The Last Groom on Earth (11 page)

Bryce glanced over at her and smiled. Angela had barely brushed her hair this morning, and she wore no makeup. She was clad in her usual jeans and her shirt collar was turned under on one side, completing her
barely together look. He thought she was utterly beautiful.

He started the car and turned up the narrow road to the highway. This weekend should have left him in turmoil, he knew. He had acted rashly, without thought for the consequences. He hadn’t even remembered to leave a message at his hotel when they left for the lake, just in case someone at his business needed to reach him. For over a day he had immersed himself in passion. He had spent every moment with a woman with whom he would have sworn he had nothing in common—and yet he did not feel that it had been nearly long enough. He didn’t even
feel
normal; he was almost giddy, smiling for no reason, and he was reluctant to return to work. Somehow every moment spent away from Angela seemed to be time wasted.

Everything was wrong and confused—yet he was blissfully happy.

Bryce glanced over at Angela again. He took Angela’s hand in his and raised it to his lips. He decided he was not going to analyze this. Right now, he was just going to let it be.

Angela and Bryce parted reluctantly at his hotel, and she returned to her condo to shower and dress. When she arrived at work, Bryce was already deep in computer sheets in Kelly’s office. He looked up when Angela stuck her head in the office, and he smiled at her in a way that turned her knees to jelly.

She thought that she would not be able to work, knowing that Bryce was just down the hall, but she was surprised to find that ideas simply flowed out of her. She was soon engrossed in her work, so much so
that when someone knocked on the frame of her open door two hours later, she jumped.

She looked up and saw Bryce standing in her doorway, and a huge grin spread across her face. She was unaware that her skin glowed and her eyes sparkled, too; she was only aware of the uprush of feeling in her chest when she looked at him.

“Hi! Come in.” Angela rose to her feet as he crossed the room and came around her desk.

She wanted to kiss him, and she was wondering if she ought to go close the door when Bryce reached her and bent down and kissed her. Angela quickly threw her arms around him and returned the kiss.

“I’ve been thinking about that all morning,” Bryce said.

Angela knew she was grinning like an idiot, but she couldn’t stop. “I’m glad you decided to act on it.”

“Well, I did manage to make myself wait until I had an excuse to come in here.”

“Oh? What?”

“I have some names I want you to look at.” Bryce laid a sheet of paper down on her desk.

“Okay.” Angela sat back down in her chair and studied the piece of notepaper. On it were the names of several companies, each with an address and phone number beneath it. Across from each name was a dollar amount. “What are these?”

“That’s what I want you to tell me,” Bryce said, perching on her desk. “Who are these companies?”

Frowning, Angela scanned the names, murmuring, “ALM, Brachen, Carswell… now that sounds familiar. Carswell…oh, I remember. That’s the new name for Frank Carter’s company. They employ high-tech temporaries, primarily for computer companies. We
had to hire some extra workers about three months last year. We’ve used them before, but it was called Independent Temporary Services or something like that. Then last year Frank joined up with another company owned by Jason Sidwell, and they named the new one Carswell.”

“Okay.” Bryce drew a line through the name. “What about those first two? ALM or Brachen?”

Angela shook her head slowly, trying to dredge something up from her memory. “Nope. I’m drawing a blank.”

“What about the others?”

Angela slowly drew her finger down the left side of the page. “F & F Graphics—no. Nagel & Boone—I don’t know, sounds like a law firm, doesn’t it? Maybe C.P.A.’s. Tri-Cor—now that’s the company that sold us that new computer equipment last year. Are these companies we paid money to or something?”

“Yeah. The ones that I can’t find any payments to from the year before. I’m looking for something different, see, from the other years. Something that will account for the loss in profit. These are all fairly large amounts. The Nagel one’s the smallest.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell, either. It sounds sort of like a game company or something.”

Angela glanced up and saw her partner walking by and called out, “Hey, Tim! Come here and look at these.”

“What? Hi, Angela.” Tim walked obediently into her office. “Oh, hi, Bryce. What’s going on?”

“Bryce was asking me about these names. You recognize any of them?”

Tim took the list and glanced down it curiously.

“I told him what Carswell was, and I knew Tri-Cor. But the others…”

“Well, Nagel & Boone is that law firm we hired in California. You remember last year when some jerk claimed we’d stolen one of our games from him?”

“Oh, yeah, sure. The judge dismissed it.” Angela looked at Bryce. “Sorry. Our attorney was actually named Silverman, that’s why I didn’t recognize it.”

