Lili
The folder I needed was filed under PARTS — REQUISITIONS and I had to stand on a chair to get to the year I wanted.
Even wearing my new work boots from the hardware store, I wasn’t tall enough for the top shelf of the filing cabinet. The chair wobbled and I steadied myself with one hand on the cabinet, wondering what the hell I thought I was doing, and quickly grabbed the folder and hopped down.
I hadn’t been able to sleep after riding home with Holt.
Conrad. I was on the verge of telling him about my suspicions, asking him what the hell was going on with my father’s company, but I was so overcome by the smell of him, by the look in his eyes when I said his name, that I simply nodded at him and melted into the rain.
Somewhere near four in the morning, I gave up on sleep and pulled out my laptop to look over parts requisitions and other records I didn’t need access to in my new role. Unless I wanted to shine daylight on questionable behavior, and it was clear my father didn’t expect me to do that.
I carried the folder to the small table by the window and sat down.
The page on top was a requisition from fourteen months ago.
C. Holt, Lead Mechanic. The familiar small flourish on the C.
He was requesting components for the fleet's annual deep maintenance cycle — a long list, item by item, part numbers I didn't know but could look up, quantities and grades and vendors he'd recommended.
I'd already pulled the Boston response on my laptop last night. Approved. Allocated. The full dollar figure, line by line, signed off in the corporate office of Ashford Aviation by a name I didn't recognize.
What I had not seen until thirty minutes ago, when I'd come into the file room and started pulling the regional purchasing records, was what had actually been ordered.
I opened the folder.
The receiving log was on top, dated the week after Boston's approval.
Roughly sixty percent of Holt's list had been ordered.
Several of the high-cost components had been substituted.
A couple had simply been dropped. The substitutions were not noted as substitutions.
They were noted as the original line items, with the lower-cost part numbers written in.
I flipped to the next page. The previous year's deep maintenance cycle, same pattern. The year before, same.
I sat at the table with the folder in front of me and felt icy dread crackling through my chest.
I knew just enough about helicopters from my secret flying lessons to realize this looked very unscrupulous. But I didn’t know whether substitutions like this were … I couldn’t even allow my mind to name the frightening words hovering in the shadows.
But I needed to know if Holt knew this was going on.
I left the file room and walked down the office hallway and pushed open the side door into the cold morning, and crossed the asphalt toward the hangar with the folder against my ribs.
The hangar door was open and the space was mostly empty. Not entirely, though.
He was at the engine of one of the birds, his back to me. The henley was navy this morning. His shoulders did not turn when I came in.
"Holt."
He turned, his eyes flaring for a second before he was able to control his features into something more professional. “Ms. Ashford.”
I set the folder down on the workbench next to him.
"I have a question about a parts requisition," I said.
I had practiced the sentence on the walk over. It came out level, professional, the regional operations manager doing her job. He looked at the folder. Then he looked at me.
"All right," he said, but his face had lost a little of the hard resolve.
"This is the deep maintenance cycle." I opened the folder to his requisition. "This is what you ordered."
He looked at it.
"This is what Boston approved." I tapped another form.
He frowned. “All right."
"This" — I turned the page — "is what the operation received."
He looked at the receiving log.
He didn't say anything for a long moment. He picked up the page. He held it under the work light. He went down the list with one finger, slowly, and at three places his finger stopped and I watched the pulse tick in his neck, his jaw tighten.
He put the page back on the bench.
"Where did you get this?" he said.
"From the file room. The regional archives."
"Who else has seen it?"
"No one."
"Sharon?"
"No."
"Boston?"
"No. I pulled the corporate side on my own laptop last night."
He looked at me. He looked at the folder. He looked back at me.
"Ms. Ashford."
"Lili.”
He didn't say it back to me yet. He was working through something.
"Some of these substitutions could matter," he said, finally.
"How much do they matter?”
He didn't answer that.
I waited.
"This one." He put his finger on a line three-quarters down the page.
"I'd ordered a stainless fuel-line union.
Specific manufacturer. Tested for the temperature range we get up here in winter.
What we received was a coated steel union from a vendor I don't use.
" He paused. "It's the union I tightened the other morning. On the Bell."
I felt the cold in my chest crawl down into my stomach.
"The tick in the idle," I said.
His head came up. He looked at me the way he had looked at me in the truck.
"The tick in the idle," he said. He held my eyes for a beat longer than he should have. Then he looked down at the page again.
