Single Sashimi (26 page)

Esme returned and plunked the coffee cup down.

“Thanks. I just emailed the slides to you.”

Esme looked down and bit her bottom lip until it looked like a raspberry. “I hope you don’t mind…I had already said yes…I told him six o’clock…”

“You have a date? That’s fine.” What was Esme’s problem? Venus wasn’t a monster, expecting her to stay late to work on a presentation that wasn’t due until next week.

Esme’s V-shaped smile and strange, direct gaze sent a bolt down Venus’s spine. “I’m so glad you understand. When Drake asked me out, I was so excited. I didn’t want to disappoint him.” She breezed out of the office.

Venus wasn’t sure how to feel. She liked Esme, and she—logically—knew she
shouldn’t
be jealous about Drake. But even after a week, the memory of the almost-kiss in the snow burned into her brain, making her a liar.

But why would Drake want to kiss her if he was interested in Esme? That seemed out of character—he was never a flirt. Which meant he might be open to Venus if she made a move… She quelled the surge of electricity that jolted through her heart. No, Esme liked him. Esme, the best Operations Manager she’d ever had, the nicest person she knew, the first woman outside of her cousins who seemed to like her. Venus would not go after the man Esme confessed to liking. That would be completely heartless of her. She reached for the coffee.

Ugh, Esme made the coffee strong this time. Venus went back to scanning resumes.

She jerked awake from a snooze. Too little sleep last night? She gulped down more coffee. The résumés blurred in front of her…

A hammer was pounding on her desk. She could feel it through her skull. Which was strange, because she couldn’t understand what her head was doing on her desk in the first place.

Venus opened bleary eyes to the sideways picture of her phone. She blinked, and it came into focus a bit more, but it still lay sideways. She inhaled, only then feeling the hard surface of her desk pressed against her cheek. Had she fallen asleep? After all that coffee?

She closed her mouth, feeling the sliminess of—oh no, she’d drooled onto her desk. An attempt to raise her head brought the hammer pounding to a thunder. Her skull had cracked open.

Dizzy. She eased upright. Room spinning. How long had she been out? She creaked her head sideways to check the computer screen—the screensaver was on. Those psychedelic wavy lines made her close her eyes. Okay, well, the blinds were open and the room was dark. Must be at least past six.

Had she caught the flu? That was just great. She should go home and take something.

A note on her pristine desk caught her eye.

I told everyone to leave you alone—hope that was okay.–Esme
.

So Esme had seen her sprawled out on her desk? Venus frowned and massaged her neck. Why would that bother her? It’s not as if Esme took incriminating pictures or brought the entire company in to laugh at her. She’d even saved her further embarrassment by telling people to leave her alone. So why did Venus feel like she’d been lying here naked instead of just asleep?

The blood pounded in her head as if it would burst out of a vein any second. Venus fumbled for her desk drawer to get her purse—locked. She’d locked it? That’s right, she had. Where had she put the key? Oh, that’s right, her blazer pocket. Funny, her blazer was creased and twisted around in the opposite direction she’d been lying.

She unlocked the drawer and got out her Advil bottle. She gulped a couple tablets down with the bottled water on her desk. The liquid made her mouth feel less like a rat’s nest, so she drank all of it.

Time to go home. She reached into the drawer to get her purse and computer bag.

The bag was upside down. It lay near the back of the drawer as it had been before, but flipped over. Such a trifle…but she pulled it out and unzipped it.

A jumble of cords fell out. Rather than neatly coiled and tied up on itself the way it always was, the power cord lay in a haphazard nest on the laptop. She hadn’t left it that way last night; she hadn’t left it that way this morning when she had briefly opened it to make sure it had enough battery life to last the day in her desk drawer.

She only used this computer for one thing—the Spiderweb.

She was having a heart attack. A squeezing in her chest made her gasp and rub her breastbone with her shaking palm. She heaved to draw in breath, but the air came in reedy gasps.

Someone had seen her development tool.

S
he didn’t care who she had to run over, she was not going to be late to work today.

Venus slid around a slow-moving ancient Honda and revved her engine in the early morning traffic. A blaring honk followed her from the guy she’d just cut off.

Her phone rang. She answered with her Bluetooth wireless earpiece. “Hello?”

“Hello, dear.”

“Mom, this is not a good time.” She squeezed in between two cars so she could make the freeway exit coming up. More honking.

“Well!” Her mother’s huffing sounded like hurricane winds in her earpiece. “That’s a nice welcome.”

“Mom, the presentation is today.”

“What presentation?”

“The one I told you about last week. At lunch. That I was stressing over.”

“Speaking of lunch, you should go to lunch with me today. There’s this new restaurant I want you to take me to.”

“Mom!” Venus jammed on the brakes before she rear-ended the minivan in front of her. “The presentation?”

