Chapter Twenty-One
Emily
I woke up after a lengthy nap in Rhett’s arms, feeling a tingle of something along my nerves. I had realized something while I’d been asleep, long after we’d gotten into bed together. I’d woken up because something in my dream told me that I knew what I needed to do, how I could work toward fixing the problem with Dad and maybe figure out how to mend fences with him. I couldn’t even think specifically about what it was, but I knew I needed to go to the office and look at Jacob’s stuff. He was the one who’d come up with the deal, so he’d have the details that would help me to get things in the direction they should be going in.
I shifted in my bed and glanced at Rhett. He was fast asleep next to me, one arm draped over my belly. I thought about waiting until morning—early morning—and letting him in on what I’d figured out, or maybe waking him up and telling him. A look at the clock in my room told me that it was nine at night. We’d gotten lunch on the way in and ordered Chinese delivery to the apartment, and we’d fallen asleep together after I’d taken the liberty of showing him the shower—and after we’d had our own little romp there together.
But I didn’t know if my hunch would bear any fruit at all, and I didn’t want Rhett to be there if nothing came about. I waited until he shifted, and then I carefully slid out from underneath his arm. I slithered out of the bed and padded across my bedroom. In the gloomy light that came in from the bathroom, I could see Rhett on my bed. He didn’t stir as I grabbed something to wear from the dresser and pulled it on. It was well after hours at the office; there wouldn’t be anyone there in the building except for maybe one or two of the janitorial staff, and the night guards. I didn’t need to dress up or look more than just regularly decent.
I went into the living room and found the shoes I’d taken off at the door, along with my purse. I took my phone off of the charger and shoved it in my bag, and grabbed my keys as quietly as I could—.
At my apartment door, I took a deep breath. Was I doing something crazy? It can’t be that crazy. You’re not breaking in—you have the security code and you have the keys. You have a hunch, and it might get you something worth working on. If I checked out Jacob’s office and there wasn’t anything to find, I would just come back and figure out some other way to help Rhett. But if there was something there, and I didn’t at least check, wouldn’t I regret it later on?
I slipped out of the apartment and headed to my car, still feeling that jittery, nervous feeling. I didn’t even know what I was going to find, or if there was anything to find, but I knew that if my dad found out what I was doing, I wouldn’t need to worry anymore about whether or not he was going to fire me. He would absolutely fire me. I shook the thought out of my head, and focused on the drive. While traffic never fully dies in Houston, at nine-thirty at night it’s pretty light, and I got to the building in about twenty minutes.
Once inside the office building, I looked around at the dark and poorly-lit lobby. I pulled my sweater from my car a little tighter around me. An idea flitted into my head. Jacob had been the one to make the pitch to the company Dad was trying to move into Mustang Ridge, so there had to be something—even something little—that would give me leverage of some kind. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I could remember Evelyn making an offhand comment about the paperwork that had come in regarding the expansion of the plan, that there were some headaches with the contract changes and the payments.
I waited for a moment in the main area of the office, looking around me to make sure there wasn’t anyone around. I could hear a vacuum cleaner running at the other end of the floor, and closer to me the click and hum of computers and printers, but nothing to tell me that there was anyone worth worrying about nearby. Exhaling, I continued on through the cubicles and desks. When I found Jacob’s door, I prayed that he’d stuck to his usual habit of not locking up. For a moment I worried—with chagrin—that this would almost certainly be the one time he locked his office; the time I needed to get into his office to check on something.
I turned the knob quietly, and it moved. Lucky. I pushed, and the door opened. The scent of stale coffee lingered, so he probably hadn’t left for the day more than a couple of hours before, at most. That meant I was pretty safe to snoop.
The first thing to look for would be hard copies, but I wasn’t too hopeful that Jacob was foolish enough to leave anything sensitive out. Then again, he never locked his door, so I couldn’t discount the notion.
I looked through the drawers that weren’t locked in his desk? But I couldn’t find anything, and the locked drawers were impossible without the key or without making it known that someone had jimmied the locks. So that was out. The only other thing I could do was try to get into his computer. But of course, he’d locked that down—he wasn’t completely careless.
I tried a generic password, but it didn’t work. I tried another one—no dice. I tried to think of what I could imagine Jacob setting as his own password, and put in a few options I thought might work, but none of them did. One after another, they failed. I pressed my lips together. I could leave, of course, but I wasn’t likely to have another opening like tonight, and I didn’t want to leave the office without at least confirming or denying, that there was even something to find.
Then it occurred to me: I had an admin password. I’d gotten it from the IT team back when I’d been having problems with my own computer, because I’d pointed out that it would be easier for me to solve the problems I was having on my own than to keep pulling a tech away from maintaining servers and other projects they had. My admin password should—in theory—get me into Jacob’s computer. I just had to make sure I logged out properly and completely before I left.
I put it in, and the computer accepted it and began loading up. I still didn’t know what I was looking for, or how to go about looking for it. Emails—his personal ones, not the official ones. I lucked out again. Jacob had set his passwords to populate automatically once he was logged in, so I was able to open up both his personal and company accounts, and start looking for things to do with Mustang Ridge.
I scrolled and looked around, skimming things to try and get an idea of what his conversations with Dad’s client looked like. Finally, I found something. Around the time that he would have been getting ready to pitch the idea of the bigger development project, I found an email to one of the points of contact I knew from the company—a pretty high-up executive, who had always stricken me as a bit smarmy but in the old-school-guy way.
As I read, I went from feeling suspicious to horrified to enraged. According to the back and forth between Jacob and this executive, he would let my dad have the credit for the expansion officially, but he—Jacob—would be getting a handsome “fee” for his services in not only getting my dad to agree to the bigger project, but also making the way smooth through the town council. As I read more, I realized that Jacob had to have been talking to someone on the town council, too. Maybe the rest of the council didn’t know about it, but at least one other person was getting a payoff beyond what Jacob was getting, which was on top of his commission. Money was changing hands like a mob deal, all under my dad’s nose.
I quickly sent the emails to myself from my own email address, grabbing screenshots of the email chain as fast as I could and attaching them to my email. I found the original contracts that Evelyn had complained about in their sloppiness, and found the separate contract that Jacob had signed and sent in, confirming his cooperation in exchange for ten thousand dollars in payment from the company, separate from the fees paid to my dad’s business for the expansion of the project. I couldn’t believe how much was going on, without my own father having any clue about it.
I logged out of everything and made sure to erase my tracks as best as I could. I didn’t think Jacob had the kind of computer savvy it would take to track me down, nor would he have any reason to suspect he’d been hacked, but I wanted to be sure he couldn’t notice anything by accident that would lead him to me.
I had just gotten up to leave when I heard footsteps approaching the office. I stopped dead in my tracks, absolutely still. I hadn’t turned any lights on, but maybe the night watchman or the janitor had gotten suspicious for some other reason? I held my breath, hoping the footsteps would continue past Jacob’s office door.
Instead, I heard the doorknob turn. It could still just be Maurice or Tally, or Nelson, I told myself, trying to calm down the pounding of my heart.
But as the door opened, I realized that I was wrong; it wasn’t any of the night staff that had come to see what was going on, or to clean Jacob’s office. It was Jacob himself who walked through the door, whistling lowly in a tuneless way until he spotted me standing behind his desk.