“And didn’t this Woolman thing sell us the chairs in the conference room?”

Angela frowned. “I thought Marbank always supplied our office furniture.”

“I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. But this sounds familiar.”

“What about Xanadu?”

Tim shook his head. “I don’t know. Why don’t you ask Kelly? She’s more likely to know than we are: I can ask around, see if anybody remembers.”

“No,” Bryce said quickly. “Don’t do that. I’d just as soon we kept this to ourselves for the moment.”

Tim and Angela gazed at him blankly.

“Why?” Angela asked. “I thought you wanted to find out.”

Bryce grimaced. “I do. I just don’t want to alert the entire company.”

The confusion in Angela’s and Tim’s eyes changed simultaneously into astonished understanding.

“You think someone’s stealing from us!”

B
ryce shrugged. “It’s a possibility. If your expenses are out of line, and you all aren’t making them up to avoid taxes, then someone else could be making up the expenses and pocketing the money.”

“No,” Tim said positively. “It’s nobody here.”

“Maybe not.” Bryce looked unconvinced. “There may not be any theft. Every expense you’ve got may be legitimate, and the IRS may drop it like a hot potato. But in the meantime, I have to check out all the possibilities. And I don’t want to give anybody a chance to cover their tracks. That’s why I don’t want any discussion of this outside this office.”

“Not even with Kelly?” Tim asked.

Bryce groaned. “Not with anybody. I shouldn’t even have asked
you.
“

“But surely you can’t suspect Kelly,” Angela protested.

Tim looked troubled. “She’s been with us since the beginning, almost.”

“I don’t
suspect
anybody. Or anything. But I can’t rule anyone or anything out yet, either. You can’t expect to find the truth if you start out with a bunch of assumptions. Besides, the more people who know, the more talk there will be, and if someone is embezzling the money, we don’t want to tip their hand.”

Tim sighed. “All right. I won’t tell Kelly. But I’m positive you’re wrong.”

He turned abruptly and walked off toward his office.

Bryce looked after him with a frown. “He’s going to have a hard time accepting it.”

“So would I,” Angela responded. “I really think you’re on the wrong track here. Just because I don’t remember some of these names doesn’t mean that someone’s embezzling money from us.”

“No. Not necessarily.”

“How will you find out—I mean, whether these are phony companies or not?”

“Well, here’s one simple way.” Bryce pointed to the telephone number beneath F & F Graphics, one of the names that she and Tim had not recognized. “Call and see if it’s a legitimate number.”

Angela picked up the receiver and punched in the numbers. She waited, listening, and after a moment her eyes widened. She hung up the phone, looking troubled. “A recorded message came on. It said this isn’t a working number.”

Excitement sparked in Bryce’s eyes, and he reached across the desk to take the telephone. “All right. What’s the address—Greensboro?” He began to punch in numbers.

Angela fought down the panicky feeling rising in her. “Maybe they’ve just gone out of business.”

“We’ll find out. I’m calling my office. They’ll check upon them.”

Angela’s work was ruined for the rest of the day. She could not get her mind off the possibility that someone was embezzling from them. By the middle of the afternoon, she was even too antsy to stay in the office. Every time she walked down the hall or went to the kitchen downstairs, she couldn’t help looking at her employees and wondering if this one or that one were capable of stealing from them. Worse, she felt guilty for not telling Kelly about Bryce’s suspicions.
Would Kelly think that she had suspected her, too?
She wished she had not told Bryce that she wouldn’t confide in Kelly. Finally she gave up in disgust and drove home, stopping only to tell Bryce where she was going.

He nodded. “Okay. I haven’t heard from my office yet. I’ll come by your condo and let you know when I do.”

It was a little bit better in her own home, but the time seemed to crawl by. She tried to read, but couldn’t, and she resorted to looking at television. There was little on except talk shows, however, and after awhile, she cut the television off, too, and simply sat, staring at the wall and worrying while the afternoon turned into evening.

It was almost eight o’clock when Bryce finally rang her doorbell. Angela opened the door quickly, her stomach filled with butterflies. Bryce’s face was hard and his eyes glittered. Angela knew that that was not a good sign.

“What did you find out?” she asked leadenly.

“The address for F & F is one of those mailbox stores in Greensboro. Okay, maybe they want a nicer address to impress their customers. But there’s also no listing for them in the Greensboro phone book.
Last
year’s phone book—when you sent them the check. So it isn’t just that they’ve gone out of business. I also checked with the Better Business Bureau…never heard of them. Nor is there anyone registered with a dba as F& F Graphics.”

