Out of Bounds Read Online Free PDF Page A

the money anymore. Oh, Lord.
    Posy coaxed the details out of her. Trish had been shocked at the amount of money people donated. She’d told a friend of hers about it and the friend had asked to borrow the money. Trish’s friend ran a Christmas store in Maine and her credit line had been reduced by her bank. She told Trish she just needed the money for a few days while she collected on several overdue accounts.
    Posy’s voice shook as she asked, “When is she going to pay you back?”
    “I’m afraid I was taken in. She lied about her situation, Posy. She declared bankruptcy last week and her assets are frozen. I’m not going to get the money back.”
    “I don’t understand why you lent it to her in the first place.”
    “She sounded like she really needed the help. This economy has been so hard for so many of my friends. I couldn’t say no when she needed help.”
    Which was close to the truth, but not exactly the whole truth. Trish needed to be loved. She collected emotional debts the same way she collected miniatures—fervently and to an extreme. If her friend told her she would be eternally grateful for the loan, Trish would have had a hard time turning her down.
    “Now Chloe Chastain keeps calling me. She wants to know when the Fallon Foundation is going to acknowledge the gift. She says she’s accountable to her blog readers. Posy, she’s going to tell everyone what I did.”
    Everyone including the police.
    “So that’s where I come in? I buy your stuff so you can pay the money back without anyone finding out?”
    Trish nodded.
    They needed a list. Figure out how much her mom owed and then sell whatever they had to or even get a loan to pay it off. Glancing around the office for a piece of paper and a pen, she realized she was still holding the deeds to her legacy. Wonders, the house. Trish’s car. Her safe-deposit box where she kept her grandmother’s diamond earrings. Did her mom really think she could write a check to cover all that?
    Oh, no.
    “Mom, how much money did you collect?”
    “Sixty-eight thousand dollars. Sixty-eight thousand, eight hundred and seventy-six dollars, actually.”
    Posy leaned against the desk and fanned herself with the papers. She wondered if she was going to vomit. “Sixty-eight—” she was barely able to form the words “—thousand dollars? From your blog?”
    “Chloe’s blog gets twenty thousand hits a day.”
    “Sixty-eight thousand dollars?” She couldn’t stop repeating the number. It seemed absurd, but Trish kept nodding in confirmation. She’d thought they were dealing with a few thousand, ten at the most. How in the heck had she raised that much money?
    How big was Chloe’s audience, anyway?
    When she’d recovered enough to ask questions, the answers she got were even more alarming. Trish was in serious debt. Wonders had limped along for several years, never straying too far into the red or the black. She’d sold the building a few years ago when it needed a new roof and an upgraded fire-suppression system, and she couldn’t afford to bring it up to code. After the economy went downhill, Trish mortgaged her house twice to keep Wonders going. The final blow came when she’d mismanaged the holiday ordering the previous Christmas. Now Wonders was about as sunk as a shoppe could get without actually closing its doors.
    She’d gone to her bank in a panic this week to try to get a loan to pay the fundraiser back, but she had no assets and bad credit and she’d been turned down flat.
    Of all the dramas her mother had created over the years, this one was far and away the most insane. Posy was accustomed to bailing her mom out of jams and patching up messes.... She’d held her hand through an IRS audit a few years ago. This was unbelievable, though.
    It had to stop. Trish’s cycle of crisis and collapse was too much. Posy had lost too much time, skipped too many dates, changed too many plans over the years.
    Covering up a crime, even if it was only a