by Sharon Pape
“Are you both up to the trip?” I asked.
“We won’t know unless we try. It would do us a world of good to get out of this house for a couple of days.” Val raised objections and Teddy shot them down. “How about we call you back once we work out the details,” he said to me, which I took to mean he had to work on getting Valerie onboard.
Chapter 39
Grannies on the Go was a small tour group that came to New Camel at least once a year. They ranged in age from sixty all the way up to a hundred and one. Most of them didn’t even need a walker to get around. Although Abracadabra wasn’t their favorite shop, they always came in to say hello and usually left with products to address the most recent indignities their advancing ages had visited upon them. They were a lovely group of women, funny and feisty. I’d enjoyed talking to them in the past, but that day I had to stick to business if I didn’t want to miss lunch with the Duncans and Travis.
The three of them were already seated when I arrived at the Grotto. Travis had chosen the restaurant, because it was quiet enough for conversation and the tables were far enough apart to allow for privacy. The Duncans stood up to hug and kiss me. If they noticed that Travis and I said polite but distant hellos, they wisely chose not to say anything. The moment I took my seat, the waiter appeared to see if I wanted a beverage other than water. Travis was drinking a cola and there were two iced teas with lemon parked in front of Valerie and Teddy. I was sticking with water.
He inquired if we needed a few more minutes to look at the menus, but I knew he was talking to me. I asked him to start with the others while I glanced at the lunch special—soup and salad or a personal pizza. The men ordered pizza; Val and I went for the minestrone and strawberry salad.
I asked the Duncans how they’d been doing. Valerie shook her head, lips compressed. “It doesn’t get any easier,” Teddy answered for both of them. Maybe I shouldn’t have inquired, but it didn’t seem right not to ask. I almost fell back on the old it will take time, but I caught myself. Instead I said, “How is Liam?” In for a penny, in for a pound.
Teddy shook his head. “Sad, distant. For a long time now we’ve wished he would meet someone, get married, have a family…” That seemed to be going around.
“I wonder if we could get right down to your questions,” Valerie said, cutting him short. I’d never heard her interrupt her husband that way, but to be fair I hadn’t spent all that much time with them. Curiosity must have gotten the better of her.
“Of course,” I said, “that’s why you made the trip. During one of our earlier talks, I remember you saying that Ava confided in you about the rift between her and Angie.”
“Yes, they’d both applied for a new position—that’s when things got dicey. Angie wanted Ava to withdraw her name from consideration. She said if Ava were a true friend, she’d realize how much more she and her kids needed the extra money. Ava replied that she was still paying off her student loans and that they should let the company make the decision based on merit. Then Angie made up some story about the company, in hopes of scaring Ava into leaving.” Bingo.
“What kind of story?” Travis asked.
“According to Angie, she was having lunch in the cafeteria and needed to go to the bathroom. The cafeteria is located between the business office and the research and development wings. Instead of walking all the way back to the bathroom in her wing, she decided to use the closer one in R&D, even though she didn’t have the necessary clearance to be in that area.” Val looked from Travis to me as if to be sure we were following her. Teddy was busy buttering a roll. He seemed fine with letting his wife do the talking.
“She said she was walking back to the cafeteria when she heard someone coming. She opened the closest door and ducked inside.”
“Wait, I must have missed something,” I said.
“No, no—I’m just getting to the crux of the story. The room where Angie hid was a conference room. It was occupied by four men and a woman. Angie recognized two of the men as company bigwigs. The others she’d never seen before. She said they were speaking a foreign language and the woman was translating. They all stopped talking the moment she barged in. One of the Eagle men grabbed her by the arm and hustled her out of the room. He told her to report to his office before leaving for the day. That’s when he tore into her. Said if she was ever found in that wing again, she’d regret it.”
At that moment, the waiter arrived with our lunch, and we sat quietly while he served it. Angie’s story was ricocheting around in my head. It must have been a chilling threat to hear from her boss. He had the power to fire her, and with the right words whispered in the right ear, render her unhireable. I wondered if the story had undergone some embellishments in the retelling by Angie to Ava, Ava to her mother and now to us. Travis caught my attention with one raised eyebrow that usually meant he had similar concerns.
I tasted a spoonful of the soup that was more like a hearty vegetable stew. “What did Angie do after that?” I asked.
“Nothing at first, but then one morning she just didn’t show up for work. Her colleagues and friends couldn’t reach her online or by phone. The superintendent at her apartment house confirmed she was gone. That’s when Ava began to think she might have dismissed Angie’s story too quickly. Angie would never have left her job if she wasn’t really scared.” Val paused to sip her iced tea and add a squeeze of lemon. “Ava felt awful about not believing her and about the way their friendship ended.”
Travis wiped pizza sauce off his mouth. “Did she try to reach out to Angie?”
“Yeah,” Teddy said, “She left messages like everyone else, but never heard back.”
I was busy chewing a mouthful of salad, wishing, not for the first time, that spring mix came without stems. “Did Ava wind up with the promotion?” I asked when I could finally speak again.
