by Marla Monroe
“Sierra, honey. You paid off that loan over six months ago. I don’t see another one in the system, either.”
Sierra’s stomach cramped. What was going on? “There is the most recent notice I received in the mail, Gina. See? It’s dated the fifteenth.”
The teller looked at the letter then returned to the computer. Moments later she was shaking her head in bewilderment. Looking back at the loan paper then the foreclosure letter, she finally spoke.
“Sierra. The original load was paid off seven months ago with a final payment of eleven hundred twenty-three dollars and seventy-nine cents. A second loan was initiated a month later for twenty-two thousand dollars with a total of five payments made against it. You must have brought in the wrong loan papers with the letter. It doesn’t matter though because I can pull up the original loan papers to work from,” Gina said as she continued to tap away at the keyboard.
A new knowledge slammed into Sierra when it finally hit her that Dexter had been screwing with her life for a lot longer than she’d realized. In that moment, she nearly turned and marched into his office to confront him, but sanity jerked her head back into place and told her to wait until Gina had the supposed new loan pulled up and printed out the paperwork for her to look over. The signature on the paperwork shouldn’t be hers, but it could be possible that she’d sign something else and hadn’t known at the time what it was she was signing.
Worry knotted her stomach as she waited as patiently as possible while the teller printed off the paperwork for the loan. Sierra thought she’d been extra diligent at reading anything she signed, especially if it came from Dexter. Still, it was possible he’d duped her. It sure as hell wasn’t the first time, but it would be the last.
“Here you go. This is the loan that’s come due. I don’t understand why they would have called it in since it’s really only two months behind and your second sale is coming up.” Gina handed the papers over to Sierra.
She didn’t bother reading over the loan in full, but flipped through the pages to get to the signature page. The signature looked like hers but for one little detail the bastard had screwed up. Where she wrote all of her letters curvy except the W, which she gave sharper points, he’d made the W on Wensel curvy just like all the other letters. It would be easy to prove when they looked at all of her other paperwork that it wasn’t her signature.
“Gina, I want the original paperwork on this please,” she said.
“Oh, it’s going to be filed. I can’t get it, but one of the loan officers can get it for you,” she said. “Is there something wrong?”
“Yes, but don’t worry about it. I’ll go talk to Mike or Mr. Harrington,” she told the other woman as she gathered her folder along with the copies of the second loan she hadn’t taken out.
“Well, okay. It looks like Mike is available over there if you want to see him,” she offered helpfully.
“Thanks, Gina.” Sierra made a beeline over to Mike’s office, praying Dexter wouldn’t see her.
To her relief, he had someone in his office and was turned so that she squeaked in under the radar. Mike stood up with a confused expression on his face.
“Hi, Sierra. I’m sure Dexter will be finished in a few minutes, if you want to wait on him,” the young man said.
“No. I need to see you, Mike,” she said, closing the door. His office was on the other side of Dexter’s so they didn’t share windows.
“What can I help you with?” Mike didn’t look too happy to see her. Was he in on all of it, too?
“I need you to pull the original paperwork for this loan, please,” she said, handing him the printout Gina had given her.
“Um, okay, sure. I’ll be right back.” He stood up.
“Don’t say anything to anyone, Mike, especially to Dexter. This is between the two of us. You can’t discuss my business with anyone without my permission, right?” she asked.
“Uh, yeah. That’s right. I’m not going to, Sierra. Just a minute while I find this.” He crossed the room and opened the door. When he’d walked through, he closed it behind him.
Sierra prayed she wasn’t making a huge mistake as she waited on him to return. Seconds felt like long minutes and five minutes felt like hours. Finally he returned with a folder in his hand and a puzzled expression on his face.
“Here they are. Had a devil of a time finding them. Someone had misfiled it under real estate loans instead of personal loans,” he said.
“Personal loans? I thought it was taken out as a real estate loan,” she said, confused now.
