Vernie: One Year Tops

Vernie Olander, is an author. She wasn’t always an author. For over fifteen years, she was the executive director of the Portland, Maine Symphony Orchestra before retiring to pursue a career as a novelist. Her days quickly changed from board meetings, pitching sponsors, and unraveling complicated budgets, to hours of writing, attending creative writing classes, and dreaming up plots for fiction novels. Energy flowed, and after completing her first novel she was ready to forge ahead with a second book. Then the unexpected. A phone call presented an offer to return to her previous symphony position. Vernie wasn’t about to give up her writing, but after much negotiation, she accepted to help on an interim one-year-basis while looking for a new executive director. Almost immediately, she encountered a series of challenges.
The financial books didn’t balance. Was it missing money or merely sloppy accounting records?