Teddy pushed his empty pizza tray away. “Yes, it basically fell into her lap, but by then I don’t think she could take any joy in it.” Travis gave up on his pie with one slice left. Val and I gnawed our way through the better part of our salads. I wondered how many calories I burned off with my jaws.
“There is something else,” Val said hesitantly. She glanced at her husband and he nodded. “Ava made it her mission to find out why the company’s executives were so alarmed when they found Angie in the restricted area. As the new head of accounting, Ava had access to a lot of Eagle’s financial files, and she figured if anything strange was going on, there would have to be a record of it somewhere. Everything comes down to money in the end, you know. It took her a while, but she came across a wire transfer of a large sum of money into Eagle’s account from an international bank she’d never heard of. She was able to trace the transfer back through the Cayman Islands and Singapore to a branch in Moscow.”
The waiter reappeared with a large tray of desserts to tempt us. He described them in detail, but we all declined. He looked personally crushed. “Coffee, cappuccino, espresso, tea?” he offered with less enthusiasm. Maybe we all felt bad about disappointing him, because the men asked for coffee and Val and I opted for tea. All I really wanted at that point was for Val to finish her story. The waiter vanished, but the busboy came right on his heels to remove the detritus of our lunch and brush the crumbs off the tablecloth. If anyone else showed up to further delay us, I might have strangled them. Judging by Travis’s expression, he might have beaten me to it.
“The Russians are financing Eagle Enterprises?” he whispered hoarsely across the table once the busboy left.
“That’s what Ava thought,” Val replied, “but she never found any other transactions or memos like that one. She said it was for a large sum, but not large enough to buy the company outright. She thought there were probably other payments, but she couldn’t find any proof. She figured that the one transaction she found was mistakenly sent to a file she could access.
“Ava even considered looking into
the Dark Web for more information,” Teddy added. “If Eagle Enterprises was making some kind of deal with Russia, they’d want to keep it under wraps. But she didn’t get far with it, because, frankly, it scared her.”
The Dark Web? I had no idea what he was talking about, but Travis didn’t seem thrown by the term. I must have looked lost, because he summed it up for me. “The Dark Web is a catchall name for thousands of shady websites that you can’t reach by regular browsers like Chrome or Firefox.” The busboy returned with our mugs of steaming coffee and tea along with cream and sweeteners.
“It sounds illegal,” I said after he left.
Val stirred a packet of sugar into her tea. “That’s what I thought when Ava first mentioned it, but apparently it’s not.”
“Neither is using Tor or other browsers that can access those websites.” Travis paused to taste his coffee. “But most of the people who use the Dark Web are involved in criminal activities. They like it because it’s much harder to track anyone there. However it’s not impossible. Users make mistakes all the time that lead the feds right to their doors.”
“I feel like I’ve been living with blinders on,” I said.
Val set her mug down. “I know exactly what you mean. Scares me to wonder what else I don’t know.”
“Listen,” Travis said so softly that we all had to lean forward to hear him, “if there’s even a chance that the Russians are buying Eagle Enterprises or the new weapon systems they’re developing, we have to inform the FBI. If there are no objections, I’ll take care of it.” Teddy and Val looked relieved that it was out of their hands. And I was no longer surprised that Travis had contacts just about everywhere.
Chapter 40
Travis and I were both speechless after what the Duncans told us. We stood near my car, watching them drive away. I’d expected to hear details of the quarrel between Angie and Ava that escalated beyond reason. But the ramifications of their argument reached far beyond Watkins Glen and the state of New York. When I’d corralled my thoughts enough to speak, Travis started speaking too. We stopped, waiting for each other to speak, then began again, stepping on each other’s words. It might have been funny under other circumstances—if we were not estranged and if the Russians weren’t buying the newest high-tech weapons from right under the federal nose.
“Go ahead,” Travis said.
“Is this FBI guy you know from around here?”
“No, he’s in the city, but it doesn’t matter. I’ll tell him what we heard, which isn’t all that much. He’ll know what to do with it.”
“Over a secure line I guess?” Was I seriously telling him how to go about it?
“No, I thought I’d just call from my cell phone in the most public place I can find that has free Wi Fi.”
“Sorry—I’m a little rattled.”
“I’m actually going to rework my schedule so I can drive down to the city and speak to him in person. If I give my news director a general idea about what I’m looking into, he’ll probably grant me carte blanche to follow the story to its end.”
“When do you think you’ll go?”
“Possibly this afternoon, early tomorrow the latest. Why?”
Because I care about you and I like knowing where you are. Great—now I sounded like a stalker. I quickly dredged up a better answer. “Because we’re partners.” I opened the car door and slid beneath the wheel. Travis knocked on my closed window, so I turned on the engine and rolled it down.
“Kailyn—please don’t get into trouble while I’m gone. There’s nothing that can’t wait until I get back. I’m serious.”
I wasn’t up to a round of flirtatious sarcasm. I gave him a single nod, wished him a good trip and waited for him to step back so I could leave without driving over his feet.