“Well, if you’d wanted to back it with your ranch, you would have had to have an appraisal and some other things to qualify. The last appraisal you had done was with the original loan you took out over six years ago,” he said. “Were you planning to pay it off today?”
“Yes. I mean no. I thought I was still paying on my original loan. I took it out for ten years. I never took out another loan, personal or otherwise, Mike. That isn’t my signature.”
Mike’s eyes grew wide before he sat down hard in his chair and flipped through the paperwork until he reached the signature page. He turned it around toward Sierra and pointed at it.
“It looks like your signature, Sierra. Are you sure you just don’t remember doing it? I mean, you’ve had a lot going on in your life with trying to work the ranch and all. Maybe you just forgot needing the extra money,” he said.
“Here. Look at all of these.” She spread out the other loan papers along with a few cancelled checks she had in the folder. “What’s different about that signature compared to all of these? Look very closely, Mike. It’s as obvious as the nose on your face when you see it.”
Mike pulled the papers and checks over to look at them next to the one in front of him. It took him much longer than it had taken her to see it, but he found it and his skin turned a sickly pale shade. He scooted his chair back from the desk, but didn’t attempt to stand up. She let him process what was going through his mind and waited.
“You didn’t get this money, did you, Sierra?” Mike said in a soft, weary voice.
“No. I didn’t, but I’ve been paying on this loan without even knowing about it. I thought I was paying on my original loan that Gina tells me has been paid in full for eight months.”
“What am I going to do?” Mike asked. Sierra knew he wasn’t asking her. He was trying to figure out how to handle the huge pile of shit that had landed in his lap without losing his job.
The Harringtons owned the bank. Dexter was the bank president’s son. Anything he did would go badly for him, and now Sierra wished she hadn’t dumped it on him. Her options had been limited though.
“Okay. Let’s go see Mr. Harrington and see what he will do about it. I don’t know what else to do, Sierra.” Mike rose from his chair as if he carried a huge backpack of heavy rocks on his back.
“Make several copies of everything first, Mike.” She gave him a weak smile. “Just in case.”
“Right. Come on. We’ll use the copy machine the tellers use.” He led the way out of his office over to a door that led behind the tellers’ desk.
Once he’d secured several copies, Mike left her next to the copier to slip one into his briefcase that he could lock. Then he returned and escorted her to the bank president’s office and knocked on the door.
“Come in,” a gruff voice said.
Mike opened the door and allowed her to enter first. When he followed behind her, he shut the door and indicated one of the chairs in front of Hugh Harrington’s desk.
“Well hello there, Sierra. How are you doing? Is Mike helping you okay? Would you rather we find Dexter?” he asked with a smile.
“Mike is doing just fine. We’ve got a problem, Mr. Harrington and I’m hoping you can clear it up to my satisfaction,” Sierra said, trying to keep her voice calm and her face expressionless.
“Goodness. This sounds serious. What is the problem?” he asked with a slight frown that reached all the way up to his bushy
eyebrows.
“Mr. Harrington. Here is a loan Sierra asked me to pull,” ’’”Mike said, handing over the signature page of the loan.
He continued explaining the problem as Sierra clasped her hands in a tight ball, waiting to hear what Dexter’s father would do.
“Sierra, honey. This looks like your signature to me. I’ve seen enough of it over the years to recognize it at a glance,” the older man said with a frown. “Why would you try to get out of it? I’ve always known you to be an honorable woman who took paying her debts seriously.”
“I do take my debts seriously when they are my debts. This isn’t my signature, Mr. Harrington.” She slid her folder across the desk with examples of her signature minus all the other papers and waited to see if he would find the difference and if he would say anything when he did.
* * * *
“I don’t like this, Rollan,” Thorne said as they worked on the last stall in the barn that needed repair. “She should have called by now. It’s nearly ten-thirty. She was going to be there when they opened at nine this morning.”
