Armed With Steele

by Kyra Jacobs

  He looked up. I reached for my bottle and chugged the rest of my beer.

  “So anyway, Michael seems like he’s going to be a really great guy to work for. Grace always spoke highly of him. Today, I got to experience a little bit of that firsthand.”

  “So, after he went over all of your job responsibilities, did anything come up that you’re worried you won’t be able to do? I know that’s been a source of concern for you these past few weeks.”

  “Surprisingly, no. He asked me to help him update a few spreadsheets, since I’m a little more IT-savvy than some of his former employees. No problem there. Besides that, though, it’s mostly just coordinating his schedule, and calling clients once a month to make sure they’re happy with our performance. How tough can that be?”

  * * * *

  “Oh. My. God.”

  It was nine o’clock Tuesday morning, and I’d already had my butt chewed by not one, but three different unhappy customers. I’d been a fool to think this task would be easy. Michael wanted these calls made to make sure we kept our clients happy—he’d never said anything about having to answer questions or offer internet invoice payment support!

  I stared down at the page-long list in front of me and dreaded the thought of having to pick the phone back up. But those calls weren’t going to make themselves. So I tried to come up with a little bit of motivation for myself—if I knocked out the calls fast enough, maybe I’d have some time to dig into Grace’s files before my next scheduled session with Michael.

  Unfortunately, my progress over the next hour was nowhere near the level I’d hoped it would be. Our customers were ticked about the lack of service they’d received the past few weeks from Maxwell, and were quite vocal about it.

  “Why didn’t you call last week?”

  “Why was my order delayed?”

  “Don’t you people take notes? Cindy doesn’t work here anymore.”

  “What was your name again? I swear, you must be the fourth person in that position this year! Can’t your company retain any of its employees?”

  That last one got to me a little. I finished the call, and set the receiver down with a trembling hand. My eyes shifted to the beautiful gazebo outside, its white paint glistening in the sun. The same gazebo my roommate had come home and eagerly described after her first day at work. She’d said it reminded her of me and my love for flowers. Now, ironically, I sat here in her seat, staring down at the same structure, reminded of her.

  “Oh, Grace,” I whispered.

  A quiet voice behind me answered, “She was our last AA.”

  I froze. Darn Vanessa and her stealth mode. Had I just blown my cover?

  “You must be making customer calls.” She took a seat across from my desk and smoothed a hand over her skirt. “Hmm, let me guess…C and C Plumbing?”

  I blinked a few times, slowly thawing from my panicked state, and then looked down at the customer list. “Yeah. How’d you know?”

  Her musical laughter filled my office. “Because when Michael is short-staffed, the task of customer call-backs always falls on me. And oooh, was Mrs. Creech irritated with me when I started calling instead of Grace. In all my time here, I’ve never had a pleasant conversation with that woman. But Grace—” Her eyes drifted to the Monet on the wall behind me. “Grace had a special way with people. She’d won Mrs. Creech over in a matter of minutes.”

  Vanessa was right: Grace always did have a way with people. “She must have been really good.”

  Vanessa’s eyes flashed back to mine with an unexpected intensity. “She was. The best AA Michael’s ever had.”

  Nothing like having to follow an act like that. “So, what happened? Why’d she leave?”

  The fire in her eyes vanished as quickly as it’d appeared. “Grace didn’t have a choice,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “There was a terrible accident a few weeks back, and…” She bit her lip. Shifted her gaze from me to the floor.

  “An accident?” It was a struggle to feign ignorance on the subject—I knew all too well how this story played out.

  “It was right down the road. I’d passed it, on my way home that night. Couldn’t believe it was her car in that ditch. When she didn’t return to work the next day, Michael dug out her emergency contact information and phoned her parents.” She looked back up at me, her features grim. “The reason she hadn’t returned to work is because she fell into a coma.”

  I put a hand over my heart, hammed it up a bit. “Oh, how awful!”

