Circle of Shadows

by Curry, Edna

  When at last, he reached shore, he lay on the beach for a while to rest, then walked along the shoreline back to his house.

  Thankful there was still some hot coffee in the pot, he poured a cup and sank down in a chair to drink it.

  He took a hot shower, and dressed to go into his Minneapolis office. Making some toast for breakfast, he pondered reporting this to the police, deciding against it.

  Throughout the long drive to Minneapolis, he angrily tossed the problem around in his mind. Why had someone done it? Was it the same person who had been in his office yesterday? Probably so. What did they want, or hope to accomplish?

  Was it connected to the problem at Adams’ Foods ? Was someone trying to get rid of him to avoid being caught at his scheme there, whatever it was?

  Chances were that whoever drilled those holes and removed his life vest, thought he was a soft office worker. They thought he would be helpless on the water without a motor. They had expected him to drown instead of only losing his fishing boat and gear.

  Was he dealing with a murderer? Because, he thought with a shudder, if he hadn’t been a good swimmer, that’s what would have been accomplished this morning out there on the lake. His murder. They might have gotten away with it too. With him dead and the evidence at the bottom of the lake, no one would ever have known why he’d drowned. His death would have been called a boating accident.

  What would whoever it was, try next? Was Lili in danger? What could he do about it?

  Remembering that Curtis would not be on duty tonight, because he’d gone to visit his mother in Iowa, Ken decided to make it back to Landers in time to take his place.

  Curtis might have missed something. Even if Curtis hadn’t missed anything, Ken decided he would rather play watchman than do nothing.

  ***

  At her office in Adams’ Foods, Lili stretched her arms over her head, trying to ease her tired muscles, then stood and poured herself another cup of coffee. She’d been working for hours at her desk, even though it was Saturday night. With Ken out of town, she’d felt restless and anxious. He’d been so cold lately.

  She just had to find the problem with Adams’ Foods’ finances. Somehow, she was sure that she was close to the answer, if she could only identify it. The answer had to be right there in her paperwork, somewhere. She was just not seeing it.

  Glancing at her watch, she saw that it was almost ten o’clock. If she didn’t get some food and some sleep, she wouldn’t be able to get up to open the store in the morning. She yawned and looked for her purse and keys.

  A noise near the front of the empty, closed store alerted Lili, sending goose-bumps along her arms and making the tiny hairs along the back of her neck stand up straight. Someone else was in the store!

  Pressing her fist to her mouth to keep from screaming, she forced herself to breathe slowly and evenly to calm her pounding heart. The lack of windows except in front near the checkout counters made the store quiet and dark even though the night-lights were on.

  She should have left with the others. It had been a foolish thing to do, staying here late at night alone. Perhaps the noise was only her imagination working overtime.

  Silently easing her office door open, she moved out into the hallway, thankful for her soft-soled shoes. She stopped at the doorway to the main part of the store, straining to hear anything more. All was quiet.

  Slipping through the door, she looked up and down the aisles before walking toward the front of the store.

  As her eyes adjusted to the dim night lights, she could see around her clearly. Everything seemed empty and ordinary. Perhaps the noise had been only a can of vegetables, unbalanced and falling from a shelf, or even, heaven forbid in a food store, a mouse.

  She turned to go back to her office when she heard the distinctive slap of the walk-in cooler door closing in the meat department. Someone was indeed in here, and was acting as though he had no need for silence, or caution, either.

  Releasing her breath in relief, she decided that one of her employees had remembered he hadn’t done something important, such as shutting off the power on the smokehouse or wrapping machine, and returned. Odd that he hadn’t turned on the overhead lights.

  “Who’s here?” Lili called out, walking confidently now toward the meat department. When no one answered, her steps slowed, and she turned back to the front of the store and quickly flipped the switches on all the overhead lights.

  She debated calling 911, then considered how foolish she would feel when the police came if nothing was wrong.

  As she cautiously walked back through the now brightly lighted store towards the meat department, the walk-in meat cooler door opened. Arthur stepped out carrying a box of bacon in his burly arms.

  He stopped as he saw her, and blinked at her in the sudden brightness, his mouth open in surprise. “Lili!”

  “Arthur! You scared me half to death! What are you doing back here? I thought everyone had gone home.”

  “Oh, ah, well I had, but then Mrs. Murdock called to say their bacon hadn’t been delivered to the church, and they needed it for their pancake breakfast in the morning. So I came down to get it and drop it off.”

  Lili’s mind was reeling. “But why didn’t you turn on the lights? When I heard a noise in the dark, I thought we had a burglar again.”

  Arthur looked away, setting the case of bacon down on his meat block. “Sorry, Lili, I...I guess it didn’t seem dark to me with the night lights on. I could see good enough with the light inside the cooler. Anyway, if you turn on the lights, the night cop will wonder what’s going on.” He looked nervously towards the street.

  Lili stared at him. Why should he be nervous that she’d turned on the lights? None of this added up. Suddenly Lili remembered seeing Billy roll his carryout cart with a case of bacon out to Mrs. Murdock’s car just as she had gone for supper tonight. The horrible suspicion forming in her mind turned to certainty.

  Arthur was lying! He was the one stealing from her store. Her own trusted meat manager, who had keys to everything. Who could also, of course, come and go without suspicion because he was next in line to the boss. Even the police officers would not question his presence at the store, nor his car there at odd hours, since she had given them Arthur’s name as the person to call if she was unavailable. Her best employee, her right arm.

  Now she saw that he was really the opposite: her worst enemy. Her stomach lurched with the sour taste of her new reality; her chest felt too tight to allow her to breathe. Her world was turning upside down.

  With that thought came awareness of her precarious position. She was alone here with Arthur, and no one else knew she was here. No one else knew what he’d done. She stood between him and success.

