“Mercy!” Vivian had exclaimed, when Ellen had described the commotion in Bell’s switchboard room that night. “Jesus Christ almighty!” was what she’d said to Violet. Because she knew what to say in polite company, but didn’t want to have to mind her mouth around family.

Violet had quit William Annat shortly after, because she had a husband, two kids, and two cats and didn’t need those kinds of headaches in her life, and Ellen Leonard had taken her one night of switchboard crisis experience and moved to Cleveland to work at Bell there. She thought she was ready for a bigger city and its bigger calls. Vivian thought she’d better be, because if men from Akron were shooting up department stores at Christmas, could you imagine what the men in Cleveland were up to?

The robbery attempt had been the talk of the town for the next few years. At least until last June when that sneaky Gilbert Ogden embezzled $250,000 from the Wayne Building & Loan on North Market Street, where he worked as a teller. He took the money and absconded with the bank director’s secretary, according to the front page of The Daily Record. Although Vivian could’ve guessed at its meaning, she’d decided to look up “absconded” in the dictionary she’d had to buy Charlotte for school.

Abscond:

: to depart secretly and hide oneself <He absconded with the stolen money.>

Charlotte was a sophomore at Wooster High School. She’d skipped the first grade after correcting the teacher on her usage of “break” versus “brake,” and knew words like “abscond” and “privy” and “myriad.” She also liked to read books, and was known to roll her eyes every time her mother boasted about how she “knew people.”

Vivian had spent days wracking her brain to try to remember if she’d ever overheard any telephone conversations between Gilbert Ogden and the secretary, before they absconded. She said she “had a feeling” about that Gilbert Ogden, with his shifty eyes looking every which way behind the round, steel-rimmed spectacles, and the nervous way he used to fiddle with his bow tie with stubby fingernails that he chewed down past the quick. “That’s the sign of a Nervous Purvis, right there,” she always said about nail-biters, and you didn’t want to get her started on the ones who wore glasses.

So, no, Vivian wasn’t all that surprised when she read about the embezzlement. But embezzlement, while sort of exciting to a town like Wooster, wasn’t the real news to Vivian. The real news had been Gilbert’s illicit romance with the secretary Flora Parker. “Illicit” was a word she knew, because it was all over her movie magazines.

“Flora Parker, my stars! Who would’ve thought?” she’d said to Ruth Craven, during one of the early afternoon lulls at the switchboard. “Although . . .” She’d then paused with a finger to her lips. “Wasn’t she from New York?”

Ruth had nodded. “From New York. And a little older. Pretty, though.”

“They have any kids, her and her husband?” Because that would’ve made it worse, and the worse a scandal was, the better it was to talk about.