by Gina LaManna
“It’s still money.”
“Everyone who works for Clark Company makes a sufficient sum of money,” Nick said. “Enough that it’s not worth the risk of getting fired to steal a few grand. And if the stolen blueprints was an inside job, the thief is making plenty of dough. Whoever has the blueprints has millions already in their pocket. Why risk everything for a drop in the bucket?”
“Hold on,” I said. “Gerard. His name was in the files for receiving a bonus on the project. Why’s that?”
Dane shook his head. “I personally approved that. We had him staying late, running employees around left and right.”
“Okay, well…fine.” Dead end. “You never did answer my question, though. Why keep a stash on hand at all?”
“Last minute necessities,” Dane said. “Every warehouse keeps a reserve just in case. Last minute expenses, dinners for employees…it’s a safety reserve.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” I said. “When was the last time the fund was accessed? Do we know for sure it was stolen tonight?”
“We don’t keep logs for the petty cash. It can only be accessed by the three of us who have permission to get into this room. If we use any of the cash, we file the receipt like any other expense. Obviously, there have been no receipts filed, hence the alarm.”
“Okay, well, if it wasn’t the three of you, yet you’re the only ones with access, then something is missing. The keycard logs will only show who entered the warehouse,” I said, thinking aloud. “We’ll need to check the sign-in sheets, too. Verify there weren’t others in the building without proper access. Do you know the exact time of the theft?”
“I haven’t checked the petty cash drawer since we stocked it weeks ago. There’s no way to pinpoint the moment it occurred, I’m afraid.”
“Perfect.” I blew out a breath of frustration. “We don’t know when, we don’t know how, and we don’t even know if the blueprints and the petty cash incidents are related.”
“Nick, pull the sign in logs of everyone who came into this building while the Warehouse 7 project has been going on. Please have them to Miss Pink at breakfast. Then—” he stopped talking when his phone rang. He held up a finger, then stepped out of the room. “Excuse me.”
The office fell silent. Nick rubbed his temples with his hands, letting out a long sigh. “I’m normally not this tense, so I apologize if I’m short.”
“I understand.”
“What with the Warehouse 7 project due this weekend, the missing blueprints, the petty cash gone—it’s a lot to manage. I’ve been working around the clock.”
“I know,” I said quietly. “I’ll do whatever I can to help, I promise. I know I’m new, and I’m not tech savvy, but I will work hard.”
“Give yourself some credit. He doesn’t hire idiots.” Nick nodded toward Mr. Clark. “I don’t care if you’re a psychic or a mathematician, if Mr. Clark pays you a visit, he sees something in you that’s worth the investment.”
I started to thank him, but Mr. Clark pulled the door open and stepped inside, a grim expression on his face that silenced my thoughts.
“Nick, please pull the information I requested. Lola, come with me.” Dane turned on his heel and started down the stairs. “Now.”
“Let me know if you need anything,” I told Nick before following my boss down the stairs. “Anything at all.”
“I’ll have the files to you by morning.” He forced a smile back. “And Lola, thank you.”
I nodded and turned to leave. I had one hand on the knob when Nick called after me.
“Give him a chance, Lola.” Sincerity glowed through his formerly forced smile. “You won’t regret it.”
“Lola,” Mr. Clark called before I could ask Nick to clarify. “The train is coming.”
Hightailing it down the steps, I turned Nick’s words over in my mind. I was still distracted when I reached Mr. Clark’s side. The train arrived, and we hopped on without a word.
“Where are we going?” I asked, once we’d ridden past Warehouse 8, and then 9. “Did something else happen?”
Mr. Clark sighed, suddenly looking older than his years. He couldn’t be more than his early thirties, but the stress of the day had given him a tense expression that aged his young, gorgeous features. “There’s been a breach of security. The guards have discovered two peeping toms on the premises and held them for questioning.”
My stomach sank several hundred feet. “Two peeping toms, you say?”
He nodded.