“Dba?”

“Doing business as. You have to register when you do business under a name other than your own.”

“Oh. Yeah. Okay. So it’s definitely a phony com pany.”

“Yeah. A $20,000 phony company.”

“That’s how much we paid them?”

“Yes. One of my employees in Charlotte checked out Brachen. Again, no dba registration, no listing in the phone book, no knowledge of them in the Better Business Bureau. Their address is a post office box, which anyone could rent. But this time they were a little more sophisticated. It’s a voice-mail number, rented by a Mr. Deal. The voice-mail company gets paid with a money order every month, no check. They also checked San Jose for ALM, the other company that neither you nor Tim recognized. Same results.”

Angela gazed at him, wide-eyed, struggling to accept his words. “So someone has stolen money from us.”

“At least $200,000 over the course of the past year and a half. It’s no wonder your profit margin was down.”

Angela felt queasy. “It has to be one of our employees, right? I mean, someone outside the company couldn’t do it?”

“I don’t see how. It has to be someone who has access to your authorization for payment slips. See, someone has to have been turning in phony requisitions for payment, then picking up the money at the mailboxes and endorsing them and putting them in their own bank account.” He paused. “Or else someone with access to the money is just writing checks without bothering with the requisition slips.”

“Oh, no, they couldn’t do that. Only Kelly has check signing authorization, and—”

She stopped, her eyes widening. “Oh, my God. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? You think it’s Kelly who’s stealing from us!”

Bryce sighed and reached out to take her hands. “I’m sorry, Angela, but yes, she’s the most likely candidate.”

Angela jerked her hands out of his. “Are you insane? It couldn’t be Kelly! Anyway, Tim or I have to countersign all the checks.”

Bryce shook his head. “Do you honestly mean to tell me that whenever Kelly gives you checks to sign, you check out whether it’s legitimate? Do you even look at the checks before you sign them?”

“No,” Angela admitted. “But why couldn’t it be what you said before, that someone is filling out phony authorizations, and she just writes the checks? I mean, if she has an authorization slip, she wouldn’t question it.”

“No. Kelly explained the system to me when I first got here. For payments as large as these, the authorization has to be approved by either you or Tim.”

“Well, they could have forged our signatures!” Angela retorted. “Isn’t that possible? Or maybe whoever did it gave us some story, made it seem reasonable for us to pay them.”

“But you and Tim had never heard of any of these companies.”

“Well, then, forgery.” Angela set her jaw stubbornly. “You don’t know Kelly. I do. She could not have done this to us.”

“I checked the authorization slips. There are copies in the accounting office. And there’s not a single authorization slip for any of these expenditures. Only Kelly wouldn’t need an authorization slip. All she would have to do is add these accounts to the computer and key in the figures whenever she wanted another payment.”

“No. It’s impossible.”

“I’m afraid it’s very possible. She holds a great deal of power in your company. She could do this without being questioned. And who was to notice? Neither you nor Tim like the business side of the company. He’s into computers, and you’re into stories. The product was all that either of you thought about. You were careless about the rest of it. Running the office didn’t interest you.”

“I’ll admit that. But it doesn’t mean that Kelly did this. It could have been someone else. You have no proof that it was her.”

“No. We’ll have to leave that up to the police.”

“The police!”

“Yes, of course. This is embezzlement. It’s a crime. They will question Kelly and the other employees. They’ll check into everyone’s finances. If someone’s been spending way over their income, it’ll show.”

“Oh, God.” Angela plunged her fingers into her hair, pulling it backward. “This is a nightmare. It couldn’t, it just couldn’t have been Kelly. You can’t turn her into the police.”

“I’m not turning her in. I will simply give them the facts.”

“And point out that Kelly’s the obvious suspect!” Angela flared.

Bryce’s mouth tightened. “For some reason, I thought you would be glad to discover where your money’s been going. I would have thought you would like to know who did it and make sure that that person gets punished.”

“Not if it means that Kelly gets railroaded into prison!”

“She won’t be railroaded.”

“She didn’t do it! You don’t know her like I do. She is incapable of stealing. Why, she has trouble even telling a lie. I’ve seen her—she gets all twitchy.”

“She didn’t have to lie to you to take this money.”

“She’s my friend. We’ve been friends for ten years. We go shopping together, we go to the movies.” Angela stopped and grimaced. “Okay, maybe that sounds silly, but I know she wouldn’t betray me. She wouldn’t do anything to hurt Tim or me.”

