The Boss's Sin

The ledger does not balance, and that is the only thing that matters. Three thousand dollars missing from the logbook. Another two thousand out of the repair fund Leo has watched his father squirrel away since their mother died. His father stands at the window of the foreman's office with his back turned and his shoulders curved like a man carrying a casket, and will not tell him it is a mistake. Harold Finch has the books. Finch has been foreman of this mill for twenty-three years, and he has looked at Leo sideways since Leo was twelve and limping, and what Finch wants is everything. Sign the mill over, make it look like a sale, and he forgets he can read. Close to fifteen thousand dollars, over six years. The new sorter that was supposed to save them. The roof on Building Three. Samuel's doctor bills. Samuel is Leo's brother. He came back from the war in a wheelchair with shrapnel through his cheek, and he is stirring potatoes at the stove when Leo comes home and tells him it is done. Then Leo finds his father floating face-down in the waterwheel pit, coat caught on a submerged grate, and carries him out, and sits on the stone edge of the pit and makes himself a promise about never trusting anyone with power again. Julian St. Clair arrives on a Tuesday, in a black Hudson Hornet polished to a mirror, wearing a suit worth more than Leo's annual salary. He is from Boston. He looks at the mill like he is measuring it for a coffin, and then he finds Leo through the office glass, and Leo looks away first. *"I believe you work for me now."* What Leo does instead of keeping his head down is read. He finds that the cost ledger for 1949 is missing from the shelf while 1948 sits right where it should. He finds the accident report on the wheel that killed a man, filed in 1940, on a wheel that was already old. He finds a bank statement with five hundred dollars a month on it, every month, and a name in Massachusetts on the other end. He also finds a photograph from the summer of 1949 with Julian in it, standing beside a man named Tom Finch who did not come home from Korea. And a blackmail ledger with notes in the margins. A historical mill-town romance between two men in a place where being found out is the whole of the danger: a bookkeeper with a dead father and a brother to keep, an owner with a Boston name and reasons he has not said out loud, and a foreman who has been selling other people's secrets for years. The romance is closed-door.