SEATTLE CINDERELLA: FOUR-IN-ONE COLLECTION Page 11

  Annie choked, coughed, gasped, and pressed one hand to her throat. “Why don’t you turn it in to the police?”

  “This isn’t television; I don’t know what they would do. Officially the car is no longer considered stolen because Cindy reported it returned. I don’t know if they’d even want it now. To be honest, I’m not really sure what to do with it.”

  “It doesn’t make sense to me why a thief wouldn’t have taken the key with him.”

  “Probably because he didn’t want to take the chance of being caught with the evidence. As well, leaving the key in the ignition makes it ready to go when he gets back.” As the words came out of his mouth, Brent’s stomach clenched. When the thief came back, he would get the car out the same way he got it in—by going first through Annie’s house in order to get into the garage. Locks could be picked, and if not, then windows could be broken. He’d once seen a movie where a thief cut through a window and got in without actually breaking the glass, so there had been no sound.

  Key or not, the thief could make a silent entry in the middle of the night when no one would be watching.

  For at least the rest of the week, Annie was alone, unprotected.

  “You can’t stay at the house. The thief is going to come back for the car.”

  Annie shook her head. “I already thought of that. After I had all the locks changed, I put signs on all the doors and windows and the garage saying the police found the car and it’s gone.”

  He pinched the bridge of his nose. “And you think he’ll just go away?”

  “He has to. There’s no more reason for him to be there. Whoever did this will see the signs and leave.”

  Brent couldn’t see the thief disappearing quietly in the night. His mind bounced to the skewed thinking of the villain in the last book he’d read, a mystery by T. J. Zereth. All he could see was Annie being the victim of the thief’s anger for foiling what could have been a perfect crime. “I don’t think so.”

  Annie stood. “I do. I also think it’s time for me to get back to work.”

  Brent stood as well. This hadn’t helped him feel better about things—everything felt worse. “This wasn’t the real reason I wanted to talk. I wanted to talk about why you’ve been having such trouble with our accounting program.”

  “I don’t know why. I know that software, but it’s not working how I was taught.”

  He waited for her to say more but she didn’t. Instead she gathered the wrappers, walked to the nearest garbage container, stuffed them in, and returned to the parking lot.

  Brent hurried to catch up to her. “I guess that discussion is over.”

  “I guess it is.”

  They made it back to his office in what he considered record time, and Annie seated herself at Walter’s desk.

  Standing behind her, he watched in silence while Annie struggled to find his missing invoice but couldn’t.

  She pushed the chair back and looked up at him. “I really have to get back so Cindy can have her lunch. Just reenter your invoice, and I’ll try to figure it out tomorrow.”

  He experienced some degree of relief that she promised to come back tomorrow, but that didn’t help his fears for tonight. He pictured Annie alone and stalked by an enraged thief.

  Brent rammed his hands into his pockets. “I don’t like you being alone at the house tonight. I think you should have someone stay with you.”

  “None of my friends can stay the night, and I won’t ask them to. Everyone has to go to work in the morning.”

  He sucked in a deep breath as she opened the door to leave. “Then what about me?”

  She froze in her tracks and spun around. “You? Stay at my house?”

  “Yeah. With Cindy gone, you have an extra room.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Before he could respond, she was gone.

  Being reasonably intelligent, he didn’t approach her again for the rest of the day, but he watched her as much as he could through the window, across the parking lot. After she left he finished his tasks, went home, and packed what he would need.

  By his usual bedtime, he was where he wanted to be—on Annie’s front lawn.

  He had just tucked the flexible support poles into their slots when Annie’s front door opened.

  She stood in the doorway wearing a ratty T-shirt and baggy sweatpants that had seen better days. She stared at his tent, firmly set in the corner of her yard behind the bushes then back to him. “What is that?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s a one-man tent. Can’t you tell?”

  “I can tell. What I should have asked is, what is it doing here?”

  “I’m spending the night. So I can keep an eye on things.” As he spoke he strolled to her garage and straightened the sign she’d taped to the door, advising the thief that the car was already gone.

  “Are you crazy? What will the neighbors think?”

  He pressed his hands over his heart and dropped to one knee. “That I’m a scorned lover, pining for a glimpse of you at the golden first light of morning.”

  Annie lowered her head and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Or a demented homeless person. Brent, go home. I give up. I’ll call someone who can spend the night with me.”

  Brent pointed to his wristwatch. “Too late. Your friends are probably in bed by now.” Even though he’d wanted someone to spend the night with her, the more he’d thought about it, if the thief was good at picking locks in silence, Annie and her friend would sleep through it. Both women would be mugged in the middle of the night, helpless against an armed robber. It was better for Brent to be where he could catch the thief before the break-in happened. He was a light sleeper, especially on the thin sleeping bag versus his comfortable bed. Also, here he would have the element of surprise.

  So he didn’t have to shout, he approached Annie to talk to her on the porch. “This will be just like camping, except I don’t have to pay for a site and there won’t be any raccoons.”

