Abediah Thornton

Chapter 19 - Wednesday

Abediah sat in one of the comfortable chairs in Winnie's office, another hot chocolate in hand. She was watching Winnie and Karen, who were moving between the desk and the floor in front of her. They were slowly taking the paperwork out of the bag and organising it. They were trying to keep things in date order. Luckily her first round of organising seemed to have been good so they were just refining.

It had turned out that Karen wasn't just a secretary. In fact, she wasn't actually a secretary at all. While she did sometimes help answer phones and welcome people to the office her main skill was as the finance whizz.

After an hour Winnie sat down and Karen pulled up a chair. 'Well, Karen, what do you think?' asked Winnie.

'I think there is a lot of helpful information here. It gives us a good idea of your income and expenses. However, I don't think this is everything.'

'What do you mean?' asked Abediah.

'Well, for a start I would have expected to see an accounting book. Even if it was just a simple in and out, it would help keep track of the money. Without that, how would you know how much to buy and sell and when you needed to go to market?'

'But there wasn't anything else!' said Abediah, panicking. 'I looked everywhere! I don't know where else to look!'

 'It's Ok,' said Winnie. 'Don't worry, this is really just to see where we are for now. You can keep your eye open for an accounting book and we'll see if we can make this-' she waved in the direction of the piles of paper on her desk- 'all make a bit more sense here. How does that sound?'

'I can have a go at writing up your books Mrs Thornton,' said Karen. 'I also think it might be a good idea to do an audit of your assets so we can figure out exactly what you have.'

'What sorts of things would count as assets do you think?' Abediah asked.

'Well, there's the big things like your farm, all the land and buildings and the farm house,' said Winnie.

'That's right,' confirmed Karen. 'But also we need to know how many cattle you have now, any other animals on the property, equipment, food, bedding for the animals. Anything that could potentially be sold really.'

'I see,' said Abediah. She took a deep breath, 'there's something else...'

Winnie nodded with an encouraging smile.

'On Sunday I went out to check the boundary fence,' Abediah began. 'I stopped going down to the far side of the farm about seven years ago. Frank was driving past every weekend going into the city and the road goes most of the way along that fence. Also we had decided a few years before to reduce the size of the herd so there weren't any cattle down there anymore.' She paused and took a drink of her, now cold, hot chocolate.

'I don't really go anywhere but to and from town so I hadn't been down there for ages.' She paused again looking up at the two faces and feeling the burning anxious shame of not knowing simple things about her own property. Winnie smiled again. Karen just looked interested. 'At the far side of our land we have a hill, it's quite steep, but on the other side it goes quite flat. When Edwin, that's my horse,' she added. 'When Edwin and I went on Sunday, we found a new barn there.'

Winnie's eyebrows rose. 'When we arrived there were two cars outside the barn. We waited for a bit and three people came out, a woman and two men. They got into the cars and left. There's a proper track down to the road and everything!' she continued, still quite astounded by the discovery. The two women were nodding, but they both had careful looks on their faces, as if they were covering their true feelings.