When I got back to the shop, I went through the connecting door to Tea and Empathy. My aunt must have taken the day off, because there weren’t any tantalizing aromas of freshly baked goods lingering in the air. Odds were she was driving around under Merlin’s direction, searching for the cause of our magickal woes.
I went back to Abracadabra and opened for business. Sashkatu was on his tufted ledge, but he squinted at me and started to stretch away the remnants of his sleep, before changing his mind and closing his eyes again. “You’re just lucky I can’t fit on that comfy ledge of yours or you’d have to fight me for it,” I said. He ignored me.
Half a dozen locals filtered in during the remaining hours of the afternoon. They kept me from dwelling on Travis and Eagle Enterprises, which was good because there wasn’t anything I could do about either one.
When Sashki and I arrived home, I fed him and the rest of my brood, and then called Tilly to find out how her day had gone. She didn’t answer. I tried her cell, but it went straight to voice mail. All of their previous trips had seen them home by six. Of course it was possible her phone’s battery had died, because she regularly forgot to charge it. Maybe they’d stopped somewhere for dinner. I waited another hour and tried her again with the same results. I checked with her friends, but no one had seen her or knew where she might be. I’d exhausted all the acceptable reasons for not being able to reach her. All I had left were worries and they were piling up fast.
There was no point in talking to the police. An adult had to be missing for forty-eight hours before they would do anything, unless said person had been diagnosed with dementia. I tried Tilly’s phone every half hour and was actually startled when it rang. Pick up Tilly, please pick up. The words repeated in my head like a mantra, but it was her voice mail that picked up. I left a message asking her to call me ASAP. It occurred to me that since her phone was on now, I could activate the app on my cell to locate her. A map popped onto my screen with a little headshot of Tilly in a building somewhere. It appeared to be at the end of a road with only one other road nearby—Eagle Enterprises. I was on my feet and moving the second I made the connection.
I grabbed my purse, locked the door behind me and jumped into the SUV. I didn’t waste time wondering what awaited me when I got there. It didn’t matter. Tilly and Merlin were in trouble. The math was simple—I had to rescue them.
The roads around New Camel would have benefitted from more lighting.
It occurred to me every time I had to drive at night. Maybe this time, I’d remember to bring it up at the next town meeting. There was no lighting at all at the turnoff, which was why I drove right by it. I’d gone a mile down the road before I realized my mistake. I spun a U-turn and headed back at a crawl, my headlights burrowing through the darkness like moles forging their way underground. I turned onto the side road that was little more than a hard-packed dirt path with trees crowding the edges. I bounced along, hitting every depression and hole because I couldn’t see them. It took a lot longer than I remembered to reach the place where the path curved before becoming the smoothly paved macadam road. I turned my SUV around, parked it at the edge of the path and doused the headlights. All ready for a fast getaway.
I opened the door and stepped down. I’d have to go the rest of the way by foot. Charging the gate at full speed was great in action movies, but hardly practical. It would alert any guards who might be in the building or around its perimeter, plus it would destroy my SUV in the process. I had a much lower budget than Hollywood.
The only light I could see from my position was most likely coming from the little guard house. I didn’t know if they kept a guard on duty there at night, but I couldn’t take any chances. If I snuck through the trees to get an up-close look, there was a good chance I’d step on crackling old leaves from autumns past and give myself away. On the other hand, if I approached by the roadway, I would almost certainly be seen. I didn’t even have the luxury of time to decide. If Tilly and Merlin were being held captive in Eagle Enterprises, I had to get to them as soon as I could.
I briefly considered teleporting into the building, but that would wast
e psychic energy I might need later. A spell would do the trick, providing I could come up with one fast enough. Rushing magick was never a good idea, but better ideas weren’t exactly tripping over each other in my brain. In less than five minutes I came up with something workable if not elegant.
Let my feet in silence pass
Over leaves and twigs and grass.
No sound reach another’s ears
If I do not hold them dear.
I recited the words three times and set out through the trees. So far so good. It was a strange feeling to be walking on a forest bed of crinkling, crunching material that made no noise. When I was parallel with the gate, I paused to look for a guard. I spotted him sitting in the guard house thumbing through a magazine, listening to music through earbuds. I could only hope that the rest of the security contingent was as apathetic as he. The odds were against it.
I worked my way down to the building where there was one armed guard outside the main entrance. I waited to see if there were more. It didn’t take long before a second man came around the right side of the building. He stopped to talk to his colleague. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it must have been funny, because they both laughed. Then the second man continued on his rounds. Based on the footprint of the place, I figured I had three minutes before he would come around again. But that didn’t solve the problem of getting past the guard who was there all the time, or of getting inside the building without tripping the alarm. Like it or not, I would have to teleport in. At least the distance was short, which seemed to play a part in how much of my energy would be consumed
While I was coming to this decision, I must have moved my feet without realizing it, because the rustling sound they made startled me. The spell had worn off. I peered between the trees to see if the guard had heard it. He was looking straight at me, but then his eyes moved on, still trying to locate the source of the noise. My heart was beating so hard it felt like it was in my throat. I was surprised he couldn’t hear it too. But he shrugged to himself and focused his attention on the cigarette he was trying to light.