i
From behind the bulletproof glass of his tiny cubicle, Joshua Domingo's fingers hovered restlessly over his keyboard. He hated Saturdays. Too slow. Like many small towns in Michigan's backwater, the stay-at-home-moms of Wallsocket dealt with all their finances during the week, leaving the weekends free for "family time". All that meant is they spent Saturdays pampering their well-paid Secretariat husbands as their children set fire to things by the freeway. No time to cash their checks or set up a trust fund for another spoiled little brat, they had to go to market and stock up on pork shoulders and lamb shanks for tonights home-cooked meal, of course ensuring there would be leftovers enough for lunch tomorrow so the kids have enough fuel for that afternoon's horse-riding lesson.
Joshua sighed. This whole godforsaken town make him sick. It was so predictable, generation upon generation of Wallsocket residents living out their neat little lives in their neat little rows of semi-detached houses and picketed gardens forever and ever and ever until the end of the world. God he hoped his own kids didn't turn out to be mindless idiots like them. His daughter he knew to be smarter than that, but that only meant that, like him, she'd find herself bordering on homicidal at a dead end job six days a week for meagre pay and a bright red stress ball with the words "Mayor Bowman believes you can keep pushing the envelope!" scrawled over it in Comic Sans. Jesus Christ. How did everything become so tedious? Was this really what his parents had wanted for him when they moved here? Eleven long years of loyal service to Columbia Bank, the Columbia Street division of Secretariat Banking, in the capacity of lowly bank teller?
Turning to his computer, he viewed his accounts. Linda Romero had died unexpectedly three days ago, survived by an only son and nearly $20,000. A tragedy. According to her obituary in the local paper, she was a pillar of the community, although Joshua couldn't remember her saying a single word to him. He smiled as he emptied the account. Let the Moms of Wallsocket try and recover from this one.
ii
At least, that's how I like to think it happened. I don't know why Joshua Domingo, 54-year-old father of three, did what he did. No one does. All we know is that at 11:23 am on April 22, 2023, CCTV at Columbia Bank shows Joshua Domingo leaving his desk without warning and not returning. Five hours later, William Romero reported to the police that nearly all of his late mother's money had vanished from her account. Four days after that, Mr Domingo was officially wanted by the FBI for siphoning $425,000 from his deceased clients, plunging his native town of Wallsocket into chaos. No one, not even family, has heard from him since.
In all likelihood, it was money for drugs, or alcohol, or to pay gambling debts, or fund whatever addiction he had fallen prey to. It's rare for a crime of this kind to be motivated by something so grand as revenge on the insular culture of small-town America, or something so petty as pure boredom, and I should know. At this point, I know everything there is to know about the Columbia robbery, and every robbery like it in the past decade. I probably know more about Wallsocket, MI, than its actual inhabitants.
Still, it's fun to think about. The psychological motives that could drive someone to steal $425,000 from the town he's lived in his whole life. To continue to live shamelessly on the same road as the woman who's unknowingly been giving him cash handouts from her dead aunt's account. To send his children to the same school as everyone else, serve their classmates Bagel Bites at birthday parties with a grin, while he robs them of their inheritances. To go from loving his birthplace enough to want to raise a family there, to hating it enough to want to destroy it from the inside out. What makes a man change that drastically? How could a person betray their own community like that? What could make someone wrap back around?