Someone Called Elise

I'm going to tell this straight because I've told it crooked to myself enough times. Margaret died in the spring. By the autumn I'd got as far as being able to make dinner without thinking about it, and my daughter Claire had got as far as not ringing every night, and I was on the computer more than I should have been. That's the setup. A lot of men my age have the same one. Elise messaged me on a gardening forum. That's where it started, I want to be clear, not a dating site, a forum about dahlias. She'd seen my photos of the tubers. She had questions. She was in Calgary, she said, a widow, sixty-two, a retired bookkeeper. She wrote well. She was funny about her cat. We moved to email, then to a messaging app, because the forum was clunky. Two months of that. I told her about Margaret. She told me about her Frank. She never pushed. That's the thing people don't understand, they think it's all "send money now". It wasn't. It was two months of a person being kind to me at eleven at night. The investment came up sideways. She mentioned she'd been "doing well" with something. I asked. She was reluctant, or did reluctant. Eventually she sent a link. A trading platform. Very clean. Her account screenshot showed a balance with a lot of digits in it. "It's not for everyone, Doug. I just don't like seeing your savings sit in a GIC doing nothing." I put in two thousand dollars. To see. The platform showed it grow. Eight percent in a week. I put in ten. It grew. There was a "customer success manager" called Michael who called me by my first name and had an answer for everything. By December I'd put in forty-one thousand dollars and I hadn't told Claire, and if you'd asked me why I'd have said it was because she'd worry, and the honest answer is I knew. She found out because she was over for Christmas and I'd left the laptop open. She's an accountant. She looked at the screen for about four seconds.

"Dad. What is this." I told her. All of it. Elise, the forum, Michael, the balance that said eighty-three thousand dollars now, which I was very proud of. She didn't say anything for a while. Then she said, "Try to withdraw it." "What?" "Right now. All of it. Withdraw it to your bank." I tried. There was a form. Then there was a message saying withdrawals over ten thousand required a "tax pre-payment" of twelve percent to release the funds, payable in the same way I'd deposited. Michael messaged within a minute to walk me through it. Claire took the laptop off my lap and closed it. "It's not real, Dad." "Elise is real." "Is she? Have you ever seen her? Video call? Once?" There'd been reasons. The camera on her phone. A bad connection. Her cat. I sat there in my own kitchen, sixty-seven years old, a man who'd run a hardware store for thirty years and could smell a bad cheque from across the counter, and I felt the whole thing turn over inside me like a boat. We reported it. The police were kind and useless. The bank was less kind and equally useless. The money's gone. Forty-one thousand dollars, which was a big piece of what Margaret and I had put by, and which I'd handed over in eleven separate transactions to a woman who'd been very good about dahlias. Elise messaged one more time, after. "Doug, I'm worried, you've gone quiet." Claire wanted me to block her. I didn't, not for a week. I read it a lot. Then I did. Here's what I've done since. I've told this story to my curling club, out loud, in front of eleven men who all looked at the floor, and two of them came to me afterwards, separately, and said they'd had a message from someone. Different names. Same cat, near enough. That's the part I can still do something about. So I'm doing it.