Chapter 4
Cheryl brought pinot grigio and a personnel problem to dinner.
Kathleen watched her cross the kitchen with the wine in one hand and her phone in the other. Phillip had let her in without knocking. He stood at the stove stirring onions and peppers as if Friday had never happened there.
“Kat, tell me I’m not a monster.” Cheryl set the bottle beside the sink. “I need to put one of my supervisors on a performance plan, and she’s going to cry.”
Kat. The name had belonged to Cheryl longer than it had belonged to Phillip. She had shouted it across their college dorm, written it inside Kathleen’s birthday cards, and whispered it in the vestry, straightening Kathleen’s veil before the ceremony.
“That depends on the documentation,” Kathleen said.
Cheryl pointed at her. “This is why I came to you. No sympathy. Straight to the paperwork. I left the employee’s name and file at the branch, so don’t ask me for details.”
She took Kathleen’s usual chair at the round oak table. Her purse went on the empty chair beside it. Kathleen carried her water to the place opposite Phillip and sat where dinner guests normally sat.
Phillip turned from the stove. “You’re opening wine? It’s Monday.”
“And Kat got back from Des Moines early. That’s practically a holiday.”
Cheryl smiled at Kathleen over the bottle and worked the cork free. Cheryl’s nails were bare. On Friday a crescent of that coral had been caught under Phillip’s thumbnail. Kathleen wondered whether the bare nails were for Phillip or for the friend Cheryl believed she had fooled.
Kathleen looked down before either of them could read the answer on her face.
Douglas had told her that afternoon to keep her routine if she could.
His team was preserving records. Cedarspan’s attorneys were deciding which systems the investigators could query without alerting the people whose access they were examining.
Kathleen had not been asked to help. She had been instructed to work her accounts and forward any unusual request to the case number.
Routine meant sitting with Phillip and Cheryl in the same kitchen where she had seen them together.
“How was the big surprise on Friday?” Cheryl asked.
Phillip’s spoon scraped the bottom of the pan.
Kathleen looked at her. “What surprise?”
“Coming home early. Phil said you nearly caught him living on frozen pizza like a bachelor.”
“I caught him cleaning the kitchen.”
Cheryl’s eyes moved toward the island. “That’s even less believable.”
Phillip laughed. “She called from the road. I had twenty minutes to mop the grease before she walked through it.”
Phillip delivered the timing as a joke. His grin stayed on Kathleen a beat past the end of it.
“What did you spill?” Kathleen asked.
He turned off the burner. “A pizza pan. Two beers. Proof that I revert to nineteen the second my wife crosses a state line.”
Cheryl kept smiling, but her gaze held Kathleen’s. “Lucky you warned him.”
Kathleen saw the question beneath the teasing. Had she looked through the window? Had she checked the garage? Had Phillip’s cleaning erased enough?
“I was trying to be considerate,” she said. “I won’t make that mistake again.”
Phillip wiped his hands on a towel without meeting her eyes.
Phillip served chicken and peppers over rice. He had used the square white platter they received as a wedding gift from Cheryl.
Kathleen asked how bad the supervisor’s record was.
Cheryl listed three late inventory reconciliations and two missed coaching notes, offset by good work with the field crews.
Kathleen said the plan should not surprise the supervisor and told Cheryl to use Cedarspan’s ordinary review process, not dinner-table advice, before acting.
Cheryl teased her and poured wine for herself and Phillip. Kathleen waved off the bottle and said she had a seven-thirty call.
Cheryl lowered the bottle. “You would. You spend more nights with municipal contracts than you do with your husband.”
Phillip laughed into his glass.
Kathleen cut a pepper strip in half. She could make Cheryl explain the joke. She could watch Phillip search for a safe answer. Instead she lifted the bite and chewed until she trusted her voice.
“The cities usually schedule calls after council sessions.”
“I’m teasing you, Kat.”
“I know.”
Phillip reached for the salt. “Kathleen’s always preferred a problem she can solve. Give her a contract dispute and a spreadsheet, she’s happy. Give her a person who doesn’t know what they want, she’d rather go back to the spreadsheet.”
Cheryl laughed too quickly.