  “Yes. Poor Michael, he was devastated.” She fell silent for a moment, lost in her own thoughts. Then she cleared her throat and sat up a little taller in her seat. “And then to find out about the embezzling? Why, it nearly killed him.”

  “Embezzling?”

  A grin played at the corner of her eyes. “Do you mean to tell me you haven’t heard any gossip about this whatsoever? Goodness, Jessica. We need to get you out of your office a little more often.”

  “Ha. Yeah, I guess so. Um, so tell me about this embezzling thing.”

  She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Well, when Grace didn’t return to work, I had to go back to covering her duties. Mostly it’s no big deal, but the one task I can’t stand is the whole invoicing and billing stuff. I absolutely hate paying bills. And I’m terrible with numbers—truly, I am. Michael knows I struggle with that, so he asked—like always—to review my work. That’s when he discovered several thousand dollars missing from his consulting budget.”

  “Missing?” I scowled.

  Vanessa nodded. “Michael made me go back and find all the invoices Grace had processed. Since she’d only been here since May, it didn’t take me long to pull them all out from the storage files.”

  “Storage files?”

  “Yes, yes,” she said with a flick of her wrist, “down the hall. By the kitchenette.”

  “Oh, right. Okay, so you pulled the files and found…what?”

  Vanessa looked right, then left, as if to make sure the walls hadn’t grown ears. Little did she know, my hair accessory was the only inanimate object listening today. “That Grace had been skimming money out of one of our consultant accounts.”

  “Noooo.”

  Vanessa nodded her head, a smug look upon her face. “I couldn’t believe it either, but the proof wasn’t only in the filing cabinets—it was also in the financial system itself. See, one of our IT guys noticed the system was still in use when he went to run some system updates after hours that last day she was here. So he came upstairs, thinking someone had accidentally forgotten to log off the network. Instead, he found Grace right here, frantically trying to finish her last transaction—illegal, transaction—before…well, you know. Before the crash.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. Knew damned well Grace never could have hacked into their financial system. The poor girl had a hard enough time operating her cell phone, let alone logging into a computer. I’d had to tutor her in the basic functions of Microsoft Office countless times over the years. So the chances of her being the one to hack into that software and skim money off the top were slim to none.

  “Of course, none of us wanted to believe it.” Vanessa rambled on, but I didn’t catch the next few sentences. My mind was a whirlwind of thoughts. Who was this unnamed IT guy who’d supposedly caught her red-handed? And had she really been in the program after hours? Was there a record showing this illegal transaction? And, more importantly, did I have enough access to see all this for myself?

  “…and I thought I knew her better than that. I mean, we hung out together all the time.”

  I raised an eyebrow at that, but she paid me no mind.

  “What’s really sad is that Michael would have walked on hot coals for Grace. Finding out what she’d done? Well, it just broke his heart.”

  My eyes flashed to Vanessa’s. Grace had always spoken highly of Michael, but never with any hint of romantic undertones. “So, were they…”

  “Oh, heavens no! She only had eyes
for her boyfriend, Matt. And, well, Michael’s not the type. He’s a rare breed around here, anymore,” she added with a sigh.

  “Um, rare breed?”

  She nodded, a wary look on her face. “There’s a growing number of men around here that seem to think they’re God’s gift to women.”

  Yet another good reason to work from home. “Really?”

  “Oh, yeah. But if you keep to yourself, most of them will leave you alone.”

  And then it hit me: maybe Grace had been framed by a rejected suitor. But who?

  I put on my best timid face. “Anyone in particular I should be worried about?”

  She leaned forward and lowered her voice once more, then started counting suspects off on her fingertips. “Frank Pitzen, up on the third floor in accounting. He’s really creepy. Divorced twice, both times because his wife found him in bed with another woman.

  “Matthew Findley. He’s one of the tech support guys—I’d steer clear of him if at all possible. He got accused of threatening one of our past employees. She could never prove it, though she did blame her high blood pressure on him. Poor thing had a heart attack after work one day—died before she made it to her car in the parking lot!”

