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“Good! I’ll be there in about half an hour.”
“Slow down,” Ashley demanded, unnerved by the calm man’s uncharacteristic impatience. Her palms were beginning to sweat. There was something about the conversation that made her more than slightly uneasy. “What’s going on?”
“I’ll talk to you when I get there.” With that, he hung up the phone and Ashley was left to consider the unusual conversation.
“What the devil?” she wondered, as she sat down at the kitchen table. Her mind was racing when she tested the soup with the tip of her tongue, decided it was the right temperature and began eating the delicious meal of hot chowder and warm biscuits.
Had John discovered something out of the ordinary in the financial reports? What was it that made him sound so worried and concerned? It was almost as if he were frightened of something . . . or someone.
“You’re beginning to sound as paranoid as Trevor,” she admonished herself, smiling slightly at the rugged image her willing mind conjured.
Ashley finished her soup and placed the bowl in the dishwasher just as the doorbell rang. She walked to the front door, opened it and ushered in a very agitated John Ellis.
“What’s going on?” she asked as he shed his coat and tossed it carelessly over a bent arm of the wooden hall tree near the door.
“That’s what I want to know.”
They walked into the formal living room and John stalked from one end of the elegantly furnished room to the other.
“Did you find something suspicious in the books?” Ashley asked, her throat beginning to constrict. Something was wrong—very wrong. John was usually a calm individual known for his attention to detail and sound judgment.
Tonight his face was flushed and his eyes darted nervously from Ashley to the door, the window and back to Ashley again. Several times he rotated his head, as if to relieve the tension in his neck.
“I don’t know—” He held his hands, palms up, in her direction. He seemed genuinely confused.
“Take your time,” Ashley insisted. “Have a seat and let me get you a cup of coffee, or brandy?”
“Anything.” He looked as if he didn’t care one way or the other. He was restless and uneasy.
She combined the two drinks and gave him a black cup of coffee laced with brandy. He took the mug, drank a long swallow, and then settled back in one of the stiff chairs near the windows.
Ashley took a seat on the corner of the couch and sipped her coffee. “Okay, so tell me what’s happening?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t like it. Claud is suspicious.”
“About the reports I requested to be sent to Bend?” Ashley guessed, knowing the calculating nature of her cousin. It was too bad Claud was so well qualified for his job; his sharp mind and legal background made him indispensable.
“Right. For the last few days he’s been questioning me—make that grilling me.”
Ashley nodded. Her features showed none of her inner distress. “What’d you tell him?”
John rolled his myopic eyes toward the ceiling. “Nothing, I think. He asked why there were so many printouts and I said that you wanted to go over the books and get a feel for running the company. Claud told me that you could never possibly need that much paper, and I told him that I was just sending you what you requested. He didn’t like it much, especially when I said that I would do the same thing, if I had inherited a company the size of Stephens Timber and it had been several years since I’d actually worked in the business.”
Ashley let out a long, ragged breath. “Did Claud buy your story?”
Shrugging his shoulders, John shook his head. “Who knows? I told him that I was working on this special audit with you and Claud told me that I was to report directly to him. If there were any discrepancies in the books, he wanted to know about them—pronto.”
Ashley frowned and tossed her hair over her shoulder as she rubbed her chin. “Did you—report to him?”
John seemed genuinely disappointed. “Of course not.”
“Good.” The tension in Ashley’s muscles relaxed slightly. “So what did you find?”
“Most everything is pretty cut-and-dried,” he replied, smiling at his own unintentional pun.
“Except?”
“Except for a couple of things.” John drained his cup, reached for his briefcase and snapped it open. He handed a few crisp sheets of paper to Ashley. They were copies of invoices to the Watkins Mill in Molalla.
