SEATTLE CINDERELLA: FOUR-IN-ONE COLLECTION

by Gail Sattler

  Tomorrow was Saturday, their busiest day, but at least Zella would be there to answer the phone and handle the walk-ins.

  Annie sank into her comfortable office chair, leaned back, and stretched her throbbing feet, wincing when the tops of her toes rubbed against the steel in the front of the boot. The boots were murder on her toenail polish, but she hadn’t had time or the energy to fix the damage.

  Cindy often worked six days a week. Now Annie knew why.

  Cindy was coming back on Monday, but Annie still wouldn’t be able to slow down. It would take at least a week, but she wasn’t going to leave the computer until all the bankstatement reconciliations and fiscal month-end financials were done.

  Before she started with the day’s paperwork, she gave herself a minute to let her head fall back on the top of the chair. Her eyes drifted closed of their own accord, and she didn’t care. For a couple of minutes, she could take a break….

  The rattling of the door handle jolted her back to the present. Fear snatched her breath away.

  Someone was trying to get in…It was dark out. With the lights on inside, she couldn’t see who was out there, but whoever it was could see that she was alone.

  If she called 911 on a Friday night she could be dead by the time the police got there.

  The door rattled again. “Annie? It’s Brent. Let me in.”

  Gasping for a breath, she jumped to her feet. As annoying as Brent was, he was harmless. Automatically she raised her hand to smooth out any wrinkles in her clothing then froze.

  The coveralls were smeared with grease and oil and something else black and slimy she couldn’t identify. A few wrinkles were the least of her problems.

  Annie sucked in a deep breath, walked to the door, clicked off the dead bolts, and pushed it open.

  Brent walked in then pulled the door closed behind him and flicked the lock. “Are you okay? I saw you all sprawled out and the deposit book lying on the floor.”

  She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’m fine. I must have knocked it down when I dozed off. It’s been a rough week.”

  “You shouldn’t have the money out like that when you’re alone in the building. You’ve been doing the same thing every day. Cindy stands over there when she’s doing the deposit so no one sees what she’s doing.” He pointed to the corner where the counter met the wall, the only place in the front office sheltered from prying eyes.

  “At the end of the day I just can’t stay on my feet that long.” She looked up at Brent as he looked down at her. “Wait a minute. How do you know what I’ve been doing every night?”

  “It’s not hard to see you. I’ve been working late every night, too.”

  “I didn’t know you were there. I thought you left the lights on for security.”

  “We have a burglar alarm for security. The lights were on because I was working. I was in Luke’s office, so you probably didn’t see me.”

  All this time, she’d been nervous because she thought she’d been alone. He’d been across the parking lot all along. Not that he would have been able to do anything besides call the police if an armed robber had come, but it still made her feel a bit better.

  She ran her fingers through her hair, not caring about the additional grease she was adding to what was already there. She’d be washing her hair when she got home anyway. “Thank you for keeping an eye on me. But I think it’s time for both of us to get back to work. How long are you staying tonight?”

  “As long as it takes,” he muttered then turned and walked toward the door. After opening the door, he paused and called back over his shoulder, “Don’t forget to lock it behind me.”

  As if she would forget. She was terrified to be alone so late. Her only consolation was that she was wearing steel-toed boots, and a kick would hurt a potential intruder more than if she were wearing her leather pumps. But still, it was a comfort to know that Brent and his surly attitude were close by.

  Monday Cindy would be back, and life could get back to normal.

  Brent gritted his teeth as he stared at his partner. “What do you mean, you want to bring Annie in to help? We don’t need help. We especially don’t need her help.”

  Luke shrugged his shoulders. “When Walter calls in sick we’ve always just waited for him to get better, but this time we can’t.”

  Brent stared at Walter’s empty desk. “Maybe he’ll come in tomorrow?”

  “No, not the way he sounded. We have to do the deposit today because we have to pay the rent on Monday. Normally I don’t have a problem, but it won’t balance. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”

  “Maybe I can figure it out.”

  Without waiting for Luke’s approval, Brent sat at Walter’s desk and thumbed through the pile of balance sheets. “This is a lot of stuff that didn’t get done. I know he only wants to work two days a week, but do you think we should see if he wants to increase his hours?”

  “He won’t. I already asked last month end.”

  Doing the mental math at what they needed to do to get the deposit done, Brent cringed. “This is going to take hours. What’s not adding up?”

  “The whole thing.”

  Brent clicked on the icon to reactivate the computer screen. At a surface skim, it looked like Luke had done everything right. It was actually hard to do something wrong because it was such a user-friendly accounting program. Until now.

  Luke pointed to the total on the screen then the total on the adding machine, which was short by hundreds of dollars. “While she’s not a CPA like Walter, Annie is an accountant. I’m pretty sure it won’t take her as long as it would take us to figure this out. Besides, I was thinking of hiring her on to help Walter with our month-end work. I know Walter wants to do it himself, but he’s getting a little more behind every month.” He glanced toward the muffler shop then back to Brent. “Besides, Annie needs the work. Cindy told me that Annie is still looking for a job. She’s lost a lot of time helping plan our wedding and taking care of Cindy’s shop while we were gone. Now she’s got a couple of weeks to catch up on Cindy’s bookkeeping.”

