The church safe had a second ledger in it.
Forty-one families tithe here. I’ve counted every dollar of it for nine years.
This one had NAMES I’d never seen.
“Curtis, you locking up?” Tammy asked from the hallway, keys already in her hand.
I told her yes. Then I sat back down in the office with the door shut, because the building fund was supposed to be at $180,000 and the number in front of me said $6,400.
We’d been promising that roof to the congregation since 2023. Old people putting twenties in envelopes with their names written on the front in shaky pen.
Pastor Dale Rickert baptized my daughter. He sat in my kitchen the week my wife’s mother died and didn’t say anything stupid, which was the thing I loved him for.
The second ledger listed transfers to something called Legacy Faith Holdings.
I logged into the church account from my laptop that night, same login we’d all shared since Tammy set it up. Fourteen transfers over two years.
Every one of them on a Monday.
Then I looked up the LLC on the state site. Registered agent, one name. Dale’s.
A few days later Marlene Hovey stopped me in the parking lot to ask if the paperwork was going through okay. I didn’t know what paperwork she meant.
She said Pastor Dale had helped her put the house in the church’s name so her nephew couldn’t take it. Said he’d prayed over the signing.
Her house is on Fulton, worth maybe two-forty.
I pulled the county deed records that weekend, sitting at the kitchen table with the dog scratching at the back door.
SIX DEEDS. Six widows from our congregation. All of them transferred to Legacy Faith Holdings, and Marlene’s was the newest one.
I lined the printouts up on the desk by date, like that would make it hold still.
Two of those women are already dead.
I made forty-one copies and put them in plain envelopes and drove in early Sunday.
Dale opened the deacons’ meeting with a joke about the roof.
“Before we pray,” I said, “I’d like to pass something around.”
What I Should Have Done First
I should have called somebody. That’s what you’re supposed to do. Call an attorney, call the denomination’s district office, call your brother-in-law who knows about these things.
Instead I sat in the church parking lot at 9:47 on a Thursday night with the dome light on and read every page of that ledger three times.
The second ledger was thinner than the main one. Black cover, same brand we’ve used for years, the kind you buy at an office supply store for four dollars. Someone had written “B.F. Supp.” on the spine in pencil. Building Fund Supplemental. I’d assumed it was an older ledger from before my time and never opened it.
Nine years I’d been treasurer. Nine years of counting, balancing, filing the 990s, explaining line items at annual meetings. I knew the account numbers the way I know my own phone number.
The transfers weren’t hidden. That was the thing that kept hitting me. They weren’t buried in some column no one checks. They came right out of the building fund line, labeled Legacy Faith Holdings – ministry partnership. Fourteen of them, between $8,000 and $22,000 each. Mondays. Always the Monday after a big Sunday – Easter, homecoming, the stewardship campaign in October.
Someone had calculated when the pot was fullest.
I sat there until the parking lot lights clicked off on their timer and I was just a guy in a dark car with a four-dollar ledger and a number that didn’t add up: $173,600. That’s what was gone.
The Name on the State Website
The state business registry loads slow on my phone. I refreshed it twice before it came through.
Legacy Faith Holdings, LLC. Registered 2021. Registered Agent: Dale Allen Rickert. Principal Address: 4 Crosswind Court.
Crosswind Court. I’d been to that house. Helped Dale move a couch in when he first got there. His wife Karen made lemonade and their youngest kid kept running through with a garden hose.
I sat with that for a minute. The registered address wasn’t the church. It was his house.
I don’t know what I expected. Some shell address, maybe. A P.O. box. Something that would’ve told me he’d been careful about hiding it. But 4 Crosswind Court was just his house, which meant either he was sloppy or he didn’t think anyone would look.
Nine years and nobody had looked. Not once.
I drove home and didn’t say anything to my wife Denise. She was already asleep. I stood in the kitchen for a while eating crackers over the sink, which is a thing I do when I can’t make my brain stop. The dog came and sat next to my foot and I was grateful for that.
Marlene Hovey’s House
I’ve known Marlene Hovey since she joined the congregation in 2019. She’s 74, walks with a cane she decorates with stickers, brings banana bread to every funeral reception. Her husband Gerald died of a stroke in 2021 and left her the house on Fulton and not a whole lot else.
The nephew she mentioned, I knew about him vaguely. Rodney. He’d come to Gerald’s funeral and there’d been some friction about the estate, was all I knew.
When she told me Dale had helped her protect the house, she was smiling. Relieved. She said it like it was a kindness he’d done her, which I guess was exactly how it had been presented.
Put it in the church’s name and Rodney can’t touch it. We’ll hold it in trust for you. I’ll pray over the signing.
I pulled up the deed that Saturday morning. Transferred eight months ago. Grantor: Marlene J. Hovey. Grantee: Legacy Faith Holdings, LLC.
Not the church. The LLC.
I had to read the grantee line four times because my brain kept correcting it to what it should have said.
Then I searched the other names from the second ledger. Ruth Ann Graber. Patricia Doyle. Shirley Odom. Connie Fitch. Beverly Park. All widows, all from our congregation, ages ranging from 68 to 81.
