Forget Me Not (Golden Falls Fire Book 4)

by Scarlett Andrews

  Annabelle sighed. She had to admit it would be another decent distraction. And it’s a place Sean knows I would be if he wants to . . . But she squashed that thought almost as soon as it popped up. False hope would do her no good. Sean wasn’t coming to trivia night ever again.

  “All right. I’ll go.”

  She saved her progress and made her backups to the cloud, grabbed her coat, and rode with Lottie to The Salmon Eye, arriving about the same time as Cameron and Derrick, who’d secured their usual table.

  “I think we might lose the sports round this time,” she said, trying to choke out a casual-sounding laugh, figuring it was better to address the elephant in the room than to ignore it.

  “No worries,” Cameron said. “We’ve been coming in second for the past couple weeks, and all it means is the MC Hammers share their beer with us rather than the other way around. We’re on much better terms these days. Aren’t we, Lottie?”

  Annabelle caught the blush that was spreading across Lottie’s face. “Lottie, is there something you haven’t told me?” Lottie nodded at a feminine blond woman on the MC Hammers. Annabelle’s eyes widened. “She’s gay?”

  “Yep! All this time I had no idea, but when I came across her dating profile the other day, I swiped right, and she did, too!” Lottie said. “So we’re going out for pie after trivia.”

  “Where to?” Cameron asked. “The North Star Café?”

  “You know it,” Lottie said.

  “Well, good luck,” Annabelle said. “I hope one of us finds love.”

  “Aww!” Lottie put her arm around Annabelle’s shoulder and squeezed. “I still think he’s going to come around.”

  “What happened between you two?” Derrick asked, leaning in. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “I don’t mind,” Annabelle said, although she did. “I have no idea what happened. He just ended things.”

  “It was because of that other woman,” Derrick surmised. “You know, the one who introduced herself as his girlfriend when I ran into her at the grocery store? The one I showed you a picture of?”

  “Melissa,” Annabelle said. “And I have no idea. He says not.”

  “Well, his loss.” Derrick raised his glass. “To better luck next time, for both of us.”

  Thank goodness he isn’t hitting on me, Annabelle thought, clinking her glass. We’re way better as friends.

  The beer went down easily, and although she delved into the appetizers the group ordered, Annabelle found herself fuzzy-headed before the trivia event began. She tried to focus, tried to laugh and be part of the group, but everything began to seem far away, even her friends right beside her.

  “Are you okay?” Derrick asked, noticing her sloppy handwriting. “You want me to write the answers?”

  “That’s probably a good idea.”

  Their team was off their game that night. Annabelle didn’t contribute anything because her mind just wasn’t working quickly enough, and because Sean wasn’t there, they missed every sports question. When the MC Hammers won and welcomed them over to share their beer winnings, Lottie and Cameron were quick to join them. Annabelle stayed put.

  Derrick stayed behind with her. “Do you want a soda? Or maybe a glass of water?”

  “A soda would be good,” she said, thinking maybe the sugar would give her energy. “I don’t know why I’m so buzzed from only two beers.”

  Derrick shrugged. “You’re probably tired.”

  “Aren’t you?” she asked. “You’re working just as hard as me.”

  “You’ve always needed more sleep.”

  “True.”

  Even after the soda, Annabelle felt too woozy to drive. Lottie had already left on her pie date, and Cameron had walked from his nearby apartment, so she accepted the ride Derrick offered. The ride home was a blur; she thought they talked about movies. He walked her to her door.

  “I got my locks changed after you let yourself into my apartment,” she said, fumbling with her keys, realizing as she said it that she shouldn’t have. “A girl needs her privacy, and you’re not coming in now because those days are over.”

  “Here, let me.” Derrick unlocked her door for her, and she dropped her purse in the doorway and then stumbled over it as she entered her apartment. “I know those days are over, Annabelle, but I am coming in because if I don’t, I’m afraid you’re going to fall asleep right there on the kitchen floor.”

  She looked to where he pointed, and it seemed very inviting. “So?”

  He smiled. “So you need a good night’s sleep or else you’ll be worthless tomorrow. Unless you plan to take the day off from working on your dissertation?”

  “Oh, no,” Annabelle said. “No days off for me! All I want to do is work, work, work.”

  She felt her words slurring—shouldn’t she be getting less drunk and not more? As her knees started to give out, Derrick took her elbow and walked her to her bed.

  “Here, lay down on your side,” he said.

  Annabelle obeyed, curling her sluggish body on the bed. Derrick pulled off her boots and put a blanket over her.

  “I’ll bring you a glass of water,” he said. “You should drink it before you fall asleep, or else you’re going to have a really bad headache tomorrow.”

  “I love Sean,” she said. “I love him, and he doesn’t love me back.”

  “Go to sleep, Annabelle,” Derrick said. “None of this will matter in the morning.”

  Yes, it will, she thought as she drifted into a state of unconsciousness, vaguely aware as Derrick left her bedroom and closed the door behind him.

  At some point, she opened her eyes to see a blue glow from under her door. Early morning light, she thought, but then a few hours later she woke up again and it was still dark. More hours later, she awoke with a splitting headache, and all she wanted was to bury herself in blankets and sleep.