  Brent’s hand froze over the adding machine. “I can’t believe you’d consider hiring her after the way she treated Cindy.”

  “Cindy says she’s changed.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure of that.” Every night he’d stayed late to watch what she did after the shop closed. The first thing she did after everyone left was spend nearly an hour on the computer, when Cindy only took ten minutes, which made him think that Annie was catching up on her personal e-mail instead of working. She never did the bank deposit the way Cindy did, and the last night he’d watched, instead of doing the bank deposit, she had a nap.

  The only thing Annie had changed was her footwear.

  However, for now they had a problem that needed fixing, and if Luke couldn’t figure it out, Brent knew he wouldn’t be able to either—after the last two weeks of mayhem, his brain wasn’t working on all cylinders yet. He had to trust Luke and give Annie the benefit of the doubt. With caution.

  “Fine,” he mumbled. “But just for today.”

  Instead of phoning, Luke jogged across the parking lot, where the first thing he did was kiss Cindy.

  Brent shouldn’t have watched but he did.

  At first it was a little peck on the cheek, and then they snuggled closer and wrapped their arms around each other. Luke turned his head and said something to Annie then kissed Cindy again. Only this time it wasn’t just a little peck. It was the fully charged kiss of a man who’d come back from his honeymoon sooner than he wanted to. Annie got up and walked away, but Brent couldn’t stop watching his friend and Cindy.

  It was like watching the closing kiss of the leading actor and actress from a movie, except this was real life.

  One day he hoped God would find him a woman like that. She would appear out of nowhere and the moment he saw her, he’d be a goner, just like Luke.

  “Brent? Did you want to see me?”

 
Brent tried not to flinch. “Annie. I didn’t see you come in. Luke and I have a problem with our deposit. We can’t balance, and it’s out by a lot. Our regular accountant phoned in sick, so we were wondering if you could figure it out.”

  She checked her watch and sat in Walter’s chair. “Of course.” With a swipe of the mouse she reactivated the screen and began clicking through the menu.

  “Do you need any help with the program?”

  “No, I’ve used this one before. I’m okay.”

  He returned to the lease agreements he had to finish, but as he worked he kept an eye on Annie.

  He counted every one of twenty minutes; Luke hadn’t returned, and Annie hadn’t left.

  “I think I found your problem. You have some invoices that the tax portion is wrong, plus it’s adding wrong, which is strange because it’s supposed to auto-calculate. I’ll do a manual override to fix it.”

  Within minutes she had it fixed, just as Luke said.

  Brent ran his fingers through his hair. “Thanks. How much do we owe you?”

  “Nothing. It didn’t take long. Consider it returning a favor.”

  When he’d watched her at night and stayed until she closed up and drove away, it hadn’t been a favor for Annie. It had been a favor for Luke.

  Just as she stood, Luke walked in the door, his ear to his cell phone.

  “Thanks, Walter, I hope you feel better soon.” He returned his phone to his pocket. “I told Walter we had a problem but not to worry, we had it fixed. He said he would be in Friday, like usual.”

  Brent turned to Annie. “If you wouldn’t mind, can I hire you for a few hours on Friday to go over what you found with Walter? He’ll need to see what was wrong, and what you had to do to fix it.”

  Annie nodded. “Sure. But it’s—”

  Brent held up one hand to interrupt her. “I want to pay you for your time. No more favors.”

  She opened her mouth then shook her head. “Okay. See you Friday.”

  Chapter 3

  Brent watched every step Annie made as she walked in. She went straight to Walter’s desk but didn’t sit down. She plunked a coffee mug on the corner then looked around, almost like she was nervous.

  Brent sighed and walked toward her. “Walter’s not coming. He called in and said he was still feeling sick and didn’t want to spread his germs.”

  Her eyes widened, and she looked straight at him.

  All he could do was stare back. Something was different about her, but he couldn’t place it. Or maybe it was because for the past few days, whenever they didn’t have a customer, Luke had been singing Annie’s praises, repeating what Cindy had said about Annie doing a great job while they were gone. Adding to that, apparently now one of the mechanics had developed a crush on her.

  In a way, he could see that happening. If he hadn’t known about the way Annie had treated Cindy, she could be a very likable woman.

  Annie reached for her cup. “I guess I should go then.”

  Brent shook his head. “Luke thinks we should hire you to help with our month-end financials.”

  “I thought your regular accountant did that.”

  “He does, but Walter’s been falling behind. Cindy said you might be open to try freelancing, so Luke wants to hire you for two days a month. Would that work for you?”

  She smiled so brightly she almost beamed. “Yes, it would. I’ve been thinking that instead of getting a job and going all the way downtown every day, I would work from home and start my own business.”

  “That’s kind of what Walter does. We don’t need someone full-time.”

  “Luke told me Walter works for a bigger company that contracts out smaller jobs.”

  “Exactly,” Brent said. “Now I’ve already logged in. We need you to check all these orders from the past week then do the deposit.”

