Chapter 9
Chapter
Nine
On the Monday of her third week at Hartwell & Moss, Nell no longer needed a photograph to find her way back to her car.
She parked near the same concrete column she had used most of the previous week, crossed the garage with her work bag over her shoulder, and reached her offices without checking the building directory.
Sasha was at her desk when Nell arrived.
She ended a call, pulled off her headset, and pointed to Nell’s earrings.
“Those are cute.”
Nell touched one of the small silver drops. “Thanks. I found them at the Saturday Market. I took a friend who came down from Fate Mountain for the weekend.”
“That’s one of my favorite places to bring visitors.”
Luis looked over from the next row of desks. “Was the Hawthorne String Band playing under the bridge?”
“Yeah.”
“I love them,” he said.
Nell smiled at the memory and put her bag away.
The office was beginning to feel less unfamiliar.
She knew where things were now, which forms Hartwell & Moss used for which jobs, and who to ask when she got stuck.
She still had plenty to learn, but she no longer felt like a visitor every time she sat down at her desk.
A few minutes later, Dana stopped by with the next step in the Northline review. She asked Nell to compare the questionable projects against one normal closeout. The charges didn’t add up. Nell listed the discrepancies. Later that afternoon, she showed Dana which records they needed to check.
“The excavator is the clearest problem,” Nell said. “It’s listed at two sites sixty miles apart during the same shift.”
Dana looked over the entries. “Request the original equipment logs. Check the crew records too and pull the source documents for the other discrepancies. Don’t tell Northline what you’re testing. Just give them the project and invoice numbers.”
Nell did what Dana suggested. Her phone rang less than twenty minutes later. The caller ID showed Northline Commercial Construction.
“This is Nell Meadows.”
“Hi, Nell. This is Tessa Ward at Northline. I handle project-record access. I’m calling about the three project files you requested.”
Nell opened her notes. “Thanks for getting back to me.”
“I can pull the equipment and crew records for the first two projects from the current system. I should be able to upload those this afternoon. The third project is older.” Tessa paused briefly.
“The source documents aren’t in the current project system anymore.
They were moved to archive when the project closed. ”
“What do I need to do to request them?”
“Nothing else on your end. Your request has everything I need.” Tessa’s tone remained matter-of-fact. “Archived source records require authorization through executive operations before I can retrieve them. I’ve submitted that request.”
“How long does approval take?”
“Usually not long. It depends on who’s available to sign off.” Papers shifted faintly on Tessa’s end. “Once I have access, I’ll pull the original project support and add it to the same upload.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
“No problem. Talk to you soon.”
The call ended. Nell returned to the project files and continued comparing the questionable closeouts against the normal one while she waited for Tessa’s upload. At lunchtime, Sasha stopped beside Nell’s desk. “We’re going out if you want to come.”
Nell saved her work. “I do.”
Luis joined them, and the three of them walked to the food-cart pod. The sky had been threatening rain since Nell left her apartment, but it didn’t break. Damp air moved between the buildings, cool enough that she wished she had brought the light jacket hanging beside her front door.
Office workers stood in short lines beneath the signs, and a bike courier ate from a paper bowl while leaning against the rail at the edge of the lot.
Nell stopped in front of a blue cart with photographs of breads and dumplings across its menu board.
One showed a boat-shaped loaf filled with cheese, egg, and butter.
“What’s that?” she asked.
Sasha stepped closer to read the description. “Khachapuri.”
“I’ve had that. It’s delicious,” Luis said.
Nell ordered it. Sasha chose mushroom dumplings from the same cart, and Luis ordered a meat-filled bread. They found an open picnic table beneath the canopy while they waited.
“So,” Sasha said, “how are you liking Portland?”
Nell looked out toward the sidewalk. A bus hissed to a stop at the corner, and people hurried across the street before the light changed.
“I like it.” Nell smiled. “I’m still figuring everything out. But I like being able to walk out of my apartment and find almost anything. Food, bookstores, parks. There’s always something happening.”
“Have you been anywhere besides the market?” Sasha asked.
“My friend and I went to the International Rose Garden on Sunday. And I’ve been exploring a little after work. I found Powell’s, although I think I saw about a tenth of it before I gave up.”
“You don’t finish Powell’s,” Luis said. “You escape.”
“And I’m now addicted to Voodoo Doughnut.”
Sasha laughed. “You’re not allowed to admit that.”
Nell laughed. “I don’t care if it’s touristy.”
She had expected Portland to feel more threatening than it did after her kidnapping.
Some places still hit her hard. A dark parking entrance.
A man walking too close behind her. A box van driving beside her on the street.
Those moments could still send fear through her before she could remind herself she was safe.
But Portland wasn’t just the city where she’d been held.
Her captors hadn’t exactly taken her sightseeing.
For her, Portland was now food carts and bookstores and roses.
It was her new apartment with the sunlight on her desk.
It was the office where she had started the career she’d dreamed of for her years at the Institute.
She was proud of her new life and herself for being strong enough to live it.
“Do you miss Fate Mountain?” Sasha asked.