  Her mouth opened but no words came out.

  He smiled. She was weakening.

  “So it’s settled. Sweet dreams.” He jogged to his tent, crawled inside, and pulled up the zipper before she could protest.

  The sleeping bag was almost unrolled when he heard tapping on the tent.

  He unzipped the door just wide enough for a peek.

  Annie’s hand, holding a key, poked through. “If you insist on doing this, here’s my house key so you can use the bathroom and the shower after I leave in the morning. Lock up before you leave. Good night.”

  Chapter 8

  Annie cringed, feeling his pain, as behind her Brent pressed his fist into the small of his back and groaned softly.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, blanking out Walter’s computer and the mess of the accounting program, replacing it with the image of Brent’s tent hidden behind the bushes in her front yard.

  Brent’s presence in her yard all night had made her realize the potential for danger was real. At first she’d simply double-checked all the locks in the windows accessible from the ground. Since Brent was so concerned, she’d put a board in every window, including the second floor and the patio door. Then she’d tucked a fishhook next to every lock that could be reached through a broken window and attached a Christmas bell to every window so if the window was moved, the bell would ring and wake her up. She’d even scattered marbles on the floor beneath each window, in case a thief did manage to get in.

  The only possible entrance she’d been unable to booby-trap was the front door. And that hadn’t mattered because Brent wasn’t far away.

  She’d slept like a baby, comfortable and secure in her soft, warm bed, while Brent had slept outside on the cold, hard ground.

  Before she left for work she’d made coffee and muffins for Brent’s stomach, but there was nothing she could do for his back.

  Brent stepped forward and rested one hand on top of the monitor. “Have you found my missing invoice yet?”

  Annie shook her
head. “No. I also can’t find a few adjustments that I made for journal entries either.”

  Luke appeared behind Brent. “Walter’s done our accounting since we started our business. He’s never had trouble.”

  She gritted her teeth. She was starting to question Walter’s methods, but she couldn’t find anything specific that was wrong. All she could do was open a different customer file and continue her search for the invoice that she knew was there but couldn’t find. Then her cell phone beeped with a text message.

  As soon as Luke and Brent were occupied elsewhere, she grabbed her phone to read the message. Zella’s reply confirmed what she already knew. Zella had never given a house key to anyone. The only extra house key was one their mother had made and left with their neighbor in case of an emergency.

  This evening she would visit their neighbor, but for now her priority was finding Brent’s missing invoice.

  After painstakingly searching every customer file, she found nothing.

  Brent returned from dealing with his customer. “Did you find it?”

  Rubbing her tired eyes, she sighed. “No. The only thing that could have happened is that you accidentally deleted it.”

  “That’s not possible. There are no numbers missing in the sequence.”

  Luke tapped his fingers on the back of the chair. “We’ll just wait for Walter to come back. Thanks for your time, Annie. We’ll call if we need you again.”

  Annie had never felt so dismissed. She left quickly and returned to finish up her work for Cindy.

  She hoped Cindy still wanted her around.

  Brent started to count to ten but only made it to seven.

  He turned to Luke, reminding himself that Luke had been his best friend since high school. “How could you do that? You pretty much just fired her.”

  Luke waved one hand in the air. “You saw it for yourself. She can’t do it. Not only is she not able to balance, she can’t work the program.”

  “Neither can either of us.”

  “Neither of us are accountants.”

  Brent pointed toward the computer. “You don’t have to be an accountant to do basic data entry on a system like this. It’s designed to be user friendly for idiots like us.”

  Luke frowned. “Us idiots never had any trouble with it until Annie came along to help. Since then, nothing has worked right. I hope it doesn’t take Walter too long to fix whatever Annie has done.”

  Mentally, Brent began a list of the things that had gone wrong. While what Luke had said was true, some of the things that had gone wrong hadn’t been touched by Annie until after he or Luke discovered they didn’t work. “What if this is a software issue? We haven’t gotten an upgrade since we bought the program. If the problem is caused by an incompatibility with old software and a new operating system, then you’ve accused Annie for nothing. What if Walter has been having the same trouble?”

  “Walter would have told us.”

  Somehow Brent wasn’t as sure as Luke. “I don’t think so. I’m going to go talk to Annie.”

  Brent dug in the bottom drawer until he found the CD of the program disc. As he walked toward the door, Annie’s car drove out of the parking lot.

  Instead of going to Cindy’s shop, he called Cindy on his cell. “Why did Annie leave?” he asked, raising his voice over the background noise of power tools.

  “I don’t know. She said she had something to do at home. I don’t know when she’s coming back, or even if she is coming back.”

  Brent sucked in a deep breath. He didn’t want Annie to go home alone. He’d planned on accompanying her to check out the house before she went in. Just because it was daylight didn’t mean her house was safe. The way he figured it, the thief had put the car in the garage during the daytime while she was at work none the wiser. So he could be there right now—angry that the car was gone.