  Finally, she got up and made coffee. It was one in the afternoon. She never slept that late and tried to think back to how much she’d had to drink the previous night. She honestly didn’t remember drinking more than two beers before switching over to soda. So why did she have the most raging hangover of her life?

  Oh well, she thought. It’s nothing that time and lots of coffee won’t cure.

  After a regretful look at her phone—no new messages—she drank her coffee, made a light snack, and crawled back into bed. She’d let herself sleep for a little while longer before attempting to work. If she still didn’t feel better, thankfully she could afford to take a day off from her research because she was way ahead of schedule. Everything was there, the data was modeled, and she was in the last write-up phase.

  At least she had that going for her.

  30

  When Annabelle got out of bed, it was already turning to twilight. Finally, she felt better, like she’d shaken off a heavy veil of grogginess that had been weighing her down. She took a shower, had another cup of coffee, made a plate of scrambled eggs, and felt much better.

  Maybe I’ll work on my stuff from home, she thought, mostly because it was a distraction from the bitter fact that Sean still hadn’t been in touch. As always, the thought of her research cheered her. Her love life might be its typical shambles, but at least she had a rock-solid dissertation ready to be defended.

  It might even be good enough to publish as a paper in a scientific journal. She’d been credited on academic papers before, always as Peter’s research assistant, but she would be the primary author on this. It was a career milestone.

  As soon as Annabelle entered the second bedroom containing her computer desk, she knew something was off.

  Her computer was in sleep mode, which was normal, but the papers piled on the desk looked tidier than usual. There was also a USB cord dangling from the computer; it attached to Annabelle’s external hard drive, which was gone.

  A finger of panic slithered down Annabelle’s spine. She opened her desk drawer; no hard drive. She rummaged through her papers and books and then checked he
r messenger bag—nothing—and her purse.

  The hard drive contained all the backups of Annabelle’s four years of PhD research.

  Where was it? Hard drives didn’t just unplug themselves and walk away, and she was sure she hadn’t taken it from the house.

  Tears of frustration threatened to burst. It’s here somewhere, she told herself. And it’s not your only backup anyway. All your data is safe and sound on your computer AND on the cloud drive.

  To soothe her jangled nerves, she wiggled her computer mouse and sat down to open her dissertation. Just seeing the names of all those data files would calm her right down, and if worse came to worst, she would go buy another external hard drive and back everything up to it.

  But her computer desktop had no files visible.

  Annabelle’s breathing came hard and fast. She’d never before had a panic attack, but she thought she was on the cusp of one. She started clicking through, browsing, then searching her system for specific files. No results. The finger of panic turned into a flood.

  “No, no, no,” she muttered.

  She opened the cloud storage program next. As a habit, she saved everything three times: on the computer, on the backup hard drive, and on the cloud. Her computer was automatically synced to a password-protected cloud drive just for her own use.

  But the cloud drive, too, was empty.

  How on earth was this possible?

  She tried to think back to when she’d last worked from home. It had been just a few days ago. Had she taken her hard drive to her office? No, she never did. There was no reason to because she had access to everything via her cloud-based storage. Still, it was the only possible place her hard drive could be.

  This was her worst fear, blooming in front of her. That her own disorganization or incompetence would result in the loss of her entire PhD. But for the life of her, she couldn’t remember doing anything differently than she ever had. She had a routine she could do in her sleep: save her work to her local hard drive, then save it to the cloud, and then save it to her external hard drive. One, two, three steps to avoid this very scenario. This very catastrophic scenario.

  That data had to be at the glaciology department. Her dissertation had to be there.

  Annabelle dressed quickly in jeans and a sweater and pulled on her coat. Why didn’t I keep hard copies? Literal hard copies? But then she remembered she had—they were all at the lab in her office. Printouts of data for years, all in her filing cabinet. The written analysis and dissertation itself weren’t printed, but that could be rewritten . . . Don’t even think like that. It was so much work that she wanted to cry at the prospect of having to re-do it all.

  It was full dark outside. There were patches of snow and ice on the ground, but the mud was taking over, and even at the late hour, Annabelle could hear the liquid drip of the melt and the distant grumbling roar of the ice-clogged Nanook River.

  Her car started right away, small mercies, and she drove as fast as she dared to the glaciology building.

  As she’d expected, the parking lot was empty, and she brought only her keys and cell phone with her into the building. With every step, she prayed, Be there, be there, be there. Her office was kept locked, and there was no way her research would have disappeared from both locations. Something weird had happened to her home computer—fair enough, things like that occurred at the most inconvenient times—and she must have just brought her hard drive to the lab and forgotten to take it back home in her haze of hard work. It was the only logical explanation.

  The glaciology department offices were eerily quiet and dark. Annabelle swiped her keycard to access the main door and then hurried to her own office, old-fashioned key already in hand. She unlocked the office she shared with Lottie, set her keys and phone on her desk, and booted up the computer. Her desk had its usual piles of data printouts and sticky notes everywhere.

  She typed in her password and waited, waited . . . and stared with shock at her computer’s desktop.