  I dug my fingernails into the underside of my chair’s armrests to keep from doing what I really wanted to at that moment: run away screaming.

  “But truthfully, the biggest womanizer of them all is Mi—”

  “Jessica?” Michael’s voice boomed from inside his office. Both Vanessa and I jumped in our seats.

  “I’ll be right there, Mr. Frankston!” I stood up so fast my chair rolled out from under me and slammed into the other side of my u-shaped desk. I looked down at Vanessa, determined to hear that last name, and whispered, “Who?”

  “Michael!” Mr. Frankston’s voice boomed again, this time with a pleading edge to it. “For heaven’s sake, call me Michael!”

  “Milo Finnegan.”

  The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “Who’s that?”

  She stood as well, and leaned forward across my desk. “Our HR director,” she said in a hushed voice. “Fastest hands in the tri-state area. If I were you, I’d avoid the elevators when he’s around.”

  My knees felt weak. “Is that it, then? Those three?”

  “Jessica?” Michael called again, the tone in his voice questioned why I wasn’t already in front of him.

  I turned away from Vanessa long enough to yell, “Coming, Michael!”

  “No, there are a few others.”

  My skin began to crawl. “If there are so many, how do you manage to stay away from them all?”

  “My advice? If you go anywhere beyond our department, always travel in pairs.”

  Pairs? I hoped like hell Vanessa would be allowed to leave her desk from time to time. “Thanks for the tip.”

  She winked at me as she headed for the hall. I snatched a pen and notepad off my desk, and hurried from my office to Michael’s.

  “Oh good, there you are,” Michael said, peering over the top of his reading glasses. “Was beginning to think Vanessa had kidnapped you or something.”

  Physically, she hadn’t. Yet there I stood, feeling mentally bound and gagged by everything Vanessa had just unloaded on me. My mind was abuzz with all questions and no answers. But then, that’s why I was there—to find answers.

  Chapter 20

  I got brave at lunchtime. Left the safety of my office to face…the kitchenette.

  The room appeared to be overflowing when I got there. I hesitated in the hall, torn. I hated crowds. But, it’d be hard to play bait if I spent all my time here hiding.

  So I pushed on. And after I squeezed past the cluster of people near the doorway, I realized most of them were just in line to use the microwave. Luckily—or not, my introverted side whined—there were plenty of seats left at two tables farther back inside the room. Since I hadn’t brought anything that needed to be heated up, I bypassed the line and found a seat that faced the clamoring queue.

  I got situated, and began munching away on my chicken salad leftovers, eyes down and ears open to the conversations going on around me. Apparently a few of my new coworkers believed me to be both pretty and deaf, as not one, but two of the conversations pertained to me and my curve appeal. When a third started up over what sounded like a debate on my bra cup size, I raised an eyebrow and turned my head toward the guilty parties.

  Both men appeared to be in their late twenties, and were dressed in khakis and polo shirts. Their badges marked them as members of the IT support group. Computer Nerd A was tall and scrawny, with acne-scarred cheeks and shaggy dark hair. He blushed upon being discovered, and quickly turned his attention back to his lunch, rotating slowly inside the microwave. Nerd B was the better looking of the two: medium build, dark blonde hair gelled carefully into place, and perfect teeth. He was also bolder than his counterpart. Instead of turning away from my irritated gaze, he locked eyes with me. And then…something. A twitch? A glimmer of interest?

  “Anyone sitting here?”

  I snapped my head back around to find a short, heavy, middle-aged woman standing behind the seat across from me, lunch in hand. One look at her logo’d, button-down blouse and navy slacks, and I knew she wasn’t a member of my division, either. “Um, no. Go ahead.”

  She did a quick scan of the faces behind me as she sat down. “Thanks. When I saw that line back there, I thought for sure all the tables would be full.”

  “Yeah, I did, too.” My eyes flashed from hers back to Nerd B.

  He was gone.

