Armed With Steele (26 page)

“Good morning, Mr. Frankston.” I mustered up a smile. “Yes, Vanessa’s taken very good care of me this morning.”

Vanessa beamed at the compliment, but my new boss frowned. “Whoa now! Mr. Frankston is what my clients call me,” he said, and waved a dismissive hand in my direction. “My
staff
, however, call me Michael. Now.” He clapped his hands, giving both Vanessa and I a start. “I’ve cleared my calendar for the rest of my morning so I can help get you started off on the right foot. Vanessa, thank you again for your assistance this morning. You’re free to go now.”

She flashed him another one of her brilliant smiles, and I watched helplessly as my only acquaintance in the building sauntered out of the room. From what I could remember, she’d always taken very good care of Grace. I could only hope she’d do the same for me.

Unfortunately, this next part required me to fly solo. I took a deep breath and turned to face my new boss.
It’s show time
.

Chapter 19

Nate raised his bottle of beer and tipped it in my direction. “To surviving your first day.”

I stripped out of my blazer and bumped my bottle against his. “And here’s to making the rest of the week a little more productive on the sleuth side of things.”

“Patience, grasshopper.”

Nate had texted a dinner invitation to me late in the day. And just to be on the safe side, he’d picked an Applebee’s on the opposite side of town from my neighborhood. Apparently, he
did
care about the welfare of my sniffer.

I took a long drink of my beer and then looked around the room. Most of the people around us were wearing jeans and t-shirts. “Sorry I didn’t stop home and change first.”

“Don’t be—I’m rather enjoying the view,” he said with a wink.

“Um, thanks.”

While I loved the way my body reacted to those words, I still felt a little awkward sitting there with him. Sure, we’d shared in some kissing escapades over the weekend, but there hadn’t been much talking involved. Being here, out on an actual
date
, was a whole other ballgame.

He took a drink and then set his bottle down. “So, tell me all about it.”

I took a deep breath, then opened the floodgates. Recapped my workday from start to finish. It was exactly what I would have shared with Grace, had she been here with me instead of him. Any other man on the planet would have been bored to tears.

But not Nate.

He listened with rapt attention, nodding in some places and scowling in others. I told him what a God-send Vanessa had been, about grouchy Harry, and how Molly
Ice Queen
Gillenwater, had sneered at me when I’d passed her on my way out that evening. And when I spoke of how difficult it had been to be alone in Grace’s old office, I found sympathy in his eyes.

“And then my mom called. Three times. Before lunch.”

Nate chuckled. “I see where you get your persistence from.”

“All I can say is, thank God I had my phone on vibrate.”

Vibrate. My eyes drifted to Nate’s strong hands, working to cut into his steak. Then up to his deep blue eyes focused on the task, and his sexy five o’clock shadow that would surely tickle on my—

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!”