I assume I clicked on a wrong button somewhere while trying to record my first bounced check. What I found as a solution after visiting with my accountant, there was what seemed like a hidden credit memo for the customer in question. Go to the Customer Center, highlight the customer in question, you'll then see left arrow in upper right hand side of the current pane. Clicking on the arrow will reveal details about your customer. In the list was a credit memo for the amount of credit that kept showing up after bouncing the check. After deleting credit memo then undoing all my previous attempts to clear the memo, redoing the bounced check process in the 2018 version worked flawlessly.
