Broken Trust (6 page)

seven

Nora stood at her
office window, heart pounding, breath catching in her chest. She gently rubbed a smooth corn leaf between her thumb and forefinger. There was something definitely wonky about this place. Murder.
Murder!

She squatted down and scratched Abbey behind the ears, letting his warmth calm her. Petal’s pain had seeped through Nora’s clothes and into her skin. Worse yet were Mark and Sylvia’s reactions to the news that someone they worked with had been shot. They hadn’t seemed at all concerned and actually more annoyed that Petal disrupted the quiet morning.

“What sort of place is this?”

Abbey didn’t answer her. He lay with his eyes half closed, wallowing in the attention.

The piles of paper and chaos of the office swamped her. “We ought to book it out of here.”

Abbey rested his head on his paws.

“I’m not up for more murder
, old boy
.”

He closed his eyes and let out a deep sigh of contentment.

“On the other hand, since you’re the only one I talk to these days, maybe I ought to hang around
just
for human contact.”

He wasn’t going to give her any advice; that much was plain.

A light knock on her
doorjamb
startled her.

Fay stood in the doorway, her eyes wide in her round face. Her voice crackled softly. “So what happened? I heard Petal say Darla was killed.”

Nora leaned back on her work surface. “I don’t know.”

Another head appeared over Fay’s shoulder. The hairy guy working on air quality. Thomas. Score one for Nora remembering his name. “Did you get any details?”

Fay turned to him with her creaky voice. “I’ll bet it was Mark.”

Thomas shook his head. “Naw. He hired her. I think he liked her because he could control her.”

Fay shook her head. “I can’t believe she’s dead. And that she was
shot
.”

Thomas nodded. “Yeah. Right here.” He scrutinized Nora’s office and shuddered as if Darla had been shot in the room.

“Maybe it was Sylvia. She hated Darla. She hates everyone.” Fay nodded at Thomas for confirmation.

“Freaky.” Without any warning, they both wandered away.

Freaky, indeed.

Nora surveyed the paper orgy strewn across the work space
. A journey of a thousand miles begins with … filing.
She shuffled the pages into unruly stacks.

Interspersed among the spreadsheets, invoices, and financial statements, Nora came across pages from a yellow legal pad. Like a child’s scribbling on a blackboard as punishment, each page was filled with one line over and over. One page repeated, “I am smart” on all twenty-eight lines. Another said, “I will succeed.” “I am beautiful.” “I can do it.” “I am rich.” Nora’s throat constricted with sympathy when she found the last one: “They DO like me.” Over and over.

Nora picked up the picture of Darla and studied it. If Darla were thin or fat, cheerful or dour, the out
er
wear concealed it all. One thing Nora knew for sure: Darla was not happy.

Nora replaced the photo and trudged along with the paperwork.

Well past lunch time, Mark stuck his head in her office. “Wow. You’ve made some headway.”
Snort
. “Darla wasn’t very organized.”

He spoke casually, as if Darla, someone he’d worked with every day, hadn’t just been found dead on a mountain. What a jerk.

Nora had slogged through much of the accounting fall-out on the desk. The documents consisted mostly of payroll spreadsheets and copies of paychecks, invoices—both paid and pending, financial reports, and Post-it notes.

She’d found the reason for all the scribbled pages. Several self-help books occupied the closet shelf, and a dog-eared self-esteem manual declared success through written affirmations. Darla was struggling to change.

Nora picked up a pile of handwritten accounting worksheets. “I think Darla tracked grants and restricted donations by hand and allocated them monthly, then backed the totals out of the general fund.”

He blanked.

“You can do it this way but it’s a lot of work
,
and there is a lag
. S
o if checks were written early in the month, the actual fund allocation won’t show up for a few weeks in the project budget.”
He obviously had no idea what she
was talking about
.
Which
gave her leeway to set up her own, more efficient system. “How’s Petal?”

He waved his hand. “She’s overly dramatic. I’m sorry you had to see one of her episodes on your first day.”

Her friend and coworker was murdered
. Nora knew what it felt like when someone
close to you
is murdered. You can’t get overly dramatic about that.

Mark’s face reddened. He must have read Nora’s expression. “It’s terrible, of course. Unexpected and upsetting.”

He stayed at the office door gazing at Nora. Not awkward at all.

To fill the void, Nora chatted. “I’ll check to make sure all these invoices are entered and get them filed. I’ll see about bank balances and check A/P.”

Abruptly, he said. “Write Sylvia’s check but everything else can wait until next week.”
Snort
.

