieving, he had been stealing from women like June.
“How many people work for the agency?” I asked.
“Maybe a hundred. More, I think.”
“And they all receive pay like this?”
June lowered her eyes.
“I don’t know. But some girls sleep in their cars. Some send money home. One woman left because her son was sick, and they told her she owed them for breaking her contract.”
My stomach turned.
My company’s name had been used to trap desperate people.
And I had never bothered to look.
I had signed quarterly reports. Reviewed profits. Praised Harlan for keeping costs “efficient.” I had seen the clean numbers and ignored the human beings beneath them.
June looked at the food on the plate.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I know I shouldn’t have taken leftovers.”
That sentence broke something in me.
“You don’t apologize for eating in my house,” I said.
She looked up.
“This isn’t charity, June. This is your home while you work here. You can eat whatever you need.”
Her eyes filled.
I picked up the plate and carried it to the kitchen counter.
Then I opened the refrigerator.
“What do you like?”
She blinked.
“What?”
“Food. What do you like?”
For a moment, she seemed unable to answer.
Then, very softly, she said, “My mother makes chicken soup with dumplings.”
“Then tonight, you’re eating chicken soup with dumplings.”
I called my chef, who lived in the staff quarters on the property.
At two-thirty in the morning, I woke him and told him to make enough food for June to take home.
He did not ask questions.
By three, June sat at my kitchen table with a bowl of soup in front of her. She ate slowly at first, still expecting someone to tell her she had taken too much.
I sat across from her, reviewing payroll files on my laptop.
Harlan’s authorization signature appeared again and again.
But then I noticed something else.
Several staff members had the same deductions.
The same false fees.
The same missing money.
And all of them had been assigned to properties connected to people I trusted.
Politicians.
Hotel managers.
Executives.
People who would never ask whether the woman cleaning their floors could afford dinner.
Then I found a folder marked CONFIDENTIAL CLIENT ADJUSTMENTS.
It required a second approval beyond Harlan’s.
The authorization code belonged to my younger brother.
Elliot Blackwell.
The man I had put in charge of my legal and financial operations.
The man who had told me, after Evelyn died, “Don’t worry, Nathan. I’ll keep everything running.”
I stared at Elliot’s name.
Then at June.
“Do you trust me?” I asked.
She hesitated.
It was the most honest answer she could give.
“No,” she whispered.
I nodded slowly.
“You shouldn’t. Not yet.”
I closed the laptop.
“But I’m going to earn it.”
Outside, the first snow of winter began falling over Lake Forest.
May you like
And somewhere inside my empire, the people who had stolen from June Carter were about to learn that I had finally started paying attention.
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