“It’s easy to tell yourself that doing this sort of thing wouldn’t really hurt you and Tim. Maybe the business makes a little bit less profit, but it’s not like it’s going to bankrupt either of you. She wouldn’t envision that the trouble with the IRS might arise. I’m sure she felt that her tracks were amply covered.”

“Kelly would not steal from Tim and me! The three of us are practically family.”

“I have news for you. Even family members steal from each other.”

“You’re so cynical.” Angela glared at him.

“I’m realistic.” Bryce folded his arms across his chest and stared stonily back at her.

“Then give me one good reason why she would do it. She makes a good salary—a very good salary.”

“But not as good as what you and Tim make. You two are the owners of the company.”

“Kelly has shares in H & A.”

“It’s not the same. Think of it from her point of view. She started out with you in the beginning. She’s always done all the financial work. Might she not start to feel resentful, to think, ‘Look at all I’ve done for this company, yet I’m not a partner. That isn’t fair. Where would they be without me?’ Maybe she looks at all the things she’s done and thinks she should be compensated more. Maybe she looks at what you have and feels envy. Sure, she’s making great money for someone her age, with her credentials; Yes, you’ve given her a lot. But that isn’t necessarily enough for some people. Sometimes they’re eaten up with jealousy and resentment. If she were, she might very well decide to rectify what she perceives as an injustice.”

Angela stared at him in horror. “No! Kelly’s not like that at all. I remember her telling me once that she’s glad that she doesn’t have the weight of the company on her back, that she wouldn’t like to have the responsibility. Besides, she knows that it’s Tim’s and my work that
is
the business.”

“People don’t always tell the truth.” He pointed this out reasonably.

“Well, they don’t always lie, either!” Angela snapped back. “Why are you so determined to make Kelly the villain?”

“I’m not. I’m just looking at the facts, and they all point to—”

“Forget your damn facts!” Angela blazed. “I
know
Kelly, and I know she could not have done it!”

Bryce groaned. “You’re being irrational.”

“And you’re being cold and inhuman!”

“I’m being logical. Dammit, Angela, you’re letting your emotions carry you away. You have no basis for believing that Kelly didn’t do it.”

“I do have a basis for it! It’s something you wouldn’t understand. My basis is ten years of being around her, of knowing her, of seeing her do things, hearing what she says. Simply because I pay attention to my emotions doesn’t mean I’m an idiot. It means that I notice the intangibles. I process those other things that are just as important, if not more important, than the black-and-white facts! I’ve always acted on my gut instinct in my business, and it’s proven very successful.”

“This isn’t the same. Gut instincts may be fine in judging what games people are going to like or dislike. But they don’t stand up against factual proof. Why are you being so damn pigheaded about this?”

“I’m not. I simply have different values than you.” Angela looked at him coldly. “I believe in things like trust and friendship. I value
feelings.
Obviously you don’t.”

“Kelly has betrayed your friendship and trust. You don’t owe her any loyalty. You’re just being naive.”

“That’s better than having no heart!”

“Don’t be a fool,” he began roughly, reaching out to take her arm.

She jerked away from him. “No! Don’t touch me. I don’t know how I could have ever fallen in love with you! You’re exactly what I thought you were to begin with—an inhuman machine, cold and logical, incapable of understanding anything but numbers. You don’t know how to feel. You couldn’t fall in love because it’s not written down in a column of numbers!”

Angela whirled and stormed out of the living room, slamming the front door after her for good measure. Bryce, left standing behind her, let out a string of curses and slammed his hand against the wall.

Damn that woman! She was so pigheaded and irrational, so determined not to listen to reason!

He was tempted to get back into his car and drive back to Charlotte.
Let her continue to be sucked dry by her supposed friend; let her try out her “gut instinct” and “feelings” theory on the IRS.

But he knew he could not do that.
It would be like…like abandoning the woman he loved.
Bryce sat down abruptly on the couch; he felt for a moment strangely unsteady. Angela was infuriating; she was far too emotional, too impulsive. Not at all the sort of woman for him. He had told himself so a million times. But now he admitted that she was the only woman he wanted. However infuriating and emotional and impulsive she was, she was also the warmth and love he had been searching for all his life. He thought of what she had said, that she didn’t know how she could have fallen in love with him, and he smiled.
She loved him, too.
It was absurd and irrational, but it was true, and Bryce knew that he would not have it any other way.