“Exactly,” Paul agreed. “Someone has already tried to kill you. Just because they failed, doesn’t mean they’ve given up. And if you take on this new position, you’ll be even more vulnerable.” He paused for a moment. “You might want to reconsider this promotion.”
A forlorn look crossed my face. “But Mr. Harrington was so complimentary. He told me he believed in my honesty and I don’t want to let him down.” I sighed. “And too, after telling him about Julie accusing me of stealing, I need to clear my name. It’s important for my future reputation, especially in the event I have to find work elsewhere.”
He let out a long breath of air. “I understand. But you need to watch your back. And, Paige, no more taking the stairs, not climbing or leaving. No more.”
I pouted. Climbing those stairs was about the only exercise I made time for. “Okay, I won’t, at least not until everything is resolved.”
“Thank you,” he said in a relieved breath. “If you want to exercise, you can join me in the gym downstairs.”
I wasn’t much for working out in front of people, but maybe I could get used to it. “Okay, you have yourself a deal.” Then I wondered what Angela would think if I worked out with Paul. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to accept his invitation.
“Well, I’ll give Detective Sutton a call and see what I can find out. In the meantime, it sounds like you’ve got your work cut out for you tomorrow.”
“Yes, tomorrow will be the first day on my new job. Mr. Harrington already told me he’d understand if I became tired and needed to call an early day.”
“Yes, you need to take it easy. It hasn’t even been a week since your head injury. Promise me you won’t overdo it.”
“I won’t,” I promised, wondering why he seemed to care.
Chapter Sixteen
The next morning arrived in a roar. Outside, strong winds woke me before the alarm. My tiny apartment was on the top floor, next to a tree limb scraping roughly against the roof of my building. Dragging myself into the kitchen, I heard a whooshing noise whistling down the chimney. Pouring myself a bowl of cereal and topping it with some two-percent milk, I sat at the table to eat and watched Callie as she periodically jumped to catch leaves as they elusively pelted against the exterior of the sliding door. A westerly view of dark heavy clouds told me a storm was moving in, just as the weatherman had predicted.
Swallowing down the last tasty morsels, I rinsed my bowl and headed for the shower. Callie pounced along with me and waited outside my closed bathroom door. As soon as I stepped out of the steam and opened the door, she meowed at me. Stooping to pet her, she weaved between my legs and then ran under the bed as soon as I turned on my blow dryer. She waited until it was tucked in a drawer and then she jumped up on my vanity to help me with my hair and makeup. This was our morning ritual.
After selecting a dark gray skirt and matching jacket, I slung my clothes along the rod until I found the perfect crisp white blouse to compliment my outfit. Thinking it was important to present myself as being “in charge,” I wanted to look my professional best on my first day as the new chief financial officer. Part of me was so excited, and yet another portion of me dreaded how everyone would look at me. My position, once again, passed over Lidia and came at the cost of Julie losing her life. My emotions were jumbled between happiness, deep sadness and an uncontrollable fear, all equally fighting for dominance within my mind.
After replacing the bandage, now reduced to a small patch on the back of my head, I checked Callie’s food, grabbed my purse and headed out the door. Bracing myself against the elements, I rushed to my car, my hair blowing around as if a tornado had struck me. Once inside, I took a moment to smooth out my tresses, then drove to work where, luckily, I was parked in an underground garage. My assigned sheltered parking space meant I didn’t have to experience the howling wind again.
First, I took the garage elevator up one floor to the concourse level. Walking across the skybridge over the street traffic below, I entered the Engineering Building. From there, I worked my way down a hallway, past the security guard and to the main elevators. Ralph was the only guard I knew by name, simply because he generally worked the day shift. And even then, I had no idea what his last name was and honestly, other than a friendly “good morning,” “have a nice day,” and “see you tomorrow,” I couldn’t remember ever having an involved conversation with any of security officers. Today wasn’t any different.
“Good morning,” Ralph said to me as I passed by.
“Good morning,” I echoed and that was it. It reminded me of exiting an airplane where the flight attendants wished every passenger the exact same thing. It must get old after a million times.
At this junction, I would normally enter the stairwell and climb up fifteen flights. Today I stood in line with a crowd of people arriving at the same time and vying for an elevator. It took three arrivals before I managed to herd myself on like cattle and then stand with my arms straight down and not daring to look at any other riders. Everyone was dead silent as we rode from one floor to the next. Periodically the lift came to a stop on a selected floor and people jockeyed around to exit with nothing more than an “excuse me,” which resulted in the parting of fellow passengers.
The ride up fifteen floors was equal to the rise in my anxiety. With every ding, accompanied by a numerical number announced by an electronic voice, a counting-up to my own exit had my heart going into overdrive. I hadn’t practiced any type of speech to announce my being the new CFO and wondered if Mr. Harrington might have apprised the employees after my departure yesterday afternoon. Did they already know? Or would I be breaking the news? In my mind, I imagined Lidia Gentry spitting venom at me, while David Ross turned back to his computer to focus on his all-consuming reimbursements. As to the others, I knew they would simply talk behind my back, as they had when Julie received the appointment one month ago.