“Shouldn’t she submit a reimbursement request and receipts?”

Mark waved that away. “She’s a star scientist
,
not an accounting clerk. She shouldn’t waste her time with this trivia.”

“The auditors
…
”

“Do it.” He interrupted, and then seemed to catch himself. “Please.”

She didn’t commit. “I’m hoping to get this bookkeeping stuff out of the way by the end of the week so I can settle in and work on the funds and project worksheets and reports. I need to figure out how all this is organized.”

Mark’s eyebrows drew down and he snuffled, an even more nervous sound than his usual laugh. “That will come. But right now you need to pull some financials together for tomorrow’s board meeting.”

A mace, complete with spiked ball, swung straight from his hand with no wind up. It smacked into the side of her head. “A board meeting
tomorrow
?”

“Don’t worry. I’ve got the financials Darla submitted two weeks ago for the board preview. You can just add a few expenses and a little income and they’ll be good to go. I
e-mail
ed them to you.” His assurance felt as slimy as his dismissal of Darla’s murder.

“It won’t be accurate.”

“No one expects them to be penny perfect. They only want an update from what they had previously. Just get through tomorrow and you’ll have time to study everything in depth.”

She doubted the board wanted or needed sketchy information. She didn’t answer.

His face reddened as he became defensive. “We can’t cancel the meeting. Daniel Cubrero fit it into his schedule. Bryson Bradshaw is over the Atlantic now and a few others won’t want to cancel their flights and reschedule. These meetings are hell to arrange.”

When she still didn’t answer he said, “Do your best. But remember, we don’t want to upset the board needlessly.” He spun around and scurried away before she could respond.

She addressed Abbey. “Not a good situation.” The Trust was an accounting nightmare. If someone didn’t set it right, and soon, they wouldn’t be able to continue to repair trails and maintain crucial habitats. The beetle kill research would take a hit.

Nora’s guilt over almost spraying uranium-tainted water on the sacred peaks in Flagstaff drove her on a strange apologetic quest. She didn’t make snow as she’d set out to do and the slopes were protected now, but she still felt she had a debt to pay. Maybe
accounting wouldn’t end global warming or save the whales
,
but straightening up this office could be her contribution.

Sour stew boiled in Nora’s gut. How would she pull together financials to present to a board of directors when she had no notion of the organization?

eight

The afternoon sun sent
an uncertain ray through her window and Abbey lay in its weak beam in the middle of the room. Someone had overcooked popcorn in the microwave and the smell added to Nora’s nausea.

An electronic beep sounded, startling Nora. A tinny voice invaded the room. “Nora?”

An old-school int
ra
office page. Must be coming from a phone. Nora raised her voice. “Hi. I’m here. Just let me find the phone.” Nora pushed papers aside and finally found a beige Titanic of technology. She picked up the receiver. “Okay. I’ve got it.”

“This is Sylvia. You haven’t had a chance to tour my office suite. Why not come down? I’m at a good break point.”

Nothing like a summons from the queen. “Sure.”

“I’m sending Petal to get you.”

The queen and even a lady in waiting—rather, a Rasta-girl-in-waiting. A rustle caused Nora to turn to the door. Petal stood like a rag doll, all floppy and boneless, her eyes red-rimmed. Appar
ently, Sylvia had little doubt Nora would accept the command. “Here she is.” Nora tried to sound pleased as she spoke to the intercom.

Sylvia must have already hung up.

“How are you?” Nora asked.

Petal shrugged. “Darla was my friend.” Her voice sounded like a drop of water on a still lake.

“I’m sorry. Do you think you should go home?”

Petal shook her head, sending her dreads into a frantic dance. “Sylvia has work for me to do.”

Nora couldn’t say what she wanted to say, which was,
Screw Sylvia.
Could this really be her first few hours of her first day at the first shot of a job in a year?

“Well, let’s go see the office, then.”

Petal led the way down the narrow stairs through the kitchen. Someone had propped the back door open and a breeze blew away the scorched popcorn odor. Past the door, a few feet beyond the kitchen and an open storage area, Petal stopped in front of a closed door. She opened it and stepped back.

Nora hesitated before entering. The room was by far the largest in the building. It accommodated what appeared to be an antique banquet table in the center of the space, scattered with maps.

“Welcome!” Sylvia swept from behind a desk, graceful as a supermodel in her high heels. “What do you think?” She stepped back and displayed her kingdom as if she were a hostess at
t
he White House.

“Impressive,” Nora said, not lying.