“Uh oh,” I said. “That can’t be good.”
“No, these things never are.”
We rode the train in a circle around the quad. Instead of taking us back to the castle, it continued past the platform and stopped in front of Warehouse 1. Once there, we stepped onto the raised sidewalk outside of a huge space that looked more like a movie soundstage than a corporate building.
It took ten minutes to get through the lobby, past security, and into the holding cell. When the door opened and the two culprits were led inside, however, my heart nearly stopped.
“Babs?” I said, stopping in horror. “Annalise?”
Annalise looked furious and pointed to Babs. “It was her fault.”
“Something you’d like to share, Lola?” Mr. Clark turned to me.
“They’re my friends,” I said. “At least they were. We’ll see after they explain what they’re still doing here.”
“Still?” Mr. Clark didn’t take his eyes off me. “Were they here before?”
“They were in my room when you arrived. I let them in—it was my idea. They shouldn’t get in trouble for it. Sorry.”
Mr. Clark’s thoughtful expression took over. “That means—”
“Yes, I had visitors. And I’m really sorry I didn’t say anything—”
“—you didn’t eat all of those Oreos by yourself?” he finished.
I blinked, and then Babs started to laugh.
“Nah,” Babs said. “I helped her to bear the burden of the Oreos.”
“So did I,” Annalise said weakly. “I ate six.”
“Thank God.” Mr. Clark turned back to the girls. “Now, can you please explain why Gerard found you peeking into the windows of my garage?”
It took two hours for Mr. Clark to determine that Babs and Annalise weren’t top-secret Russian spies. Even after I vouched for them, Dane ran background checks and watched surveillance tapes. Then Gerard convinced Mr. Clark that no, he hadn’t been concerned for his life, just a little surprised when two female faces popped up after midnight in the windows to the garage.
Eventually, Dane let the girls go with instructions to use the front door next time. Mrs. Dulcet walked me back to my room after Dane rushed away murmuring about his schedule, and by the time my head hit the pillow, it was nearly four in the morning and I was a zombie.
I fell into a sleep so deep I didn’t hear the door opening to my bedroom until it was too late. A figure moved through the room. My heart pounded, beating against my chest so loudly it was a wonder the intruder couldn’t hear it.
I kept my eyes mostly closed, peeking only enough to see a shadow standing at the foot of my bed. Weapon, I needed a weapon, I thought. But the only thing within reach was the platter I’d used for cookies and tea. I waited, squinted, as the figure leaned forward, biding my time.
“Why?” Mr. Clark’s voice pierced the dark silence.
I flew up in bed, hugging the blankets around me. “What are you doing in here?”
A light flickered in from the hallway, overflow from the fireplace in the common room, small licks of orange bouncing up the walls in an irregular dance. Shadows crossed his face.
“Why?” he asked again, ignoring my very valid question. Instead, he began to pace back and forth, back and forth at the foot of my bed. “Ten thousand dollars. Why would someone steal that amount?”
I could only stare. Until eventually, he slowed his pacing and looked at me, his eyes beacons of blue in the flickering blacknes
s.
“Go to bed and think about it in the morning.” I hugged the blankets tighter to my chest. Now that the shock of finding a man in my bedroom had dissipated, the sleepy, grumpy version of Lola was coming out. “Sleep helps your brain process these things, you know.”
“It is morning. I’m awake for the day.”
“It’s…” I squinted. “Six? Is that right? It’s six in the morning. I have hardly been in bed for two hours.”
“Ten thousand dollars. Such a small amount in the scheme of everything.”
“Did you even go to bed?”
“I climbed into bed, if that’s what you mean.”
“But you didn’t sleep?”
“Ten thousand dollars! What inspired someone to go through the effort?”
Finally, I sat up in bed and ran a hand over my eyes, resigned to the fact that Mr. Clark wanted to talk. As his personal assistant, it was my job to listen. “Mr. Clark, why are you inspired to come in here and talk about it at this hour? Answer me that, and I’ll put on my happy pants and talk to you.”