Poor Julie. Parking beside her now empty parking space had been a harsh reminder of her cruel death. Her funeral had been on Sunday while I was still in the hospital. While I had sent flowers and my parents and Amy had attended as my representatives, it pained me not to have been there myself.
Ding, the elevator called out announcing, “Fifteenth Floor.” I cringed as the doors parted.
“Excuse me,” I said, slipping past two men without so much as brushing either of their jackets and then I was in the hallway, gazing at the large double glass doors with huge “Harrington Oil & Gas” lettered across the front. Our firm took up two floors within the building. Corporate/Management was one floor up, including Mr. Harrington’s office. My floor was considered Operations which consisted of several divisions within the company, including the Accounting Department, where I would now be heading.
Taking a deep breath and exhaling slowly, I proceeded down the hallway to the glass entrance. Pushing inside, I gave a nod to Darcy Myers, the receptionist for the 15th floor.
“Good morning Ms. Davis,” she responded with a polite smile. “It’s nice to see you back at work.”
“Thank you, Darcy,” I replied. “Do you know if Mr. Harrington either phoned or came down and talked to anyone after about four yesterday?”
“No, he didn’t,” she answered in a professional tone.
“Okay, thank you.” It seemed I was on my own. When Ethel had been forced to give up her position as CFO because of her car accident, Lidia, Julie and I had each applied for the job. At that time, Mr. Harrington had called a special meeting in the conference room and announced Julie was replacing Ethel. After simply welcoming her to the position, he didn’t go into any details for his decision. I wondered if it might have made any difference to Lidia if Mr. Harrington would’ve taken the time to explain his choice to her. And here I was, once again, about to tell Lidia she was passed up for a second time. She was last choice, and this was assuming, if I lost my job, she’d be the one to replace me. Mr. Harrington might hire someone else and Lidia may have never been a contender. I wondered why
he hadn’t chosen her. Was there something he knew about Lidia, other than she was a complete bitch?
The Accounting Department was down a hallway to the right of reception. The room was divided into two sections. A large common area included several desks, each aligned against the north-facing windows, taking in the downtown buildings, including the old Tarrant County Courthouse. A long rectangular table separated the workstations from a wall of file cabinets. While the arrangement failed to provide privacy, it afforded everyone with an equal view.
At one corner of the room, the CFO office took in not only the amazing downtown view, but the peaceful landscape along the westerly fork of the Trinity River. Glass panels served as a barrier between the office and the employees.
Trying to calm my jittery nerves, I paused at the door for another deep breath. With a count to ten, I grabbed the handle, twisted it and stepped inside.
“Oh my God,” I yipped out, expecting to see the room exactly as it always had been, but it wasn’t.
“I know,” griped Penny Mathis. “Can you believe this shit?”
No, I couldn’t. Nothing had prepared me to see boxes upon boxes. Normally the firm’s original paperwork was organized in file cabinets lining the back wall. Apparently when the police had taken the documents and computer equipment, they had returned it in cardboard boxes and in no particular order.
“We spent all day yesterday getting the computers hooked back up,” Penny continued to grumble. “It looks like today is going to be nothing but paperwork arranging.”
“Get this,” Lisa Harris added, “we have to start all over on the entries from last Thursday too.”
“This is all your fault,” Lidia Gentry piped up. “I can’t believe you’re even here. You’d think after killing a fellow employee and being arrested for it, you would’ve been fired.” She rolled her dark, almost black eyes at me. “It just galls me for you to even have the nerve to show your face.” She narrowed her beady eyes at me and gave me a scornful look. “You must be sleeping with the boss.”
Her spouting mouth was enough to churn my anger. If I had the power to fire her, I might just make it my first task. Mr. Harrington was coming up on his sixtieth birthday and he wasn’t handsome for his age. His gray hair was thinning, he had a large round belly, and a distracting mole on the side of his right check, just above his coarse beard. The thought of sleeping with him had never remotely crossed my mind.
“It’s good to see you back,” James Pierce said, shooting me a kind smile. “I heard you took a nasty tumble and almost died too.” He lowered his head and sighed. “Poor Julie,” he added in a low mumble.
“Thank you, James,” I addressed. “It’s good to be back.” I peered over at the CFO office. The door was shut and through the glass windows, I could see the lights were off. With the illumination spilling over from this room, I saw at least a dozen boxes stacked around the desk. It was going to take a long time to get organized, let alone begin an audit. The best place for me to nonchalantly begin inspecting the paperwork was right here with my fellow employees, because, once I crossed over the threshold, it would be suspicious for me to come out and go through the common file cabinets. Walking over to my desk, my previous desk, I noticed my computer wasn’t hooked up. Stowing my purse in a bottom drawer, I turned and looked at the mountain of paperwork. “Where shall I begin,” I asked generally.
“Anywhere,” Lisa huffed as she selected another box, pounded it down on the table and began sorting through the paperwork.
“Why don’t you start with the paperwork over there?” Penny suggested, pointing to a stack of boxes nearest my desk.