Sylvia waved that away. “The Trust was too cheap to give me a separate office
,
but I’ve adjusted to the constraints.” She led Nora from the door, around the center table to the far side of the room.

The area Sylvia chose as her personal office occupied a whole corner. Her massive cherry wood desk nestled in the space created from two walls of the suite and one wall pieced together with file cabinets.

“I spent quite some time scrounging in antiques stores to find this bookcase.” She indicated an ornate wood bookshelf occupying the wall behind her desk. A Tiffany lamp on her desk cast a glow to reflect off the polished wood furniture. The bookshelf held her framed diplomas, a bronze of a nude
,
and volumes of expensive-looking hardcover books.

“But this is my real treasure.” She swept her arm in front of her to showcase the antique dining table taking up the center of the room. Maps sprawled across the table. “I’m quite proud of that table. It was an amazing deal I found at a shop in Aspen. Darla questioned the expense and said a fifty
-
dollar table from Costco would work just as well
,
but Mark backed me up.”

Petal slinked away to another corner and folded herself into a chair. She rolled it close to a desk
more like the humble discount office store kind the rest of the Trust staffers used. A small lamp sat on her desk, draped in a pink scarf. She hunched over a keyboard and began to type.

The addition felt tacked-on, without the charm of the turn-of-the-century farmhouse. Nora pointed to a stack of computer processing units. These weren’t typical CPU towers to power a regular PC. Next to the tower stood a giant, high-tech scanner, almost as large as the antique table. “What is all this for?”

Sylvia seemed pleased to be asked. “The Cubrero Family Foundation paid for sophisticated modeling software and sufficient power to run it. We needed to have the tools so I could create the
maps.” Sylvia indicated the scanner. “This machine prints with the necessary detail and size.”

Nora studied the 3
x
4
-
foot color maps tacked on the walls.

Sylvia spoke as though conducting a grade school field trip. “
The m
ountain pine beetle is infecting the forests at a rate ten times any previous infestation. It’s at about
three-point-six
million acres in Colorado and Wyoming alone. Common wisdom says the large beetle population is the result of climate change. But I’m suspecting the beetle is actually altering local weather patterns and air quality. There’s a big difference between the effect of a living forest and a dead one on the environment. I’m studying the age
-
old question: what comes first, the chicken or the egg
?
” She laughed at her own cleverness
.

Nora stepped to the table and bent to the maps.

“You know,” Sylvia explained. “Is the climate driving the beetles or are the beetles driving the climate?”

Tappity-tap, tap, tap
. Petal worked away.

Nora lifted the corner of one of the maps and leaned on the table to scrutinize it.

Sylvia slid the map from Nora and thrust a finger on it. “You see? These overlay colors and shading indicate not only temperature and cloud cover but times and trends, followed by these stills.” She pulled out another map from underneath and spread it on top of the first. “These indicate the spread of beetle kill. When I combine them in an animated digital process, I can illustrate the actual correlation between climatic factors and beetle spread.”

“That’s amazing. And you created this technology?”

Sylvia laughed. “Oh, not all of it. I used some of what I developed with my team at
the
HAARP facility in Alaska.”

“Isn’t HAARP something like an array of towers that shoot energy into the atmosphere? People think it’s some sort of weather
-
altering thing or mind control or doomsday weapon?”

Sylvia laughed. “There are
a hundred and eighty
towers and they send out a ping
,
but the energy used is much less than any sun burst. What happens is that the towers send a billion watts of energy into the atmosphere. That’s about
a hundred
times a thunderbolt. It excites the ionosphere and creates a plume and then bounces back to the surface.”

“What is the point of the research?”

Petal quit typing. She sat still as if listening.

“What does it matter? All major scientific breakthroughs have come about with research for
the
sake
of
pure knowledge. We don’t know what we’ll discover that will create real good. For instance, there is hope that some of the HAARP technology will actually facilitate ozone repair.”

“You get information from HAARP for the beetle kill research?”

“Oh no. I’ve developed a tower using similar HAARP technologies. It’s an advance on the work of Nikola Tesla. I’ve developed the technology to use only one small installation on M
ount
Evans, not far from here.”

Oh. Where Nora met Petal.

Petal started tapping on the keyboard again.

“It’s one of Colorado’s tallest peaks. The highest electron density is on tall mountains because the negative charge is reaching for the positive charge in the atmosphere. My tower sends extremely low frequency waves, ELF
waves
, and the waves that bounce back create the raw data I use in the modeling software I created.”

Didn’t she say earlier she’d bought the software with donor funds? Maybe she worked with Al Gore when he invented the Internet
too
.