Even in the dark, I could see his eyes flick toward where my legs might be. “You’re not wearing pants?”
“What? No! I mean, yes.” I shook my head to clear my foggy brain. “It doesn’t matter. Figure of speech. Why are you here now?”
He cleared his throat and, though I couldn’t make out his expression in the darkness, I’d bet he looked uncomfortable. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think before coming in here. I should have knocked.”
He turned to leave. Resigned, I called after him. “Wait, wait,”
Stalling in place, he rested his fingers on the doorframe. “I can wait.”
“You’re already here, and I’m dressed enough,” I said. “Sit down and tell me what you came to say. Your pacing is making me dizzy.”
Mr. Clark stood perfectly still. I experienced a moment of panic while I wondered if I’d been too direct. He was my boss after all, and he didn’t have to listen to a word I said. I readied my case for why he shouldn’t fire me when, just as I’d suggested, he sat down, easing himself onto the edge of the bed.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“No kidding.”
His eyes flicked toward me, pale under the wash of early morning moonlight mixed with tendrils of sunlight. “You didn’t seem surprised at Warehouse 7 that someone would steal ten thousand dollars. Even when Nick and I disagreed multiple times. Why?”
“Why would someone steal ten thousand dollars? Plenty of reasons. I can list off a hundred right now. Where do you want me to start?”
“Anywhere.”
I thought he was joking for a minute, until I remembered that Mr. Clark didn’t joke. The man honestly, truly didn’t understand what ten thousand dollars meant for a person. Born a billionaire, he’d probably been given ten grand as a weekly allowance. I exhaled a breath and started. “Well, for most people ten thousand dollars could pay rent for a few months.”
He blinked several times, but he didn’t comment. He didn’t need to; the blank stare on his face said it all.
“Someone might steal the money if they had no other option—for example, if a man who worked as a teller for the bank got laid off, he might need the money to keep a roof over his family’s head. Or food on the table.”
“Several months’ rent?”
“Most people don’t pay more than one or two grand per month for an apartment, or even a home, on the Shore. Most people with really good jobs don’t make more than fifty or sixty thousand dollars.”
“Per week?”
“Year.”
That practically gave Mr. Clark a heart attack. His eyelids fluttered. “Fifty thousand dollars a year?”
I shrugged. “Something like that. Some make more, some make less.”
“And you?”
“I graduated school not too long ago.” I cleared my throat. “Master’s in Business Administration. Unfortunately, the job market in the Sunshine Shore wasn’t exactly hopping. But it worked out okay because I got to spend a lot of time with my grandmother before she died.”
“How’d she die?”
“She was sick. She was old, too. Anyway, it doesn’t matter.” I swallowed before I could well up with tears. “We had big dreams for the place. I was going to help her re-vamp—we’d build a coffee shop next to the psychic hut, and I’d get a little sunglasses place to go with it. I still have big dreams for the place, but until I can make them come true, my income is non-existent.”
“You would’ve taken this job for less?”
“I would’ve taken the job for ten thousand dollars,” I said, figuring at this point, there was no use lying about it. “But I didn’t steal your ten thousand because that would make me an idiot, and we’ve already agreed that although I come close sometimes, I’m not that stupid.”
“Intriguing.”
Fingers of panic squeezed my heart and suddenly, I wondered if my big fat mouth had thrown away the opportunity to turn Psychic in Pink into Shades of Pink. “Please don’t change the contract now.”
“Even if I could, I wouldn’t.”
“But… I paused. “Now it’s my turn. Why pay me so much money to find a few pages of designs?”
“It’s a calculated risk.”
“How so?”
“If you’d read your contract, you’d know.”
“Please,” I said. “Enlighten me.”
“If you don’t succeed in finding the blueprints, I owe you only for the days you worked at a rate of five hundred dollars per day. There are only a few days left before the entire project is ruined, so at most, I’m paying two or three grand.”
“Oh.”