  Her typical file clutter was gone. In its place was a single folder called “Dissertation.” Feeling numb tingles in her extremities, she double-clicked it.

  She scrolled through its contents: ice data, other scientific papers, and a document called “Thesis.” She opened this last one and started to read.

  “What the hell . . .?” It was in the format of a doctoral thesis, but the hypothesis wasn’t hers.

  It was Derrick’s.

  Confused, Annabelle kept reading. The thesis was only partially written, and when she started to look through the data in the folder, it became clear that it didn’t add up to support Derrick’s thesis in any way. The flaws that she’d seen in his research—and pointed out to him, back when they were dating—were glaring when put together in this format.

  This was his doctoral dissertation. But what was it doing on her computer?

  She clicked on the file’s properties. To her consternation, the author of the document was “Annabelle Keith.”

  She picked up her phone and dialed Derrick, the phone pressed so tight to her ear that she could feel its warmth.

  It was ringing, and then Annabelle heard a ringtone go off in one of the other offices. Derrick was here in the building, presumably in his own office.

  Annabelle got up and marched to the office Derrick shared with Cameron and saw a crack of light coming from inside. She knocked on the door. “Derrick! I know you’re in there!”

  Derrick opened the door with a sly smile. “Oh, hey, Annabelle. How are you feeling?”

  “Where’s my hard drive?” she demanded. “My portable hard drive.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He peered at her. “Are you still drunk from last night?”

  Last night, last night. Last night was still fuzzy. Suspiciously fuzzy.

  “Where’s my hard drive?” she said again, trying to look around him into his office, but he hadn’t opened the door all the way. “It’s missing, and you’re up to something.”

  “What makes you think—hey!”

  Annabelle shoved past him into his office, and her mouth dropped open. His computer was on, and hooked up to it was Annabelle’s hard drive. She recognized the small cat sticker on it.

  “What the hell, Derrick!”

  “Listen, will you calm down—”

  “Are you kidding? This is my research! My entire degree! And you . . .”

  Her words trailed off as the enormity of what was happening hit her. As the pieces clicked together into one big, awful picture.

  Derrick’s research was shit. His dissertation was therefore also shit. And so he was trying to plagiarize hers.

  “I can’t even believe you,” she said, stupefied. “How long have you been planning this?”

  “Planning what, Annabelle?” His eyes were narrow, shifty. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  “That is my hard drive.” She pointed. “See the cat sticker? Mine! Did you get me drunk last night on purpose just so you could get into my apartment and steal it? Or did you drug me?”

  A flash in his eyes gave him away.

  “You slipped something into my drink?”

  She pressed both hands against her temples as her mind tried to process what was happening. There had been that bluish glow she’d seen while falling into the drug-induced sleep Derrick had orchestrated. And that previous time he’d been in her apartment—what was that about? He’d been encouraging her to work hard on her dissertation, to finish up, all the while planning to steal it and claim it as his own!

  “You drugged me last night and brought me home so you could access my home computer and its files,” she said. “You took my hard drive, deleted my research, and then you must have come here and done the same thing to my office computer. You replaced my good research with your shitty research and replaced my nearly-done thesis with your own unacceptable one. You’re trying to plagiarize my work! My entire PhD!”

  The gall and the utter brash dishonesty of it
filled Annabelle with rage. How dare he? He couldn’t possibly think he was going to get away with it. Dr. Eubanks would know better . . . wouldn’t he?

  Annabelle’s and Derrick’s research questions were identical. Could Derrick spin it somehow that her research had gone wrong?

  If he publishes first. The dissertation Derrick had left for her was so incomplete that there was no way she could rewrite it into a proper final thesis in the next few weeks. And if Derrick published hers in the meantime, he would have nine-tenths of the high ground and could claim she’d stolen from him.

  “I’m calling Peter,” Annabelle said, clutching her phone.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Derrick said, taking a step toward her.

  Annabelle suddenly realized she was in a very confined space with him. An arm’s reach apart. She glanced at the door.

  Come on, it’s Derrick. He might be an intellectual criminal, but he’s not violent.

  She tried to stay calm. Tried to ignore the frightened-rabbit racing of her heartbeat. She couldn’t provoke him and definitely couldn’t let him know she’d put it all together.

  “Derrick, if you needed the data, you could have just asked,” she said, trying to sound merely exasperated. She dropped her hand with the phone, pressing the “on” key with one hand, knowing that she could dial 911 with a quick swipe of her finger.

  “I needed a lot more than your data,” Derrick said. His voice was casual. “You were right, Annabelle. Isn’t that what you’ve wanted me to say all these years? You were right. Your hypothesis, your model. You speak the language of the ice. It’s like you knew from the start what it would tell you. Me, on the other hand . . .” He choked out a humorless laugh. “As you might have gathered, my dissertation fell apart right around the time we got the samples back from Kahiltna this spring. I realized that I’d been running up a blind alley. What was I supposed to do?”

  “We could co-publish!” Annabelle said. She knew there was a quiver of fear in her voice and hoped that Derrick misinterpreted it as caring. “It happens all the time. We’ve been working together. Taking samples together. I’m sure Peter would like the idea of collaboration.”