“So it’s a matter of tweaking the tower’s angle of refraction to gather the matrices to compile the complicated 3D images.”

Nora pulled another map from the bottom of the pile and slid it on top. A red Sharpie circle marked a map of South America. “Are you researching Ecuador?”

Sylvia shoved another map over the South America one. “No. Of course not.”

Petal typed away, not appearing to pay any attention to their conversation.

Sylvia eyed Petal and placed a hand on Nora’s arm. “It’s a lovely fall day. Let me show you the friendship garden. A garden club donates their time to give us a place for reflection by the creek.”

They walked through the kitchen, out the back door
,
and into the yard. The brown grass crunched underfoot. “How are you settling in?”

My office looks like a volcano of paper erupted in it. The previous
F
inance
D
irector was murdered. The star scientist is a prima donna. The
E
xecutive
D
irector is a creepy loser from high school. The sanest person here is a dreadlock-wearing woman of indeterminate age.

“As well as can be expected for a first day,” Nora said.

“That’s good.” Again, no mention of Darla. Sylvia stopped well short of the promised garden. “I’ll need that check today.”

Now we get to the point of the welcome tour.

“I won’t be able to do that until next week.” Firm. Competent. No nonsense. And if she kept her jaw clenched and hands clasped behind her back, Sylvia wouldn’t notice how shaky she felt.

Sylvia’s nostrils flared. “I don’t need the entire amount right
away. Just fifty thousand.”

Just?
Nora squinted into the sun. The soft breeze sending the scent of pine didn’t make her feel as happy as it usually did. “The problem is I don’t know if we have fifty thousand pennies, let alone fifty thousand dollars.”

“My work is funded through the entire year.”

Sure, make me feel unreasonable
.

A voice traveled from the side of the house. “Yoo
-
hoo!”

As if she heard the scream of an incoming bomb, Nora had the urge to dive for cover in the shrubs next to the house.

Sylvia gazed past Nora’s head.

Nora held her breath and turned. “Mother. What are you doing here?”

Other people’s mothers provided stability and support and the familiar comfort of home. Not so much with Abigail. When she dropped in unexpectedly, it usually meant drama. Lots of it.

Abigail waltzed toward them. A twelve
-
hour drive from Flagstaff would mean she left at two in the morning, and yet, here she stood, after hours of being folded into her car, as fresh as if she’d just re
turned from a fund-raising luncheon. Her slacks weren’t even wrin
kled.

She held out her arms for a dramatic embrace. “Nora! How is your first day?”

Nora didn’t fall into the maternal hug. “I’m kind of busy, as you can imagine.”

Abigail dropped her arms. “It’s your first day, dear. You’ve barely started.”

Says the woman who
has
never worked.
“How did you even find this place?”

Abigail held up a phone. “This is my new toy. Isn’t it fantastic? It has GPS and the Google and weather. It even has apps for shopping.”

“Nice.” Nora wanted to program the phone to send Abigail back to Flagstaff.

Abigail turned to Sylvia and extended her hand. What a pair of matching fabulousness they were! “I’m Abigail, Nora’s mother.”

Sylvia placed her manicured hand in Abigail’s. “Sylvia LaFever. I’m a scientist here.”

Abigail nodded in appreciation. “A scientist. How lovely. Do you live here in Boulder?”

Sylvia hesitated. “Temporarily.”

“No denying, Boulder is charming in its unique way. But a
woman of your obvious sophistication must find the whole casual, hippie atmosphere somewhat provincial.”

Pretentious much, Abigail?

Sylvia preened, obviously enjoying Abigail’s keen perception. “I’m working hard for the Trust, so I don’t have time to miss the luxuries lacking here. But when I wrap this up, I’ll be on a fast plane to Europe.”

Abigail latched on to the conversation. She might disparage
Boulder’s outdoorsy attitude, but it beat the glamour of Abigail’s life in the mountain cabin outside Flagstaff. “What’s your favorite city?”

Nora let them bond over memories of escargot and wineries in the French countryside. Compared to Sylvia’s suit practically cut from dollar bills, anyone might appear dumpy, but Abigail glittered like a gold brick, holding her own on the magnificence scale.

Nora needed to get back to her office. She’d look over the documents Mark said he’d
e-mail
ed her. Then she’d boot up the Trust software and see what those financials revealed.

Now that she had a plan, standing here in the afternoon sunshine made her skin itch. She started to back away from the delightful duo. Her feet crunched on the fall-withered grass. She stopped.

She blinked.

No. I don’t see anything
.