“A good private investigator costs easily that much,” he said. “However, if you’re able to secure the blueprints in time, a hundred thousand dollars is pennies on the profit we’ll make from the sale of this chip.”
My breath vanished. A hundred thousand dollars was pennies to him? Somehow, our differences hadn’t hit me yet, and I was still adjusting to the fact that he was so, so rich, and I…wasn’t.
I wasn’t rich. I wasn’t wealthy or genius levels of smart. I wasn’t organized to perfection. I was clumsy sometimes, and whimsical. I had survived paycheck to paycheck in college, and was just beginning to feel like I had something to show in my savings account. Then in whirls Mr. Clark, and suddenly, it was hard to believe I’d accomplished anything.
“I see,” I said finally. “Well, I should get up and get to work then.”
I started to pull the covers back, but I realized that the nightgown I was wearing came up just a little too high on my thighs to wear in front of my boss.
“Um, sorry. I’m actually not wearing pants, so if you wouldn’t mind, I’d appreciate a second to dress in private?”
Mr. Clark stood, looking startled. “Did I say something to upset you?”
“I’m just getting to work. Clock’s ticking, right?”
“Lola, you’re acting differently.”
“I have to get to work.” Since he wasn’t moving, I flung the covers back, my breathing coming in sharp bursts.
What was I doing here? I didn’t belong. The thought of not delivering the chip before this weekend was crushing, claustrophobic, and it wiped away all my insecurities. I stood before him in my nightgown and reached for the robe. I needed some time alone.
“I’m going to shower now, and if you’re still standing here when I get out, you probably won’t like what you see.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not your type,” I said. “I’m not rich, I’m just your assistant, and I just want to do my job and get out of here, okay?”
“I didn’t hire you because you’re rich.”
“No, you hired me because I’m poor and you needed a different perspective.” I didn’t mean to be so harsh, but tears were threatening, and the only thing worse than hurting Mr. Clark’s feelings would be crying in front of him. “Well, I’ll give you my perspective once I get out
of the shower. What time is breakfast?”
“Seven.”
“I’ll see you then.”
He turned to leave, the slight slump in his shoulders a note of resignation. I closed the door behind him, letting the tears sting my eyes as I made my way to the shower.
A few curse words later, I’d finagled the spaceship shower to function properly, and navigated my way under the stream of hot water, letting the tears, the stress, and the sleepless night wash away.
Everything was dry by the time I headed to breakfast. The bathroom floor, my eyes, the towels—I’d managed minimal splashing from the spaceship while also getting a grip on my runaway emotions.
I’d searched the closet for options to make me feel a little less poor than I already did, and settled on a pencil skirt and a white blouse. Mrs. Dulcet had exquisite shopping taste, and if I wasn’t mistaken, she’d had fun shopping for a young woman as opposed to her usual shopping duties for Mr. Clark.
I slipped into a pair of Manolo Blahniks that gave me an extra lift in both height and confidence. Maybe if I failed at this case, I could still find a way to live here. I’d be a janitor if it meant I got to keep the shoes.
By the time I entered the dining area, I was downright cheery. “Good morning,” I said to Mr. Clark as I joined him in the dining room. “Did you sleep well?”
His eyes traveled up the length of my attire and landed on my face, his stare a curious one, and nothing more. “Sleep?”
“I was joking. Obviously you didn’t sleep much.”
“I never do.”
I climbed into the chair, avoiding his pointed looks in my direction. “What’s on the menu?”
“Is everything okay, Miss Pink? When I left, you seemed upset.”
“Everything is just fine, Mr. Clark,” I said, giving him a broad smile. “I just needed a shower. With a little coffee, everything will be perfect.”
Mrs. Dulcet must have heard my entrance because she appeared not a second later carrying a silver tray with all of the coffee fixings. “Oh, my dear, you look wonderful. Doesn’t she look wonderful, Mr. Clark?”
Dane’s eyes locked on my face. “Yes, she does.”