Excerpt of She's the One by Patricia Kay

The blinking message light on her phone was the first thing Susan Pickering saw as she walked into the kitchen of her small bungalow at nine-thirty that night. Dropping her purse, her tote and her bag of take-out Chinese food on the kitchen table, she headed for the counter where the portable phone sat in its base.

Sighing — Thursdays were always such long days — she keyed in the code for her voice mail and rubbed the back of her neck while she waited for it to kick in. At least sales had been good today. Some Thursdays it hardly paid to keep the shop open until eight-thirty.

"You have two new messages," the canned voice said. "Press One to listen..."

Susan pressed One.

The first message was from the president of the women's club at Susan's church with a reminder of the board meeting that would take place Monday night. Susan was the club's secretary.

Since Susan already had a note on her calendar about the meeting, she deleted the message.

Then the second message began. "Ms. Pickering. This is John Mellon with Allmark Visa. Please call our 800 number regarding your overdue bill. Failure to call will mean immediate cancellation of your card and all privileges."

He went on to give her the complete phone number and, before hanging up, urged her once more to call immediately, saying their customer-service department was open twenty-four hours a day.

Susan frowned. What in the world was he talking about? She hadn't used her Allmark Visa card in at least six months, and there was no balance the last time they'd sent her a statement. Susan didn't believe in using credit cards unless it was absolutely necessary. In fact, she only owned two of them — the Visa and her American Express card.

There must be some mistake. There had to be. She dug her Visa card out of her wallet because she knew they would want her account number. Then she pressed in the keys for the 800 number. It took awhile before she was connected to a person. She had to wade her way through the automated answering system first, but after making three or four selections, she finally had a live voice.

"This is Esther. May I have your account number?" Susan slowly gave the woman the number.

"Um, is this Ms. Pickering?"

"Yes, this is Susan Pickering."

"Would you give me your mother's maiden name, please?"

"Newman." She spelled it out.

Silence.

Susan's frown deepened.

"Um, Ms. Pickering, I'm going to connect you with someone in the business office. Please hold."

Before Susan could utter a word of protest or even ask a question, the line went silent, followed by the soothing sounds of easy-listening music. Except, Susan was too rattled to be soothed by anything, unless she heard the words "We're so sorry for the mix-up, Ms.Pickering,there'sobviouslybeenaterriblemistake."

After what seemed like an eternity, a youngish male voice came on the line. "Miss Pickering?"

"Yes?"

"Miss Pickering, this is Robert Wiley. Are you calling to make a payment?"

"Look...Mr. Wiley, I don't know what you're talking about. I haven't used my card for months. I don't owe you anything. You must have me mixed up with someone else. Why, I haven't even received a statement from you in at least six months."

"That's impossible. We've sent you at least three communications regarding your outstanding bill in the past month alone and they haven't been returned."

His implication was that she was lying, which got Susan's hackles up. "Well, I'm sorry, but I didn't receive them. Maybe you sent them to the wrong address. Anyway, I told you. I haven't used my Allmark Visa card in at last six months, so I can't imagine why you're sending me statements, anyway. Maybe you've charged someone else's purchases to my card by mistake."

"According to the address change you requested, we have your address listed as..." He proceeded to give her a post office box address in Columbus, which was thirty miles from Maple Hills where Susan lived.

Susan began to feel like Alice in Alice through the Looking Glass. This whole thing was just bizarre.

"First of all," she said, "I never sent you an address change. Secondly, I still live on Fifth Street in Maple Hills, not Columbus, in the same house I've occupied for eight years. And...I hate to sound like a broken record...but I haven't used my card in six months, at least."

Susan was mad now. Allmark had screwed up, but she could see it was going to take her many phone calls, e-mails and wasted hours clearing up this mistake, even though none of it was her fault.

Dammit, anyway.

Why hadn't she canceled that card when she'd thought about it a couple of months ago? If she had, she wouldn't be having this aggravating conversation, especially tonight, when she was exhausted from her eleven-hour day at the antique shop and wanted nothing more than a glass of wine and her Chinese food.

"You're saying you didn't call us on...the tenth of June...with an address change?"

Again she heard the skepticism. "No, I didn't," Susan snapped. "It must have been someone else and another card and you people got them mixed up."

"Pardon me, Ms. Pickering, but that's impossible. Anyone calling to change an address would have to give us all the particulars on the card involved including correct address, phone number, card number, social security number and mother's maiden name. Now if it wasn't you who charged over $6,500 on this card, who was it?"

"Sixty-five hundred dollars!" Susan was shocked. She couldn't remember the limit on that card, but she was sure it wasn't more than eight thousand.

"Ohmigod. I...I can't imagine."

But a tiny kernel of anxiety had knotted in her stomach, even as she expressed her ignorance.

Could Sasha be responsible for this?

Oh, God. Surely not. Susan's younger sister had been in trouble many times, but she'd never broken the law.... Well, unless you counted her drug use.

And don't forget that one time she shoplifted. But she was just a teenager when that episode happened. And that incident had taken place during her worst and most rebellious period. Susan reminded herself that Sasha had never done anything like that again.

She wouldn't have done this to me, would she? No.

Sasha wouldn't.

She wouldn't.

There was another explanation for this credit card problem, and it didn't involve her sister.

"S-someone must have stolen my identity," she said, grasping the first option that came to her mind: this doesn't involve Sasha.

Finally the man she was talking to sounded sympathetic when he said, "I'm sorry, Miss Pickering. If what you say is true, then it looks as if you're the victim of credit card fraud. I'll turn this over to our fraud division, and they'll be calling you."

"What about all the charges on my account? Am I liable for them?"

"If everything checks out, you won't have to pay more than fifty dollars."

Susan sagged against the counter in relief. She didn't know what she'd have done if they'd insisted on more. Her business bank account had a fairly healthy balance of five thousand dollars, but she couldn't keep her doors open if she let it get too far down.

And her personal account was pretty low right now because she'd just paid for some expensive dental work. That was one of the drawbacks of owning a small business. She couldn't afford gold-standard health insurance or dental insurance.

"I advise you to notify your local police, because this might not be an isolated incident," he said. "It's possible your identity has been stolen."

Susan closed her eyes. I do not need this hassle right now.

Susan made him repeat the post office box address, which she wrote down, and she gave him the fax number at the shop so he could fax over copies of the statements showing all the purchases which had been made.

"I'm curious about something," she said. "I made a rather large purchase on this card right after I got it, and I remember someone from your company called me the next day to make sure I really had made the purchases. They said it was a safeguard against someone else using the card."

"Yes, we do that," he said.

"Then why didn't anyone call me about all these purchases?"

"We only call when an individual purchase is more than $500...or when a person's buying history warrants a call. In your case, none of the charges against your card were individually large. In scanning over them, I see that the largest was $365 at Banana Republic."

Susan bit her lip. Banana Republic. Sasha loved shopping there. But Sasha couldn't have done this. She couldn't. Susan refused to believe it. It had to have been someone else.

"Thank you," she finally said. "I'll call the police as soon as we hang up."

"It can wait until morning," he said. His voice was now kind. "We put an alert on this card more than a month ago, so whoever's been using it won't be able to use it again."

"Okay."

"My shift will be over in about fifteen minutes. But tomorrow morning, if your local police want to call us, they can talk to Bob Blackstone. He's the head of our Fraud Department. I'll send everything over to them before I leave here tonight."