  He showed Annie how they entered their invoicing then left her alone. But still, he was going to keep an eye on her.

  Annie didn’t know whether to jump for joy or run for the hills in terror.

  Brent and Luke’s company was small, so their project should have been easy, but because their company owned an entire fleet of cars, there were many liabilities, especially the insurance. From what she’d seen, they operated smoothly and ran at a profit.

  Once she became accustomed to their procedure, checking the invoices and entering their expenses wasn’t difficult. However, when she started to enter the deposit, the same thing that happened to Luke happened to her. Everything she’d entered that had been paid for reconciled, but a couple of older invoices didn’t balance with the credits when she entered them into the general ledger.

  She didn’t want to accuse their accountant, but she had to make Brent and Luke aware that he’d made the same mistake a number of times. Perhaps a reminder for Walter to be more careful wasn’t out of line.

  Or maybe it was out of line. She knew Brent and Luke had been using the same accountant since they’d started their business. She’d only graduated from college a couple of months ago, and while she had a degree in accounting now, Walter was a CPA.

  No, that didn’t make her bad or inaccurate. She was just inexperienced. The bottom line was that the ledgers balanced or they didn’t. If she was going to do the job they were paying her to do, she had to make them aware.

  Just not today. For today, she would fix the errors and go forward.

  Before she knew it, Brent flipped the sign on the door to Closed.

  He turned to her. “How did you do?”

  She looked down at the piles of paper and sighed. “I’ve finished most of it and balanced your bank deposit, but I haven’t started closing off your month end.”

  His brows furrowed. “Why not?”

  Since it was her first day, she didn’t want to tell him about the errors or that correcting them had taken time she hadn’t expected.

  Unless it was a test. She didn’t know how much Brent or Luke knew about general accounting or bookkeeping, but since it was inconsistent with the programming that there were errors, she wondered if they had duplicated the same thing Luke had found earlier and wondered if she would find it or be able to fix it.

  Above all, she couldn’t lie or mislead him. In the pastor’s sermon last Sunday he’d shown how omission of the truth was as much a lie as telling one.

  Annie cleared her throat. “I found another error that was the same as the other day, and it took me a while to fix it.”

  It was almost like the gears were whirring in his head. He cleared his throat. “Show me.”

  Butterflies warred inside her stomach as Brent dragged a chair to sit beside her. She pulled up the corrected entry and did her best to explain.

  Brent straightened in the chair and stared at the monitor. “How did this happen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  His look said she should have known, but she didn’t.

  She hoped he wasn’t having second thoughts about hiring her. She hadn’t graduated at the top of her class, but she’d still graduated with honors. If she had just fixed the problem and said nothing, he wouldn’t have doubted her—he would just have thought she was slow. Annie needed this job to build her reputation.

  She studied his face. Not only would he make a very good business reference, he would also make a very good friend. Cindy and Luke thought the world of him. Of course, they never talked about how handsome Brent was. It was almost funny that his hair color was nearly the same nondescript shade of brown as hers, but his eyes were mesmerizing. Dark brown as rich chocolate, and he had lashes any woman would kill for.

  As if he could tell what she was thinking, he jumped to his feet.

  “It’s time to go. I need to check all the doors and lock up.”

  He strode to the back door and walked out. From her chair, Annie watched him as he walked through the lot and checked every car, making sure every door was locked and every trunk was closed. Every car was just a quick check, but when he got to a green car he stopped. A
fter checking that it was locked up tight, he bent and pressed his hands to the window as he looked inside, and she thought he smiled.

  Annie’s breath caught. All she could do was stare. A Mustang convertible. Her dream car.

  She couldn’t afford to buy one, but as soon as she got her first paycheck, for one day, she could rent this one. It didn’t matter that so far she only had one customer. One day there would be more.

  On second thought, she hadn’t done anything to celebrate her graduation from college, so she could justify the expense of taking a day and driving to experience the sights and sounds of Seattle on a hot day with the top down.

  After she drove through the city she would go to Alki Beach and cruise along the beach road. Maybe she’d stop for a burger and go run to the shore and wiggle her toes in the water. Then she’d keep going east to Redmond and idle through Marymoor Park and wave at everyone who was out for a breath of fresh air. She’d be getting fresh air, too. Or she could boot it up the I5 and journey north to Canada and go to Vancouver’s Stanley Park. She sighed. No, she’d never make it back home in time to return the car for the one-day rental deadline.

  The second Brent opened the door to come back into the office, the questions burst out: “How much to rent the Mustang? Is it available next weekend? What’s your deadline to have it back?”

  He smiled and sighed. “It’s not a lease car. Sorry.”

  Her whole body sagged. “Then what’s it doing here?”

  “We’re hiding it. The best place to hide a car is with other cars.”

  “Why would you hide such a magnificent car?”

  “Luke bought it for Cindy’s birthday.”

  All she could do was stare at the car. She’d bought Cindy a sweater and matching scarf.

  Brent grinned ear to ear. “Luke said Cindy’s truck is sometimes hard to park when she goes downtown, so he bought her something smaller. I can hardly wait to see her face.”

  “I guess this means you’re coming to the birthday party.”