“Yeah.” The answer came easily. “I miss people more than anything. Most of my friends are there. I went to school there, and I worked at a local diner there for years.”
“Big change, then.”
Nell looked around the pod. A cook at the neighboring cart slapped a ball of dough onto a floured counter. Someone behind them laughed loudly enough to turn several heads. A gust of wind pushed the smell of roasted peppers beneath the canopy. “Yes,” Nell said. “But a good one.”
Their food arrived. Nell stirred the soft egg and melting butter through the cheese, tore one end from the bread, and dipped it into the hot center.
Sasha asked how Nell’s drive to work was going.
Nell admitted she still left too early because she didn’t trust herself to predict traffic.
On her map app, Luis showed her a route that avoided the worst backup near the office.
Rain began while they were finishing. It tapped against the canopy, then strengthened enough that people at the uncovered tables started gathering their trays.
Nell and her coworkers waited until the hardest burst passed before starting back to the office.
Nell opened her umbrella, despite Sasha and Luis’s teasing.
She still tasted butter, cheese, and black pepper on her tongue as she walked back to her desk.
Nell put away her umbrella and reopened the Northline file. The rest of the day passed without the promised records from Tessa Ward. Nell had almost stopped expecting them when an upload notification appeared shortly after lunch on Thursday. A message from Tessa accompanied it.
Hi, Nell. I received approval on the remaining project materials. These are the versions I was instructed to upload.
Nell paused over the wording.
Did you happen to retain your notes from the earlier files? I want to make sure you have what you need to reconcile the support.
That made sense. Nell had already worked from the client records before requesting the source documents, and keeping her own references was part of how she tracked what she had tested.
Yes, Nell replied. I kept my work notes and the references from my initial review. Thank you.
Nell opened the first uploaded work order. It referred to the excavator she had flagged on Monday, but when she compared the equipment number against the one recorded in her notes, the numbers didn’t match. She checked both again, digit by digit.
The machine that had appeared at two projects sixty miles apart during the same shift no longer did. Nell opened the crew records next. One of the workers she had documented on overlapping shifts had disappeared from the replacement sheet. Her heartbeat quickened.
She pulled up the vendor invoice. The unusual sentence she had marked because it appeared almost word for word on an unrelated vendor’s bill had been rewritten. Three changes. Nell opened the completion photographs.
The project number was the same. The filename followed the same naming convention. But the photograph itself was different. The earlier image had been framed too tightly to establish the location. This one showed enough surrounding material to make the work appear consistent with the project file.
All four changes removed discrepancies Nell had already documented.
She reopened the request she had sent Northline. It listed the projects and records she needed, but none of the problems she had found. There was no reason anyone filling the request should have known exactly which details mattered to her.
Nell called Dana and they met in a small conference room twenty minutes later. Nell pulled up the four changed files on a company laptop.
“The client files changed after my request, and Tessa Ward still hasn’t sent the archived project.”
“Don’t contact Northline again,” she said. “I’m taking this to the senior manager.”
Nell nodded.
Dana glanced at Nell’s notes. “You did the right thing bringing this to me.”
Back at her desk, Nell tried to return to her other work. But every time she thought about Northline, unease tightened in her chest. The timing was impossible to dismiss. Four discrepancies had disappeared from the records she’d asked to see.
Nell thought about her weekend with Ryder. He was the person she called when something rattled her, and she was rattled right now. She waited until she was back at home after work to contact him.
“I was trying to wait to call you for another ten minutes,” Ryder said when he answered.
Nell smiled. “Why?”
“So, I wouldn’t call the second you walked through the door.”
Ryder was usually happy to hear from her, but the kiss at her door had changed things between them. Nell could still feel his hand on her waist and the warmth of his breath on her lips.
“How has your week been?” he asked.
“I told a coworker my friend came down from Fate Mountain this weekend.”
Ryder was quiet for a beat. “I’m your best friend.”
“Yes, but it sounds wrong now.”
“What do you want to call me?”
“You’re my mate,” she whispered.
He didn’t answer right away. She heard him breathe and it sent a shiver through her.
“When can I see you again?” Ryder asked.
“Soon. I hope. Things are weird at work.”
“What do you mean by weird?”
“Something happened with one of the accounts I’m working on,” Nell said. “Some of the records changed after I asked for the documents supporting them.”
“Changed how?”
“Every replacement removed something I’d already documented.” She traced the blue rim of the bowl.
“That sounds serious.”
“My supervisor thought so too. She took it to a senior manager and told me not to touch the account until they decide what to do.”
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know. It just feels wrong.”
Ryder was quiet for a moment. “I wish I was there.”
Nell closed her eyes. She wished that too. “Tell me about your day.”
He told her that a replacement bracket for a camera job had arrived with the wrong bolts that morning, so he’d had to sort that out before driving to a feed store for the installation.
Then the store owner’s dog kept stealing his work gloves every time he set them down.
She laughed at the story, and it made her feel better after the strange day she’d had.
They said good night, and Nell set down her phone, wishing Ryder was with her.