Ruth Ann and Connie were already gone. Ruth Ann passed in January of last year. Connie in the fall.
Their houses were still in the name of Legacy Faith Holdings.
I don’t know what the legal situation is when someone dies and their property is already deeded away. I’m a bookkeeper, not a lawyer. But I know what it looked like sitting there at my kitchen table, and what it looked like was that two women had died without knowing they’d given away the only thing they owned.
Forty-One Copies
I didn’t sleep Saturday night. Not really. I kept getting up and going to check the printouts like they might have changed.
They hadn’t changed.
Sunday morning I was at the church at 7:15. Deacons’ meeting starts at 8, service at 10:30. I made my copies on the machine in the office hallway, the one that always jams on page three. It jammed on page three. I cleared it and finished.
Forty-one envelopes. One for each family in the congregation. I labeled them by hand, which took a while, and stacked them in a box I found under Tammy’s desk.
Then I made a separate stack of six for the deacons and put those in the meeting room before anyone arrived.
I thought about calling someone first. The district superintendent, maybe. A lawyer. I’d looked up the denomination’s fraud reporting process at 2 a.m. and it involved a form and a sixty-day review period. Sixty days while Marlene Hovey’s house sat in an LLC with Dale Rickert’s name on it.
I didn’t call anyone.
Dale came in at 7:50, coffee in hand, wearing the blue shirt he wears on Sundays when he wants to look approachable. He said good morning. I said good morning back, because what else do you say.
He set up his notes at the head of the table. He wrote Roof Update on the whiteboard. He told a joke about the roof, something about the Lord providing but the Lord also providing roofing contractors, and the two other deacons who were already there laughed.
I waited until everyone was seated. Seven deacons total. Dale at the head.
“Before we pray,” I said, “I’d like to pass something around.”
What Happened When They Opened the Envelopes
I’d put the deed records on top. That was a decision I made at about 3 a.m. Lead with the concrete thing. The thing with names and addresses and legal descriptions that anyone could look up themselves.
Gary Fitch opened his first. Gary’s 61, retired electrician, not a man who shows a lot on his face. He read the first page and then looked up at me and then looked at Dale.
Dale said, “Curtis, what is this?”
“Deed transfers,” I said. “Six of them. All from congregation members. All to Legacy Faith Holdings.”
“That’s a ministry holding entity,” Dale said. “For asset protection.”
“It’s an LLC registered to your home address.”
The room went quiet in a specific way. Not the quiet before a prayer. A different kind.
Roger Atkins, who’s been a deacon here for twenty-two years and coached my son’s little league, turned the pages slow. His wife Joyce had brought a casserole to our house after Denise’s surgery last spring. He got to the page with Connie Fitch’s name on it and stopped.
“Connie,” he said, mostly to himself.
“She passed in October,” I said. “The deed’s still in the LLC.”
Dale started talking then. He talked for a while. Ministry partnership, legacy planning, asset stewardship, protecting vulnerable members from predatory family members. He was good at it. He’s always been good at it. That’s the thing about Dale. He sat in my kitchen when my mother-in-law died and didn’t say anything stupid, and now he was sitting at a deacons’ table and saying a lot of things that sounded like sense if you didn’t have the printouts in front of you.
Gary Fitch put his papers down flat on the table.
“Dale,” he said. “Stop.”
After the Meeting
I called an attorney that afternoon. My cousin’s husband, Phil, who does mostly real estate but knew enough to tell me to preserve everything and not say anything to Dale until we had counsel involved. Phil called a colleague who handles nonprofit law and that person called me back within the hour.
The denomination’s regional office got a call from me Sunday evening. The woman I spoke to, her name was Sharon, she asked me to email her everything and gave me a direct number to call Monday morning.
Monday morning I called it. The denomination put Dale on administrative leave by noon.
I don’t know the full legal picture yet. I’m told there’s a process. The state attorney general’s office has a charitable trust division and they’re the ones who handle this kind of thing, and I’ve been told someone there has the documents.
Marlene Hovey doesn’t know yet. I’ve been told to let the attorneys handle that conversation and I’ve agreed to that, even though it means she’s going to hear it from a stranger. I don’t know how you tell a 74-year-old woman that the pastor she trusted prayed over a document that took her house.
I still don’t know.
The roof is still leaking. There’s a bucket in the third pew from the left, which someone put there so long ago that no one notices it anymore. Last week it rained on a Wednesday and I drove by the church and the lights were on inside and I thought about all those people, forty-one families, putting their twenties in envelopes with their names written in shaky pen, and I sat in my car for a while before I drove home.
The dog met me at the door.
That helped some.
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If you know someone who sits on a church board or volunteers as a treasurer, pass this along. They’ll understand exactly why I couldn’t wait sixty days.
If you’re still in the mood for some family drama and unexpected discoveries, you might enjoy reading about The Woman in the Front Row Had a Folder With My Mother’s Name Inside, or perhaps the tale of My Father Walked Into My Restaurant and Sat Down in My Section Like He Owned the Place, and don’t miss the intriguing story of My Mother Taped a Key to Her Wrist Before She Died. I Found Out Why..