  Damn. I’d have to try to get a look at his nametag another time.

  “Must be leftover day or something.”

  My new lunch companion chuckled. “Good thing we both brought rabbit food, huh? I’m Lauren, by the way.”

  “Hi, Lauren. I’m Jessica.”

  “Oh, Michael’s new AA! How are you liking it here so far?”

  That she knew who I was threw me for a loop. Either I was the only new person around here, or rumors flew like the wind at Maxwell. “Oh, it’s great. Thanks.”

  She pulled a can of Diet Pepsi out from her lunch tote and leaned toward me. “You’re lucky you got in up here, you know. Frankston is one of the most sought-after bosses in this place. And he seems to take good care of his employees.” She moved her head over her tote, looking for something, and mumbled, “For the most part, anyways.”

  For the most part? What was that supposed to mean?

  Lauren produced a fork, bottle of light ranch dressing, and large container of salad from her tote. Would have been a relatively healthy lunch if she hadn’t proceeded to drench it with dressing. “So, great weather we’re having this week, huh?”

  I shifted my eyes away from the growing pool of creamy white in her bowl and nodded. “I’m just glad the rain is gone.”

  She speared a fork full of lettuce and shook her head. “Yeah. It’s days like this I hate working in the basement.”

  “What’s in the basement?”

  “The mailroom. That’s where I work—been there forever.”

  “That sounds cool,” I lied.

  She shrugged. “I like it alright. Get to see every piece of mail that enters and leaves the building. Like secretly being in the know, you know?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I took another bite of salad and tried to think of a way to steer the conversation back to Michael and his staff.

  “So, if you’ve been around that long, you’ve probably seen a lot of changes over the years, huh?”

  Her head bounced up and down as she chewed. “Yep, a lot of changes. Wall colors, furniture.” She looked up from her salad to me. “Staff.”

  I was about to explore the staffing turnover angle when Vanessa appeared in the doorway. Her eyes darted around the room and landed on me.

  “Jessica!”

  She strode toward me like a woman on a mission. Coworkers, both male and female, scattered to clear a path for her. Vanessa stopped
beside our table, planted a hand on one hip and cast a harsh look at Lauren. Then her eyes flashed to mine. “I’ve been looking all over for you. Our admin staff meeting with Michael got moved up to one o’clock.”

  “Okay, no problem. Let me finish these last two bites, and I’ll head back.”

  Vanessa scowled at Lauren once more before spinning on her three-inch black patent leather pumps and stalking out of the room.

  I shoveled the rest of my salad into my mouth, and apologized to Lauren for having to leave so abruptly.

  “No problem,” she said.

  I scooted my chair back from the table.

  “Be careful of that one.” Lauren’s eyes flashed to the doorway. “She can be a bit moody at times.”

  “Um, thanks. I’ll try to remember that.”

  * * * *

  I arrived to find a pleasant surprise on my desk. It was a note from Vanessa, saying that the IT group had finally gotten me into the computer system. I quickly stowed my lunch tote and whizzed my chair around to the computer. Why it had taken them so long to get me assigned a user name and password was beyond me. No matter. Now I was armed and dangerous.

  Time to start digging for answers.

  Unfortunately, it only took a few minutes for me to realize that Maxwell had clamped down on my network access harder than a puppy on his favorite chew toy. I could see my personal files, one folder under the Marketing-Admin directory, and a few measly meeting appointment calendars. That was it. No financial records. No personnel files. No nothing.

  With a sigh, I pushed away from my keyboard. Wished I could be done with this undercover stuff. And having to wear itchy pantyhose. I mean, really, who trades sweatpants for hose?

  I shook my head and glanced at the clock. 12:55. Time to head down the hall for our weekly staff meeting.

  Vanessa was the only person in the large conference room. She glanced up from her manicure job and pushed the seat next to her away from the table.

  I’ll take that as a hint.

  “You really should stay away from Lauren.”

  I sat down and smoothed a hand over my skirt. “Why’s that?”