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Chapter Nine
“That’s it,” John announced, his weary voice filled with relief.
“You’re sure?” Ashley couldn’t believe that the task that had seemed so monumental a few weeks ago was now finished.
“There’s nothing else.” John’s expression was one of certainty. Other than the incriminating invoices and memo from Lazarus, John had found nothing to substantiate Trevor’s accusations against Stephens Timber.
Ashley should have been jubilant, but she wasn’t. “You’ve checked through everything?” Her fingers tapped nervously against her chin as she sat in the chair facing the desk. John was sitting behind mounds of computer printouts, each carefully labeled and banded together on the top of Lazarus’s desk in the den of the stately old manor.
“I’ve gone over every piece of paper you’ve brought me.” John leaned back in the chair and propped his boots on the desk in a gesture of satisfaction. He stretched and even from where she was sitting, Ashley could hear his vertebrae crack. How many hours had the poor accountant sat at her father’s desk, poring over black-and-white figures?
Ashley tried to accept John’s audit as final, but during the last couple of weeks with Claud at the office, she had begun to doubt her earlier convictions about her family’s innocence. Working with Claud on a daily basis had forced her to face up to the fact that the man had no sense of moral responsibility. Dollars and cents were his only motivation.
Abruptly she got out of her chair and paced anxiously between the desk and the window. The city lights of Portland winked seductively in the clear, black night.
“I thought you would be relieved,” John remarked.
“I am—sort of.”
“But?”
“These reports are all recent—all in the last six months.”
“What’re you getting at?”
She stopped near the window and stared at the cloudless night. “I want to clear the family name once and for all. There are a couple of things I want to check out, but it will have to be done at the office. If I take home the reports I need, Claud will become suspicious.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re old. Some of the documents won’t e
ven be on the computer,” she thought aloud, her eyes piercing the blackness of the still night.
“What will you be looking for?”
Ashley smiled cryptically and faced him. “I don’t know. I won’t until I see it. But I want to check the records about the time of the Springfield spraying.” She saw the look of protest in the accountant’s eyes and she continued. “I want to see the books from day one—when Dad started the company—”
“Because of Robert Daniels’s disappearance?”
Ashley let out a long sigh. “Right.”
“I don’t think you’ll find anything,” John offered, hoping to give some comfort to her worried mind.
“Let’s just pray that you’re right.”
Later, after John had left for home, Ashley sat in her father’s desk chair, worrying about the future. Several times she considered calling Trevor and once she had even gone so far as to reach for the phone. But she hadn’t. Her pride forbade it. She sighed and let her hand fall to her side.
Ashley felt that she couldn’t go to Trevor until she was certain of all the facts. The small piece of evidence against Claud and Lazarus would only add fuel to Trevor’s inquisitive nature and Ashley wanted to be prepared with all the answers to his accusations before she saw him again.
If she saw him again. The argument between them was still unresolved and Ashley doubted if there would ever be a time when they could feel the freedom and love they had shared while alone in the mountains. It was all just a lie, she tried to convince herself, but the memory of Trevor’s intense blue eyes, filled with honesty and raw passion, still touched a very vital part of her. She found herself hoping that he still cared, if only a little.
For the last two weeks, each time she had picked up a newspaper, Trevor’s face had been plastered all over it. Claud was no longer worried about Trevor’s bid for the Senate, he was downright furious that the polls showed Trevor Daniels leading the race.
Just the previous week Ashley had walked into Claud’s office and overheard the tail end of a telephone conversation.
“I don’t care what we have to do,” Claud had stated emphatically, his lips white with rage, just as Ashley had walked into the room, “we can’t let that son of a bitch win!”
Ashley had known instinctively that Claud was referring to Trevor, but she pretended that she hadn’t understood the conversation.
