Chapter 8
?
E lizabeth dressed quickly, changing from her shorts into jeans and grabbing a lightweight T-shirt and a sweater. She locked up the front door, stepped out onto her front porch, and waited for Masters to show up. True to his word, he was right on time. She walked down to meet him, instead of his getting out and all, and also waving at Dolly, who sat on her front porch.
Dolly smiled and waved back.
Masters looked over at Dolly. “She’s got a bird’s-eye view of your house and Nicholas’s, doesn’t she?”
“She does,” Elizabeth noted hesitantly. “I do worry if she’s in danger though.”
“Hard to say. It depends on whether she’s got anything that she’s hiding—or she will give information freely to anyone who comes and asks her questions,” he replied, his tone way too serious for her liking.
“That won’t make me feel any better,” she muttered.
He glanced over at her, as he pulled out into traffic. “Was I supposed to make you feel better?”
She groaned and muttered, “It would be nice.”
“A lot of things in life would be nice,” he replied. “And, right now, I need to hear more about that phone call.”
“Nothing much to say. I got the phone call in this raspy voice, which did sound like my brother. He said, Sis? Sis, help me , and then the call ended,” she shared, shivering at the reminder. Typical of Masters, he caught note of her shiver.
He asked, “And you believed it, didn’t you?”
“I did, yes,” she admitted. “But I don’t know if it’s because I wanted to believe he is alive so desperately.” He smiled at her, and such approval filled his expression that she sighed and shared, “I’m not completely gullible.”
“No, but you love your brother, and you want him home. That makes you vulnerable, not gullible. So, don’t confuse the two.” He continued. “But being vulnerable makes you an easy target because what you want is something other people can exploit. And that brings us back to what came to mind when I asked you whether anything may or may not have been a trigger for getting you to quit—or something along that line.”
“When you said quit , something came to mind. We had an online meeting today, where they’re ordering all of us back to work at the bank, even though most of us have it laid out in our contracts that we can work from home. I go in once a week at least, and, up until now, that’s worked just fine.”
“And this is coming from Fred, the son of the man who you started working for.”
“Probably, but it came from the mouth of his new CEO. Fred has hired a friend of his to be the CEO, so that Fred doesn’t have to work quite so much,” she shared.
“And the new CEO’s pushing this.”
“Yes. So, then my boss, my actual supervisor, called me after the meeting, where we were informed of the new terms, and he asked me how I felt about them and was I likely to quit.”
At the word quit , he glanced in her direction.
She nodded. “It just seemed out of character.”
Silence came for a moment.
She added, “And yet they could have just fired me, instead of forcing me to work from the bank each day. There is absolutely nothing stopping them from doing that, outside of the fact that they don’t have any cause,” she noted, with a laugh. “But, during the time that I was first dealing with my brother’s disappearance, I was in trouble and had too many clients to maintain. My supervisor did take the blame for that, saying that it was his fault and that he should have relieved me of my caseload.
“But they’re clients , not just numbers to us. These are people we work with intimately and have done so for many years. So, it’s not somebody you just pass on. In many cases, even after understanding what my situation was, several wanted to stay with me. I think that caused some ill will within the bank. However, if it had been anybody else, honestly I think it would have still been the same thing.
“You develop a relationship, and when you develop a good working relationship, then you stay with that person, and you hope that everything in their world rights itself, and it’ll all be fine. In my case I won’t say it’s all fine because my world obviously isn’t fine. Yet, I think, from a client’s point of view, it did right itself. And, although I didn’t get all my clients back, I did get the bulk of them. For the ones who didn’t leave, nothing changed,” she added, with a shrug.
“But if the CEO or Fred wanted to get rid of me, don’t kid yourself. There are one million ways to move someone on without too much trouble,” she stated. “So it doesn’t make any sense that they would order everyone to return to the bank to work there, hoping that I alone would quit. If they were hoping I might quit, that might be a different story, thinking that I’m already on edge, and that something like this would send me right off again.”
“But what would be the point of that?” he asked, looking at her directly.
“I don’t know. I’ve been sitting here thinking about that, figuring out just why, and it doesn’t make any sense.”
He pulled up in front of a family restaurant.
She looked at it and smiled. “I haven’t been here in a very long time.”
“Neither have I,” he said. “It just seemed to be the right place for tonight. Come on. Let’s get some food. Both of us are running on empty.”
“We had sandwiches not that long ago.”
“ I’m running on empty anyway,” he clarified, with a laugh, as he snagged her arm and tugged her toward the restaurant. “Let’s go. We need to eat.”
“What happens if you’re seen out with me? Will you get in trouble?”
He shook his head and muttered, “No, it doesn’t work that way.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. “I’m pretty damn certain we were followed.”
He nodded and whispered, “I agree, and that’s another reason I want to get you inside that restaurant.”
*
Masters quickly got Elizabeth inside and texted Jasper. He was looking as the vehicle went past slowly.
“I don’t know what you can see of the license plate,” she whispered at his side, “but all I got was two letters, an L and a J .”
He nodded. “And I got two more,” he muttered. “So, between us we’re doing good.”
“If you say so,” she muttered, as the vehicle tore off down the road. “I presume at the end there they saw us now watching them.”
“Hard to say,” Masters conceded, “but the fact that we have picked up a tail is fascinating.”
She frowned. “You call that fascinating?”
“I do,” he said, with a smile, touching her on the cheek. “It’s okay.”
“It doesn’t feel very okay,” she muttered.
A waitress hurried toward them, apologizing for having left them standing here.
But he smiled at her and replied, “It’s all good.” Then he nudged Elizabeth forward to follow the waitress.
When they were seated, he looked around at the location of the table and nodded approvingly. The waitress asked them about drinks and menus, and he told her they wanted menus, then looked over at Elizabeth about the drink question.
She shook her head. “I think I would like a clear head.”
He raised an eyebrow but didn’t argue, and the waitress returned with just water. As they went through the menu, he felt the waves of stress coming off her. Finally he put down the menu and shared, “It could have just been from an altercation I had at work myself.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “You mean, they’ve finally figured out that you have some power?”
“No, they haven’t figured that out yet at all,” he declared, “but they’re pushing it. So they’ll soon figure out just where Jasper and I are at, and they won’t like any of the answers. Also we’re beginning to wonder if some people in the department aren’t playing against each other.”
“I think that’s what people do,” she stated bluntly. “Sometimes I wonder if they do anything but play stupid games.”
He nodded just as the waitress returned and asked them, “Are you ready to order?”
He looked down at the menu he’d partially seen and asked, “What’s the best burger you’ve got?”
She launched into an explanation, and he stopped her halfway. “I’ll take that one.”
She wrote it down, then turned to Elizabeth, who ordered a green mixed salad with chicken.
As soon as the woman was gone again, Elizabeth leaned forward and noted, “We have too many suspects.”
“We do, and yet I think the bottom line will be that phone call.”
“Sure, but how do we know where it came from? It was very quick, with few words, and yet I swear to God it was Nicholas.”
“It’s the I swear to God it’s him part that I find fascinating because, in order for somebody to make it seem like it’s your brother, they must have a copy of his voice.” He watched as she sat back. “And all kinds of things can be done to video and audio these days. So, if somebody does have a recording of his voice, it would not be hard to edit the tape to say what you wanted it to say. And, yes, we have seen similar things before,” he added. “And I’m sorry to say that. The other alternative,” he said, as he took a deep breath, “is that your brother is alive.”