Chapter 4 No Good Deed #2
“You were the last person in the office last night,” he continues, ignoring Jessica. “We have you on digital.”
My heart rate picks up. “I thought the cameras shut down. Aaron said—”
“They didn’t ‘shut down.’ There was a blip in the footage, some kind of obscuring fog. But we have enough to confirm you were the last one here,” Calvin clarifies.
Which means they don’t have me putting the money on Sue Ward’s desk.
I take a deep breath. But if they’re suspicious now, once that charge hits accounting, they’re going to comb through earlier footage.
There aren’t security cameras in the private offices, but the workspace video will show me entering and leaving Calvin’s office.
That, along with last night, will be enough to start an inquiry.
Jessica tilts her face, apologetic, and speaks with her eyes closed. “No one is saying you did anything.”
Calvin’s thick neck reddens above the collar like a sunburned python. “Oh, for Pete’s sake.”
Jessica lays an empathetic hand on my arm. “It was a nice gesture. No one is saying it wasn’t.”
“You left Sue that money!” Calvin explodes.
My eyes widen.
“We don’t know that,” Jessica says, shaking her head at Calvin.
“Don’t we?” he barks.
“There’s no clear footage,” she says as she turns back to me. “It’s just an educated guess.”
“It’s inappropriate, is what it is,” Calvin continues.
“Am I in some kind of trouble?” I ask.
“No,” Jessica says adamantly while Calvin glares at me over the broad plane of his desk. “No one’s done anything illegal. We just want to get to the bottom of what happened. It’s … distracting,” she says as though distraction carried a bad aftertaste. “It breeds a certain kind of environment.”
I can’t imagine what kind of environment she means. A fun one perhaps. I could see Jessica being allergic to fun.
“This is a place of business,” Calvin counters. “We pride ourselves on a professional culture.”
I think of the Christmas party last year where Aaron drank too many vodka tonics and tried to Irish step dance on a cluster of desks as Sita took a nap on the floor of the CFO’s office. “Of course.”
“Which no one is implying that you aren’t,” Jessica affirms.
I understand Jessica’s presence, but her devotion to remaining deeply ambiguous is doing little to help my nerves.
“Save your do-gooding for when you’re off the clock,” Calvin growls. “No one has time for this. Now we have to launch an investigation—”
“An investigation?” I blink rapidly. I clearly did not think this through. I hadn’t exactly expected to be alive this morning, much less at work.
Jessica leans reassuringly toward me. “We haven’t done anything definitive yet.”
“L-leaving someone some money hardly sounds like it warrants an investigation,” I stammer. My knee begins to bounce wildly. “You said yourself it wasn’t illegal.”
“Tampering with security is a crime,” Calvin replies.
“May be,” Jessica corrects. “None of it is very black-and-white.”
“Whoever left that money likely had something to do with the camera glitch.” He narrows his eyes at me. “Where did all that money come from anyway?” he mutters.
I wonder if he’s noticed the missing credit card. Probably.
Swallowing my dread, I plaster a flat, innocent look across my face.
I didn’t tamper with security, it was just a stroke of incredibly good luck that those cameras malfunctioned before I started stacking hundreds on Sue’s desk, but they don’t know that.
Still, it looks bad. “Well, if my power was out at the condo last night, maybe you guys had an outage as well. Have you checked with your electricity provider?”
Calvin pulls his lips in until they disappear behind his teeth. Finally, he says, “Rest assured, we will do everything in our power to get to the bottom of it. Now, unless I’m mistaken, I think you have some work to do.”
I nod and get to my feet, closing the door softly on Jessica’s concerned expression.
An investigation is the last thing I need, even without the current predicament.
Some stranger digging into my sordid past, drudging up my embarrassing criminal history, those years in foster care when one opportunist after another tried to take advantage of me, knowing there must be a trust fund out there.
I changed my name at the first opportunity.
But before that, when I was connected to Solidago and my grandfather as its only survivor and his only heir, I was plastered across the news.
The grisly fire burned for hours on the TV screens of America as if fed by a continual stream of fuel, though the Certified Fire Investigators could never identify its source.
But I knew. My mother had told me once without realizing what her words would come to mean.
“Secretly, all women burn, Judeth,” she said the day she found me setting fir cones alight with a flick of my fingers behind the house.
“For desire. For revenge. For independence. For answers. For a power that has been continually denied them and a gaze that penetrates deep enough to truly witness them. For children wanted and children lost. For the future, then the past. To be a woman is to be a fire.” She peeled her eyes away from the coast in the distance to stare down at me.
“But the Cole women are an inferno. If you’re not careful, it will devour you, heart and soul.
That’s what happened to your grandmother.
She burned right through the world until there was nothing left for her. ”
I’d been warned not to use my abilities, not to let anyone see, least of all my grandfather. But there were long days where I might have forgotten that she was my mother at all if not for the gift we shared, and I couldn’t resist playing with it. “How do you stop the fire?” I asked.
She drew a breath and looked into my eyes. “You can never stop the burning, Judeth. You can only hope to control it.”
No one could understand why the rest of my family and our staff didn’t flee the flaming house that night.
But the power I unleashed was unlike anything I’d felt before.
It had its own agenda, raging and snaking, moving in ways I’d never hoped to command.
I’d found a clear path out, but the flames closed behind me.