  “Thanks.” He snapped his phone shut and turned to Luke. “There’s something I have to do. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

  Because of the rising panic, it felt like he caught every light red on his way to Annie’s house. When he arrived he found her car parked in the driveway, but the tightness in his gut intensified when she didn’t answer the door. The sign still taped to the garage door that the Mustang was no longer there didn’t calm him.

  He was ready to kick the door down when he heard Annie’s voice in the distance. Following the sound, he saw her next door, talking to her neighbor.

  Knowing she was safe, he sank down on the porch step to wait for her.

  She started walking home, and as soon as she saw him, her pace quickened.

  He didn’t want to admit how worried he was, so he pushed himself up and stood slowly, trying to appear casual as she approached. “What were you doing next door?”

  She held up a key. “I asked Nadine for our house key back. I told her I changed the locks. She usually has it hanging on a hook by the door, but it had fallen down under the table. We found it, but it was covered in dust and obviously hadn’t been used for years. This is the only spare key there is, so I’m right back to square one.”

  Instead of making him feel better, the confirmation that the only known spare key hadn’t been used made him feel worse. “The reason I came is because I wanted to talk to you about something.”

  “You couldn’t have phoned?”

  “No, I have to show it to you. I need to ask you some computer-related stuff.”

  “I’m no expert. I really don’t know much about computers.”

  He waited behind her as she unlocked the door then followed her in.

  “I was wondering if part of the reason we’ve been having trouble is because of our old program and our new computer.” He held up the program disc. “I wondered if you know someone who knows more about it.”

  “I might. Let me put the disc into my computer so I can get the dates and version number.” As she accepted it, a smile broke out across her face. “Wait. I have a better idea. My mother has a really old computer. She says it works fine and has no need to upgrade it. Let’s install it there and see if it works any differently. I even have all your data with me.”

  Brent sucked in a deep breath. “What do you mean?”

  “I do a backup every week out of habit. I did one from your system a few days ago, so it’s even fairly current. Let’s see if this works.”

  Patience was not a virtue of Brent’s; it seemed like forever while they waited first for the ancient computer to boot up and then through the grueling amount of time it took to install the program. Finally when everything was loaded, Annie called up the file. “Here we go. Let’s see the most recent invoices entered.” She hit the button and recalled the last number used.

  “That’s my missing invoice.”

  Annie hit a few more keys, and a stream of numbers appeared. “Here’s my missing journal entry.” She sighed. “That means this is good news and bad news. It appears that the problems have been compatibility issues all along. So that’s good news. But the bad news is that you have to buy the upgrade and hope that no data has been compromised. That doesn’t really make sense to me, but we have the proof right here.”

  Brent tried to be happy, but all he could see was a lot of extra work, and expense, to get all the data fixed.

  Annie stood. “If you don’t mind, I have to get back to the office. There’s still a few things I need to do.”

  Brent followed her out, then waited in his car while she locked up. He followed her back to the parking lot, but when she went back inside the muffler shop, instead of going back to check on Luke, Brent followed Annie.

  Cindy stood at the counter, writing in the appointment book. “Annie, what are you doing back? I didn’t really expect you.”

  “I have a couple of things I wanted to finish up.” She headed back to her desk, but didn’t sit down. “My computer’s turned off.”

  Cindy nodded. “I needed to put in a special order, so I shut down what you were doing and used your computer since i
t was already on, then I guess I automatically turned it off. I don’t mind if you go home and finish what you were doing tomorrow.” Without waiting for a response, Cindy turned and went into the shop.

  When the door closed behind her, Brent saw it as an opportunity. “I think we have a lot to do tomorrow to re-enter the missing data, so let’s take advantage of this as a break before the grueling work begins. Let me take you out for dinner.”

  “Dinner? But—”

  “No buts. Let’s reward ourselves for solving the problem.”

  Brent held his breath.

  Annie sighed. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  He turned and stared walking toward the door with his back to her, so she wouldn’t see him smile. “We’ll take my car.”

  Chapter 9

  Annie fiddled with her napkin, folded it neatly beside the water glass, straightened the cutlery, and then picked up the water glass, shaking it a little to see if she could get the ice cubes to settle.

  Anything to have something to do with her hands. She listened woodenly when the waiter came to announce the special of the day and give them the menus.

  She held hers up between them like a shield. Although she didn’t know why. Since Cindy and Luke’s wedding, she’d seen Brent nearly every day. Today was no different than any other day.

  Except for the romantic music strumming in the background. And the flickering candles in the muted light. And the aroma of sizzling steaks and good food that could never be duplicated by a toss-in-the-oven lasagna. And the fact that someone else was going to do the dishes.

  Not to mention that she was sitting across the table from a tall, dark, handsome man.

  Annie shook her head behind the menu. That wasn’t a thought she wanted to have about Brent. She wanted to work for him, not have his children.

  She thunked her head to the table.

  “Annie? Are you okay?”

  No, she wasn’t. She bolted upright. “Sure. Fine. I’m fine. Very fine. Couldn’t be finer.”