Kathleen set her fork beside her plate. Her husband had once said her steadiness made him feel safe. Cheryl had toasted that quality at the wedding reception. Now Phillip and Cheryl used it as a private joke while Kathleen ate from the platter Cheryl had bought them.
“Your supervisor knows what she wants,” Kathleen said. “She wants another chance without a record. You know what you want too.”
Cheryl’s smile paused. “Which is?”
“To keep someone you like without explaining why you let three reconciliations run late before you wrote a single coaching note.”
Phillip took a drink.
Cheryl pushed the cork back into the bottle. “See? Monster.”
“No. A manager who waited too long.”
Cheryl stared at her until Phillip asked about dessert.
Kathleen carried her plate to the dishwasher when her work phone rang. Douglas’s name did not appear. The incoming number belonged to Cedarspan’s secure callback service.
“I need to take this outside.”
Phillip looked at the phone. “Client trouble?”
“Work.”
Kathleen went out the back door and stood on the stone border beside the herb box, in the dark, under the kitchen window. She answered with the case number.
Douglas verified her identity and gave her a limited update: the Friday exception and the ten earlier records had been created through Cheryl’s credentialed account. Each record selected Kathleen’s employee identifier as the approving director.
The thyme was still flattened where her phone had gone into it. “Can she say someone used her password?” Kathleen said.
“She can say anything when she’s interviewed. We’re reviewing access records and device information. I don’t want you drawing conclusions beyond what I just told you.”
“Understood.”
“Evers Route Services recorded custody scans on the affected transfers. Those scans establish that the vendor accepted assigned movements. They do not, by themselves, establish who diverted property or what was inside any carton at your residence.”
Above her, through the window she had looked through on Friday, Cheryl laughed.
Kathleen asked when the interviews would begin. Douglas refused to share the sequence because Cedarspan had to protect its records before anyone received notice, then told her to continue her normal schedule.
“Cheryl is in my kitchen.”
Douglas was silent for a beat. “Has she mentioned the transfers or asked you to change a record?”
“No.”
“Then don’t question her for us. If you need to leave for personal safety, leave. The case doesn’t require you to remain there.”
Her suitcase was still upstairs on its rack with two blouses taken out of it, the way it had sat for nine years. Pamela had told her not to confuse endurance with strategy.
“I’m safe,” Kathleen said. “I’ll call if that changes.”
She ended the call and wrote the authorized update in her chronology standing where she was, with the light from her own kitchen falling past her onto the herb box.
Seventeen minutes after she stepped outside, she went back in.
The plates had been stacked beside the dishwasher.
Cheryl and Phillip stood beside the island with the wine between them.
“There she is,” Cheryl said. “We were telling the cake story.”
“Which cake story?”
Phillip grinned. “Your wedding cake. You were so worried the bakery would deliver the wrong filling that Cheryl went into the kitchen and cut the bottom tier open for you before the reception.”
“I saved her,” Cheryl said. “It was raspberry. Kat ordered lemon.”
Kathleen remembered Cheryl crouching behind the reception-hall kitchen door with a butter knife. Kathleen had laughed until her mascara ran. Cheryl had wiped it from beneath Kathleen’s eye with one careful thumb.
“You said you checked it because you loved me,” Kathleen said.
Cheryl’s grin softened. “I did. I do.”
Phillip put his arm around Cheryl’s shoulders and left it there.
Cheryl came around the island and hugged Kathleen. The pinot on Cheryl’s breath mixed with the vanilla lotion she had used since college.
“We’re terrible,” Cheryl said against Kathleen’s cheek. “You’re allowed to have one friend and one husband who refuse to be impressed by you.”
Kathleen kept her arms at her sides a beat too long, then returned the hug. Cheryl’s shoulders came down.
When Kathleen released her, Phillip was watching.
Cheryl had not asked one more question about the supervisor after the first glass of wine. She had not come for advice. She had brought a reason to stand in this kitchen on a Monday, and the unnamed employee was it.
Kathleen’s identifier appeared on eleven records.
Three Cedarspan-labeled cartons sat in her garage, and Phillip’s custody scans touched the transfers.
The two of them had their hands on each other.
Kathleen could give Douglas the records and Pamela the marriage.
They could lose jobs, contracts, money, and her.
As she watched them laughing over the wedding they had both betrayed, Kathleen knew exposure would not be enough.