“Yeah, even if she was thirty minutes late, it shouldn’t have taken an hour to close out a loan,” Rollan agreed.
Thorne was sure something had gone wrong. They’d promised her they wouldn’t interfere, but not knowing if she was okay or not was killing him. What could go wrong at the bank though? She would be in a public place with other people surrounding her. Still, his chest hurt.
“Let’s give it another thirty minutes, then we’ll head in that direction to be sure she didn’t have another flat tire or something. We still don’t know who cut her tire to begin with,” Rollan said.
“That really makes me feel better about waiting, Rollan. What if she’s in some ditch from a blow out? If she had a simple flat tire, she would have called us,” Thorne pointed out. “We should have checked her truck over before she left. I’d pretty much forgotten about the cut tire. If someone at her place is messing with her and I didn’t think to check them out, it’s my fault if she gets hurt.”
“You’re not taking all the blame on for this, man. I knew about it, too. Let’s wash up and go find her. She might have just forgotten to call us and gone shopping while she is in town,” Rollan pointed out.
“You and I both know that’s not like her. She’s too responsible to get lost in shopping and forget something this serious. She knew we wanted to come with her and would be waiting for her call since she didn’t let us,” Thorne said.
Rollan nodded and they both dropped their tools to jog toward the house. One of the hands saw them and called out to see if something was wrong.
“No. We’re just late for a meeting and still need to clean up. Call or text us if you need anything,” Thorne called out. He wanted to already be in the truck driving toward Riverbend and Sierra.
He used the mudroom to wash up while Rollan continued into the kitchen. They never cleaned up in the kitchen, but this was an emergency and they needed to hurry up and find out where their woman was.
“Ready?” he asked his friend.
Rollan finished drying his hands and tossed the towel on the counter. “Let’s go. I have a bad feeling about this.”
Thorne did, too, but wasn’t going to put it into words. He didn’t want there to be anything wrong. If he let himself get worked up over possibilities, he’d be in no shape to help Sierra if she needed them.
They drove a little slower on the way into Riverbend than normal, afraid they’d miss her in a ditch or something if they drove too fast. At the same time, they both wanted to hurry up and get there in case she needed them right then. By the time they arrived at the bank to find her truck sitting right out front, Thorne was as close to being a nervous wreck as possible without wringing his hands like a woman.
“Her truck is still here, so we didn’t miss her on the road. Do we go in or what?” Rollan asked, clearly as torn as Thorne felt.
“If we do and nothing is wrong, she’ll be angry with us,” Thorne pointed out.
“Do you think she’s okay in there? We could just sit here and wait for her to come out,” Rollan suggested.
“That’s just about as bad as going in and looking for her.” Thorn wanted to risk her anger and go inside to check on her.
“I’ll move the truck over there in the grocery store parking lot. We’ll be able to see when she comes out, but she might not see us,” Rollan suggested.
“Yeah, go ahead. I really want to go inside and check on her,” Thorne admitted.
“Me, too, but we better not. She’ll be fine as long as she’s in the bank. Dexter can’t do a thing with others around them. She’s either visiting with someone she knows or giving the bastard a piece of her mind. Either way, we interfere and she’ll always think that we don’t trust that she can take care of herself and not want to get involved with us.” Rollan had a point.
They waited in the truck for another thirty minutes, watching others go inside the bank and then come back out in under fifteen minutes. Thorne had about waited all he could stand. Something wasn’t right. He was sure there was a back door to the place. She could have been forced out the back if Dexter wanted to do it badly enough.
“Start the truck, Rollan. I’m through waiting. Something has happened and we’re sitting over here twiddling our thumbs like idiots,” Thorn said.
Rollan didn’t argue. He had the truck parked only a few cars over from Sierra’s in less than a minute. They both unbuckled and started to climb out of the cab when the bank door opened and a very angry Sierra stormed out with someone they’d never seen before following her. The young man helped her into her truck, seeming to argue with her as he did. Sierra kept shaking her head then grabbed the door and closed it, causing the man to quickly step back to avoid getting hit.