“What presentation?”

Venus strangled her mother’s imaginary neck until the car behind her honked to get going. She hit the accelerator, but not soon enough to prevent an SUV from cutting in front of her, forcing her to hit the brakes again. Her padded computer bag slid from her passenger seat and thumped onto the floorboards.

Aargh! She reached over to grab it and slide it back on the seat, enduring another round of honking from the cars behind her. She couldn’t stop that rush of despair that blew up from her stomach like a typhoon every time she looked at her laptop—ever since last week. She knew it had been hacked into, knew the development tool had been copied. She hadn’t had time to do much more than worry excessively about it.

One thing she did know—Yardley was behind it.

“So, dear—lunch?” Mom’s voice had that distracted tone—she was probably making breakfast or something like that.

“No, I’m too busy today.”

Tense silence.

Oh, brother.

“Mom, I told you I have a presentation today—”

“It’s only a presentation; it takes one hour. You have eight hours in your workday. You can’t spare an hour to eat lunch with your mother?”

“I still need to go over the slides with Esme”—she hit the brakes as she took the turn on the exit lane a bit too fast—“and set up the meeting room equipment”—she turned the corner and stopped hard at the sudden line of cars waiting for the light—“and go over the schedule with Gerry.” Could this light take
any
longer?

“That’s not going to take you
all
morning, is it?”

“Today. Is. Not. A. Good. Day. Mother.” Finally the light turned green.

Click
.

Oh, great. Just when things between them were getting better. Maybe she should have offered to have lunch tomorrow. Why did she always think of these things too late?

She screeched into the parking lot and grabbed her stuff. She wasn’t actually late, but she wasn’t as early as she wanted to be.

Darla came running out the doors of the building, heading straight for her.

“Esme quit!”
Her voice echoed off the concrete walls.

What? Without talking to her? Without warning? “Today?”

“This morning. As of an hour ago.”

“Why?” Venus hustled toward the doors. “Is she still here?”

“No, she left!” Darla heaved. “She didn’t even tell Gerry in person. She sent an email, and then flung the news over her shoulder at me as she left the building. I had to be the one to tell Gerry. She’s having a cow, by the way.”

Unnecessary news because Venus heard the shouting as soon as she got within a foot of the doors. Esme gone? What was going on? She clenched her jaw and inhaled, then yanked open the glass door.

The noise level sounded like a hundred cats in heat. She plunged indoors.

Darla followed. “We have another problem.”

“What?”

“Macy crashed the server last night. A bunch of people have been here since four this morning trying to fix it.”

“Where is she?”

“She quit!”

Naturally.

Darla clenched shaking fists to her stomach. Her eyes were wide, but her jaw was so tight, it could have been wired shut. At least she held in her fear and anger rather than unleashing it, which somebody was doing down the hallway.

“Does Gerry know about Macy?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said dryly.

“When is the Amity Group supposed to arrive?”

Darla straightened, tugging at her modest silk blouse. “Not until noon.”

Venus realized Darla had dressed the part of a receptionist today, and a tiny piece of stress melted away. “Good. Then we have time. Come with me.” She marched behind the lobby down the corridor.

As she turned the corner, she discovered that not all the noise was emotional. Some of the voices were merely hurried as techs shouted to each other, trying to fix the system. So different from the first day, when they’d all been gathered in the breakroom.

The argument emanated from Gerry’s office. Venus knocked and didn’t wait before barging in.

Lisa, the website programmer under Macy, faced off against Gerry. Lisa stood as immovable as a stone Buddha while Gerry’s white face had the skin pulled back like a corpse. Although she stood behind the desk, her shoulders angled forward as if she’d leap over the top and beat up the poor girl.

Lisa turned toward Venus as they walked in. She panted as if she’d run a race and her mouth was solid and mutinous, but her wide eyes had a frantic gleam.

She’d rescue the poor tech first. “Lisa, the system—”

Lisa turned to her with desperate appeal. “The system is a complete mess—”

Gerry slammed a fist down on her desk. “The system wouldn’t be a mess if you hadn’t—”

Lisa rounded on Gerry. “There was no way to know Macy would—”

“You’re senior programmer under her—you should have been watching…”

Venus gave Gerry an urgent,
Shut up and let me talk to her
look. Gerry’s nostrils flared, but she turned and stalked toward the window of her office.

Venus had never met such melodramatic women in her entire life. Did they pump hormones into the air filtration system or something? The mess today was huge, but Gerry needed a serious chill pill, as the high school girls would say. Venus remembered how she’d dealt with Angeline on her first day here. Okay, that had been a bit harsh, but Venus had only worked with men before coming to Bananaville. She’d learned a thing or two about dealing with women since then.

“Lisa, it’s not your fault.” Venus heard her mother’s voice. She’d pitched her tone exactly like Mom when she was being charming and soothing—which she usually did when she wanted something. But maybe that was the solution, since Venus certainly didn’t have a nurturing personality.