“Will do,” I agreed, proceeding to do what everyone else was doing … removing the contents and spreading them out. A lot of the documents were my own expenditures. As I sorted them on a section of the long table in the center of the room, I noticed they weren’t completely disorganized as it had originally appeared. The police hadn’t shuffled the file cabinet. But they had removed the contents from the file folders, copied everything and then just dumped everything back in on top of the empty binders. To my relief, everything was still sorted by vendor and date. It was only a matter of making the different stacks, locating the empty folder, returning the paperwork to it, and then filing it back in the proper file drawer. We each had our own locking file cabinets, separated between land acquisitions, leases, royalties and bonuses, payroll, drilling operations, and reimbursements. My cabinet held large equipment and on-going expenditures.
I almost suggested we should search out our own work product since we were familiar with the contents and the process would go faster. But after contemplating it for a moment, I decided I’d rather know what was in the additional boxes I had never been privy to.
Everyone quieted down and got busy. It was several minutes later when Carter Hughes arrived. While I had dragged in behind everyone else, my arrival had still been ahead of business hours. I couldn’t help but notice he had arrived a good thirty minutes late. Though I wasn’t necessarily throwing my weight around, it was a part of the CFO’s job to make sure the employees towed the line, so to speak. And, too, I was curious as to why he was late.
“Are you just now getting here?” I asked in my least confrontational tone.
“What if I am?” he barked, crossing the room and throwing a briefcase on his desk. “Julie’s dead and there’s no CFO, so why not grab a few extra minutes of sleep? What’s it to you?”
“Carter!” Penny shrieked. “That’s not nice.” Penny was the office moderator. Always trying to keep the peace.
“Are you for real?” he turned and glared at Penny. “Paige kills Julie, causes all this shitstorm here at work,” he waved a hand around the room, indicating the computers and the boxes, “and when she finally drags herself into work, she has the nerve to point out my being a few minutes late.” He furrowed his thick brows. “Screw her.”
It was apparently a good thing I didn’t have the power to fire. We’d be down two employees and I’d only been back at work for half an hour. After Carter’s mouth had gone off, I decided to keep mine closed about being the CFO. Until they knew about my promotion, there was no telling what my coworkers might spew. And who knew, something escaping their flappy mouths might just be useful.
Chapter Seventeen
The storm hit with pelting rain slapping loudly against the windowpanes. Fat drops dribbled along the glass, trailing to the bottom ledge. With burst of lighting and thunder, we decided to break for lunch before the possibility of an electrical outage caused the elevators to shut down. Generally, I either packed a lunch or grabbed something from the deli downstairs. This morning, with my nerves on edge, I hadn’t bothered with making myself anything. Heading for the elevator, I rode down with Penny.
“That Carter,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “He thinks he can do anything he wants.”
“Yeah, I noticed,” I said reflecting on his late-morning appearance. For a moment, I considered telling her I was now the CFO. Penny was generally neutral, always taking the highroad and never getting into arguments with the other employees. She might serve as an ally, or at least give me an indication as to how to broach the subject with the others.
At five-eight, or so, she towered over my short frame of five-two, even as she leaned against the back of the elevator. Her pale blonde hair grazed against the back-mirrored wall. Penny was the gorgeous gal that all guys couldn’t take their eyes away from.
“He thinks he’s God’s gift to women, too,” she added in a hateful tone. “Men like him are disgusting.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed,” I agreed. Carter constantly bragged about his female conquests to the other men in the firm. It was impossible not to overhear him. But this was the first time I’d ever heard Penny speak so bluntly about anyone’s negative qualities. Recently she and Carter had been flirting with one another. However, from the disgruntled tone in her voice, it didn’t come as any surprise for him to have had a quick fling with Penny and t
hen dumped her. Was it possible she hadn’t realized he was a notch-in-the-bedpost type of guy?
“He’s a womanizer. Keep your distance from him,” she warned with a scorned look on her face.
“Good to know,” I agreed. I had never found Carter attractive. Yes, he was a very good-looking man with attractive blue eyes and sandy-blond hair. However, not only was he defiant against his superiors, he was also a braggart. Those qualities were a complete turnoff in my mind.
Once we reached the lobby level, we walked together to the deli. While Penny headed for the salad section, I meandered over to the prepackaged sandwiches. After selecting a chicken salad croissant, along with a bag of baked chips and a bottle of water, I progressed to the cash register. Penny lined up behind me with a salad, an apple and some sort of green vegetable juice.
When I turned around, I noticed Paul seated at a table near the back. He was dining with a woman, whom I figured was either a coworker, a client, or Angela.
Deciding to say a friendly hello, I headed over to his table. His back was to me and as I neared, I got a good look at the gorgeous, bleached blonde he was with. She was a real knockout with brilliant blue eyes that suddenly became glued to my approach.
“Paul,” I said collecting his attention. When he turned to face me, I added, “I saw you over here and thought I’d come and say hello.”
“Paige,” he choked out, literally, as if a bite of sandwich had lodged in his throat. He coughed and grabbed for his bottle of water and began draining it dry.
“Hi, I’m Paige,” I said pleasantly to the woman, even sticking out my hand in introduction. She blatantly ignored the offer and I awkwardly dropped my hand to my side.
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