When she backed out of the space, Rollan did the same even as he was pulling his seat belt back around to snap it into place. They followed her at a good distance behind until she sped out of town toward home. Thorne’s phone rang, alerting him that she was calling him. He grabbed it off his belt and exchanged a worried look with Rollan before answering it.
“Hey, honey. How did it go?” he asked, wincing at the way it sounded when they had witnessed her angry flight from the bank.
“I’m finished, and it’s all taken care of,” she said, a slight hitch in her voice that told Thorne she was crying or trying damn hard not to.
“What’s wrong, Sierra? I can hear it in your voice. You’re upset,” he said.
“I’m heading to your place right now. I’ll tell you when I get there.”
He winced, looked over at Rollan, and knew they had to come clean. Rolland knew it, too, since he nodded at him.
“Honey, you sound too upset to be driving. Pull over. We’re right behind you. One of us will drive your truck for you,” he said and waited, expecting her to blow up at him.
When it didn’t happen, he wondered if she’d hung up on him, but then a sniff over the phone told him otherwise.
“Okay,” was all she said before slowing her truck down and pulling off the road.
Both men breathed a sigh of relief as Rollan followed suit. Until, that is, she flung open her door and jumped down from the cab to storm over to them.
“Ah, hell,” was all he had time to say before she wrenched open his door.
Chapter Twelve
Sierra couldn’t believe they had come to town despite her telling them not to. As much as she wanted to yell at them for doing it, she was immensely relieved to see them. It was obvious that she was a seething mess and didn’t need to be driving. She’d known it and Mike had known it when she’d climbed up into the truck outside of the bank. All she could think about was getting to them. She trusted them and instinctually knew they would help her make sense of it all.
When she pulled open the passenger door to see Thorne sitting there with a worried expression and just a touch of guilt, it all hit her once again and she started laughing. She couldn’t stop. It rolled out
of her so that she had to grip the door to stay on her feet. She wasn’t surprised to see the alarm on Thorne’s face as he jumped out of the truck. Rollan had all but run around to stand next to her as she continued until tears rolled down her cheeks.
“Honey, what’s wrong? You’re scaring us, Sierra,” Rollan said, rubbing her back in small circles.
“What happened at the bank, baby?” Thorne asked, reaching out to her.
Their honest concern finally sobered her. She would have collapsed to the ground if Rollan hadn’t grabbed her. She was a mess and couldn’t believe the extent of Dexter’s deceit and frightening plans.
“C–Could we go back to your place?” she finally asked.
“Of course, honey,” Rollan said. “I’ll drive your truck. Let’s get you in the truck and Thorne will drive you to the ranch.”
She let Rollan pick her up and set her in the cab of their truck while Thorne hurried around the front and climbed up into the driver’s seat. Rollan fastened her seat belt for her then closed the door and jogged back to her truck. She realized she’d left everything on the passenger seat but figured he wouldn’t understand any of it and wouldn’t try to read it while he was driving anyway.
“Lean back and rest, Sierra. We’ll take care of everything,” Thorne told her as he pulled out onto the road.
Sierra wanted to let them do just that, but knew she couldn’t allow them to make it all better for her. She had to face what she’d allowed to happen and stay strong. Letting them bail her out of everything wasn’t the way to cultivate their friendship. On top of that, they were going to be her bosses soon. She wasn’t backing out of the agreement unless they didn’t really want to buy the ranch.
Thoughts and questions circled in her mind as Thorne drove. What if they didn’t want the ranch anymore? Should she still put it on the market and sell it? Now she wouldn’t be losing a huge chunk of it to pay off the loan she’d thought she was still paying for. Add to that the money she would be getting back from the forged loan taken out in her name and she could easily finance the girls’ education and have enough left over to give her a start on a new life.