"Yeah," he said. "That's what it was."
I sat down on the stool at the end of the bench because I did not entirely trust my knees. He noticed. He didn't comment.
"Has this before," I asked. "The substitutions?”
He did not answer that.
The silence sat between us next to the folder.
"I want to keep looking," I said.
"Ms. Ashford."
"Lili.”
"Lili.” He said it without looking up from the page. He said it like the word had weight in his mouth he hadn't anticipated. He cleared his throat. "Be careful who you show this to."
He looked at me, then. Hard. Whatever was in his face held something aching. Haunted. “You don't know what you're looking at yet," he said.
"I think I do.”
"You might find things that —" He stopped. He did not finish. He looked back down at the folder.
"I'll be careful," I said.
He nodded, once.
I picked up the folder. I held it against my chest. I should have left then.
I had what I'd come for — better than what I'd come for.
I had a man who had spent two years working alone telling me, in a roundabout way, that he had known something was wrong, and that I was now the only other person who did.
I did not leave.
“Conrad.” I liked the taste of his name in my mouth, the feel of it on my tongue. I didn’t know what I had uncovered, but I was certain Conrad Holt was not a willing participant in it.
"Yeah."
"Thank you. For being honest with me."
He looked up. "Lili,” he said, low.
We looked at each other across the workbench and I had the very distinct sense that something had just been settled in the air between us.
I felt a charge, and inexperienced as I was with men, I knew I wasn’t imagining it.
And that terrified me more than what these papers suggested about my father and his care for the human lives piloting planes with his name on the side.
I left the hanger abruptly, hurrying to the file room to pull as many folders as I could carry.
I had been scouring numbers for forty minutes when I noticed my hands were shaking. I came up here to bide time, grab access to money and start what? Some stupid tourist company flying wealthy people around the mountains.
I was now certain my family—the wealthy elite I thought I’d cater to—was playing Russian Roulette with people’s lives.
How could I even think of letting anyone fly up in those planes, let alone paying guests?
I felt my entire world catching fire as I built irrefutable evidence that my father was the aviation version of a shitty house flipper.
* * *
I’d been staring at papers and numbers for I don’t know how long when there was a knock at my office door.
The cadence was unfamiliar—Sharon would holler and Diaz would tap while opening the door.
I knew it would be him even as I schooled my voice into false calm. “Come in.”
The door opened.
Conrad Holt filled the doorway, his muscled frame beautiful and rugged even under the fluorescent lighting.
His face was pinched. Drawn. There was a tightness around his eyes that hadn't been there this morning, and a haunted quality to his mouth that made me think he had been carrying whatever he came to say, for a very long time.
He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. We’d never been together in my office before. He looked, for a half-second, like he didn't know what to do with himself in it.
"Lili."
"Conrad."
His eyes went to the desk. To the four folders open on it.
To the laptop. To the legal pad I had filled most of one side of with my own handwriting.
He took it all in without saying anything, and I felt suddenly self-conscious about how much I had been doing in the time since I'd left him, as if I'd been caught at something.
"Make copies," he said.
"What?"
"Of all of it. Copies. Personal ones. Not on the company network." He gestured at the laptop with his chin. "Take photos with your phone if you pay for that yourself. Put them somewhere outside this building. Somewhere outside Forge Creek if you can manage it."
I stared at him.
"Things tend to disappear," he said. "From the archives.
The longer they sit, the more likely they are to get pulled for some kind of cleanup or audit or whatever they call it that week.
If you find something and you want to be able to prove you found it, you need your own copy. Off the system. Off the property."
His voice was rough at the edges, and I understood without being told that he had thought about all of this before. Not in the abstract. He had been protecting his own paper for a long time.
"Okay," I said.
"And don't email anyone. Not about any of this. Not from a company account, not from your personal one if it's logged into anything connected to Boston."
"Okay."
"If anybody from corporate asks why you've been pulling archives, you say you're orienting yourself. You're new. You wanted to understand the operation's history. That's all. You stop the conversation there."
"Okay."
He looked at me. He had run out of practical things to say. There was something else he had come up here to do that he had not yet done, and I could see him deciding whether to do it.
I stood up from the desk.
I had no plan for what I was going to do once I was standing, but my body was drawn to his. I stepped around the desk toward him, felt the heat of his body, and closed the door, leaving a foot and a half of space to be swallowed by the energy of this man and his magnetism.
"Conrad."
"Yeah?”
"How long have you known?"