In the end, I hadn’t been able to control it.
As I head back to my corner desk, I want to hug Sue, ask to see pictures of her son.
But I don’t dare. Sue has said even less to me than I have to Aaron over the years, and that’s how I should keep it.
Friends are a luxury I can’t afford. Not after Dara.
And it might seem obvious if I started chumming up to her now. Calvin already has his suspicions.
Dara’s freckled face swims before me. The red braids she always wore, so tightly plaited they gave her an automatic brow lift.
The prim way she would hold the cigarettes I stole from Nina’s purse and cough out a plume of smoke, purpling behind it.
She was soft, full of easy smiles and simple dreams, a bright cloud of a girl.
When I last saw her, I’d just turned sixteen.
My grandfather had begun to notice me in ways he never dared to before.
For the first time, I felt the urgency behind my mother’s command to avoid him.
Dara and I twirled through the goldenrod that day until our skirts were yellow with pollen, then raided Nina’s stash of cookie tins, lazing in the pantry, nibbling like church mice.
Finally, she uncrossed her legs and stood, needing the restroom.
By the time I left the kitchen calling her name, nearly a half hour had passed.
The door to the great room flung open and Dara pushed past me, bolting outside as if the devil himself were after her. My grandfather stood in the doorway watching, a dark glint in his eye, tucking in the hem of his shirt.
I locked myself in my room that night and every night after, knowing full well that Dara was only a consolation prize.
The old man had told me as much himself only a week before, in an encounter so disturbing, I’d all but squeezed it from my memory.
He didn’t name Dara, of course. But he didn’t have to.
I should have known the risk we were taking.
Seven days later, Nina brought the news with her from Bandon. Dara’s body had washed up on the beach, a bottle of Elavil emptied into her stomach.
I can still remember the way her lips pulled down at the corners as she ran past me, the white dotting her cheeks as if someone had taken a straw to her face and sucked all the color out.
I tried to reach her after that afternoon, but she stopped answering my calls, stopped meeting me by the back of the house.
I would see her in my mind after she died as I imagined she looked when they found her—face waxen and drooping from the bones, eyes flat as glass panes with nothing behind them, the shame more than she could bear.
Three weeks later my grandfather cornered me against the broad surface of my grandmother’s dresser in the room I’d been warned to stay out of, the door left unlocked and cracked open by a careless housekeeper.
Three weeks later I fled into the high winds whipping across the goldenrod, feeling the heat at my back.
Three weeks later my mother was gone. They were all gone.
The money I placed here last night—it was never really for Sue.
It was for them, for Dara. The laptop I stole for Julia, the tire Aaron still doesn’t realize I had changed for him while he was in the office stressing over a deadline—all for the ones who died in my place.
Every tiny act of kindness I can pull off.
Every animal I feed at the shelter. Every small favor.
My mother haunts me, her final moments, her eyes like lit Sterno cans, but my mother chose her path.
The rest were victims of circumstance, especially Dara.
I’d offered her up to my grandfather on a silver platter by letting her into our house after what he said to me, and he destroyed her like he destroyed everyone.
I don’t regret the loss of Macallister Bates, even if he was my blood.
As far as he’s concerned, I did the world a favor.
But I carry the rest with me—Nina, Scott our groundskeeper and his assistant Jack (who turned my book in), Elle and the new hire, Dawn, as well as Grady and Paul, the “security” detail and drivers who were little more than glorified thugs.
They’re a memorial in my brain, the weight of their deaths sucking at my conscience.
I am nearly to my desk when the office phone beside me rings.
It’s the one they keep on Jiang’s desk, but Jiang isn’t anywhere in sight.
The shrillness of a landline is something I don’t think I will ever get used to.
Almost out of spite, I reach over and pick it up.
As I bring the handset to my ear, a lacy fretwork of goose bumps rises across my skin. “Hello, Pacific Creative.”
“Well, well, well. If it isn’t the good little copywriter hard at work. Hasn’t anyone ever told you, Jude? No good deed goes unpunished.”
I recognize the seductive lilt of her voice immediately—the woman under the bridge. “How did you get this number?” I whisper. “Are you following me?”
I can practically hear her smiling through the phone. “That’s no way to say thank you after everything I’ve done for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Someone had to obscure those cameras. You can’t just go around leaving a digital footprint, Jude. Not when you’re one of us. We have interests to protect.”
I spin around, making sure no one’s listening, then duck down and whisper into the phone, “That was you? You got me into trouble. There’s going to be an investigation.”
“There already is,” she says harshly. “And it’s not the one you’re concerned about. Seems like you’ve got your priorities confused, but don’t worry, I’ve got the missing footage right here. Think of it as collateral. The price for sharing our darkest secrets with you.”
“Are you threatening me?” I breathe into the handset. Calvin said it was “a glitch.” I didn’t think there might still be footage out there, in someone else’s hands.
“I’m motivating you,” she replies. “Helping you maintain your focus. You’re on deadline, after all.”
“And if I don’t want to play your games? If I’m not interested in being in your circle?”
“I have a lot more than this at my disposal,” she growls. “Don’t test me, Jude. We’re just getting started.”
I take a breath. “Two more days.”
“By sunset,” she adds. “Step carefully, kitten. We’re watching.”
A resounding click followed by a steady dial tone is the last thing I hear.