Broken Trust Read online

  “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-mailed 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 intraoffice 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. Apparently, 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 the 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 3x4-foot color maps tacked on the walls.

  Sylvia spoke as though conducting a grade school field trip. “The mountain 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 sh
ading 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 Mount 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 Finance Director was murdered. The star scientist is a prima donna. The Executive Director 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 returned from a fund-raising luncheon. Her slacks weren’t even wrinkled.

  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-mailed 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.

  The flash of blue to the side of the farm house stole Nora’s breath.

  No. Not now. Not ever.

  She had left Flagstaff. Fled the mountain with its real or imagined spirits. They wouldn’t follow her here. But he had followed her, at least to Mount Evans, hadn’t he? Unless she was crazy. And of course, Nora was crazy. Still, she was an ignorant white woman lacking in any spiritual quality that might appeal to a kachina.

  “What is it you and Nora were talking about?” Abigail didn’t seem to mind prying into Trust business.

  Sylvia responded as if it were a
simple request. “I need her to cut me a check.”

  I can hear you, Nora wanted to say.

  “Good luck with that,” Abigail said and they both laughed. They’d only known each other for a few minutes and already worked in tandem to torque off Nora. “She can be so tight-fisted and serious.”

  If by tight-fisted you mean set up a generous budget that doesn’t include world cruises every six months, then yes, I’m a tightwad.

  Sylvia seemed quite taken with Abigail. “I’m glad to know it’s not just me.”

  “Oh heavens, no. She’s been like this since she was a toddler. When she was six she begged me to get her a cash register. Not a toy, mind you. She settled for an adding machine. She spent days writing figures in columns and adding them up. It was cute then.”

  Nora forced herself to stare at the side of the house where she’d imagined the kachina. Maybe a staffer was taking a smoke break and wore a blue shirt. Of course there was no kachina. Kachinas didn’t exist.

  “At least she’s had lots of practice,” Sylvia said. More of their instant-bestie twittering.

  “We should have lunch soon,” Abigail said.

  Sylvia headed back to the house. “It’s been delightful meeting you.”

  Nora faced her mother with a stern expression, folding her arms.

  Abigail raised her eyebrows. “What? I just stopped by to get the key to your apartment. I’ll go there and wait for you. I know you couldn’t possibly take time from your first day to spend with your mother.”

  Nora dug in her jeans for her keys and started to pull off the apartment key. “How long are you staying?”

  Abigail shrugged. “That depends, dear.”

  A hard fist formed in Nora’s chest. She half-considered refusing to give her key to Abigail and insisting she turn the car around and head home.

  She saw it again. The blue. It appeared, then disappeared. Damn it.

  Abigail plucked the key from Nora’s limp hand. “You don’t look well, Nora. You need to take better care of yourself.”