She kept her voice quiet, in hopes Lisa would calm also. “We know you do your best. There’s nothing you could have done…” And more repetitive, calming things, which seemed to work because Lisa’s breathing slowed from offended heaves to a more normal rhythm.

Venus touched her shoulders gingerly, but it seemed to relax her more. She turned her gently and pleaded with Darla over the girl’s head. Darla obliged by wrapping an arm around her shoulders. “You go with Darla, now, and we’ll take care of everything.”

As soon as the door closed behind them, Venus hissed at Gerry, “Do you have to argue with everyone?”

At the same time, Gerry whirled. “Do you know what the Web director that
you
hired did last night?”

They faced off, each breathing fire. But Gerry seemed to check herself, and she took a deep breath and backed off. A bit disgruntled, Venus did the same. Since when was volatile Gerry the calm one of both of them?

Gerry sat at her desk. “I’m sorry. When you hired Macy, you certainly couldn’t predict what she’d do.”

“Her résumé was stellar.” Venus rubbed the back of her neck. “I should have followed her more closely. I would have known she was incompetent.”

Gerry tapped two fingers on her desk. “Lisa said it was deliberate.”

“What?”

“Sabotage. Why would anyone sabotage us?”

“I…” The thought of her tampered laptop made her pause. Was all this connected somehow? Was
Esme
connected with it? She couldn’t breathe for a moment. “Esme didn’t say why she left, did she?”

“No. Just polite nothings.” Gerry gave a groaning sigh. “Well, we can’t do anything about it now.” She checked her watch. “It’s seven thirty.”

“So we have, what, four and a half hours before Amity shows up?”

“Do you have the slides for the presentation?”

“Yes. I’ll do the presentation.” The acid boiled in her stomach.

“We need the server up so we can demonstrate it for Amity.”

“Lisa’s working on it—”

“Lisa’s smart, but she’s just out of college. Can we call anyone to help us out?”

Venus snapped her fingers. “Jaye. I’ll call him.” She fumbled with her purse and grabbed her cell phone.

Gerry waved her out. “I’ll call Drake.”

Venus hustled down the hallway, trying to keep her computer bag from slipping from her shoulder. “Jaye, I need help. Our server is down.”

“Venus…I’m in L.A.”

“What?”

“Last-minute trip. Manager told me yesterday. Left last night.”

She kicked open her office door and dumped her bags on the floor. “Well…what are you doing now?”

“In traffic. Talking to animators in an hour.”

“Okay, I’m going to have Lisa call you.”

“Now?”

“I need the server up. Talk her through it.”

“Sure. ’Cause, you know, it’s really easy to fix something you can’t see.”

“Just do something. It’s not like I have a ton of options.”

“Okay, okay.” He clicked off.

Venus speed-dialed Lisa and gave her Jaye’s cell phone number while she booted up her computer. No emails from Esme. Rats. The latest version of the presentation she had was the one Esme sent on Friday. They’d worked on a new version yesterday, and Esme had promised to email a copy to her—but apparently she’d had other things on her mind, like quitting and leaving them hanging out to dry. She’d have to get it off Esme’s computer.

She swept into Esme’s office. The pink stuffed bears were gone from her desk. A wave like an electric field passed through her, making her shiver and her stomach cramp. As she clenched her midriff, she fisted her hands, fighting a sudden desire to rip the stuffing out of those dratted bears if they were still here. And the computer was still on. She toggled the mouse to disrupt the screensaver.

Gone. Wiped clean of every piece of data that wasn’t an application.

Venus collapsed into the chair, her stomach vibrating like a truck engine about to blow. This was deliberate. It must have taken Esme at least an hour. She knew Venus would need that presentation, and she’d purposefully destroyed it.

Venus said a few not very nice words.

Gerry had mentioned sabotage of the server. It was starting to sound more plausible by the minute. Was it connected to her laptop too? That bitter coffee, waking up as if she had a hangover… She opened their Instant Messaging application and sent Gerry an IM:

Esme’s hard drive is completely erased
.

What do u mean erased?

She erased the presentation too
.

Can u redo?

Yes
. She hoped so.
Did Esme or Macy have anything against Bananaville? You? Drake?

I’ll ask. On the phone w/ Drake
.

While waiting, Venus looked to see if she could recover anything from the hard drive. The vibrating in her stomach had moved to her hands, and she found it hard to type.

Running feet down the hall. Stopping, starting again. “Venus! There you are!” Darla grabbed onto the doorframe to stop herself before she ran past. She looked frantic enough to combust, but she seemed to be trying to keep her voice down.

Oh. Man. “What is it?”

“It’s Amity!” Darla started to hyperventilate. “They’ve arrived early!”