  Fear slid along her veins. Her muscles felt like slush, treacherous and cold, and as useless to help her move as melting snow was to a skier. She just stood there, staring at him, frozen with uncertainty.

  Arthur looked back at her, and his face took on a nasty grin. “So you don’t believe me, Lili? Neither you nor Mr. Mills is so smart after all, eh? With all your fancy computers, I figured you would get suspicious sooner or later,” he said laughing harshly. “But I outsmarted you!”

  Red hot anger replaced the cold in her mind. She lashed out, “You’re the one who’s been stealing us blind, aren’t you, Arthur? How could you, after all these years with us?”

  “Exactly. You got that right. After all these years! I wasted all those years. I thought Robert would reward me and the others...leave us shares in the store, or sell it to us cheap, or something. Instead, he sells it out from under us.”

  “So you decided to help yourself, is that it, Arthur?” she asked, her voice calmer now. She tried to ease away, to plan an escape.

  “I deserved it, after working all these years,” he shouted furiously, glaring at her.

  “So that’s why Anna has been missing so many things,” Lili chattered on, remembering her keys were in her purse back in the office. Why hadn
’t she called 911 when she’d first heard a noise and damn the embarrassment if she’d been wrong?

  She took another couple of steps back. Arthur started around the meat case towards her.

  Then she turned and ran, her heart pounding as fast as her feet, making a dash for her office. If she could get inside, she might be able to lock the door against him long enough to call for help. Arthur’s footsteps pounded after her as she ran.

  She didn’t even make it to the hallway at the back of the store before she felt his large hand catch her long hair, and then her collar. They went down together, and his big hand closed over her wrist and twisted her arm behind her back.

  Twisting desperately around, she bit his shoulder as hard as she could. “Damn it, anyway, Lili. Stop it!” he growled in her ear. He got his feet under him and yanked her to her feet, then stood holding her, panting and glaring at her.

  She raised her chin defiantly. “So you caught me, Arthur. So what? You’ll never get away with any of this.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says me. I write the paychecks, remember? You’ve had your last one. You’re all through here, Arthur, and without a recommendation you’ll never get another job around here.”

  His mouth twisted. “Too bad you feel that way.” He said nothing for a moment as he caught his breath. She tried to pull free, but winced when he tightened his grip on her wrist.

  “There’s another way out, you know,” he said, in a softer voice. “You were cheated by Robert, too, you know. Mr. Mills got the cream, while Robert left you the skim milk, or should I say the short end of the stick?”

  She gasped in shock at the gall of the man. “That doesn’t excuse stealing.”

  “You could share in the spoils, Lili,” he pleaded softly, “and Mr. Mills would never know the difference.”

  “How could he not know?” she asked. Suddenly she was curious to know how he had worked this scheme without her finding out. How long had it had been going on?

  He grinned and eased his grip on her wrist. He watched her rub her numb hand with her other hand, but didn’t release her.

  “Your old man didn’t notice, and he was here every day. So how would Mr. Mills notice, when he only shows up once a week?”

  “Ken has everything on computer. You can tell a lot from reports.”

  “Not if someone doctors the figures. You put garbage into a computer and garbage comes back out. Renee told me that herself.”

  “Renee! She was in on this?”

  “Not yet, but I know she’ll help me. She told me Mr. Mills puts all the stores onto computer, and she types the reports in for him. She’s falling for me, you know,” Arthur bragged with a smirk.

  “Really?” Lili said, swallowing. “You believe Ken wouldn’t notice if she typed in any changes in the reports the managers send him? He’s not stupid, you know.” Keep him talking. Don’t panic. How much time do I have before someone driving by wonders why the store lights were on at night? Will anyone bother to investigate?

  Chapter 13

  Arthur smirked at her. “Renee says he reads the reports first, then she types them in and files them. I’ll bet he never even looks at them a second time. He’s too busy running from store to store. Or taking you out.” He grinned. “Besides, he’s so rich, he’ll never even notice a few thousand dollars missing now and then, from all those stores.”

  Something Arthur had said earlier popped back into her mind. “What did you mean, ‘if my father didn’t notice?’ Were you stealing from him, too?”

  “It wasn’t ‘stealing’,” he objected. “I just added a bonus to my wages.”

  “But how could my father not notice?”

  He shrugged and looked away. “Some restaurants, churches and clubs paid in cash from the money they took in when they sold the food. When I delivered their orders, they would pay me for it all. I didn’t always turn the cash all in.”

  “But how...,” she began, then remembered that he often dropped off orders on his way home, or ran the till himself at supper hour, or on the nights he closed the store.

  “Why wouldn’t that shortage show up in your meat department sales or profit figures?” she objected, trying to understand. “Even your sales per man-hour were good.”

  Arthur smiled slyly. “That’s easy to fix when you’re running the till, too,” he said. “I rang up the groceries I delivered under meat, to spread out the shortages, and to skew the figures. That way you never knew, nor your old man neither.”

  Lili felt sick. Another disadvantage of using old-fashioned cash registers instead of scanners using barcodes. The person running them could control the information. She had always trusted Arthur to put the money in the till himself, and mark the accounts paid. Now she could see what a mistake that had been, and how easy it had been for him to manipulate the amounts.

  No wonder she and Ken hadn’t figured out what he was doing. If he hadn’t rung the sales up, the till would still balance, and the shortage wouldn’t show when he didn’t turn in the money.

  “Were you the burglar who hit me that night in the storeroom, too?”

  Arthur looked sheepish. “Yeah, sorry about that. But I didn’t hit you too hard, just enough to knock you out so’s you wouldn’t know who was there. That was your own fault, you know.”

  Lili felt fear slide down her back. If he had hit her once, what else might he do to her now? “My fault?”

  “Yes. If you had turned on the lights when you came in that night, I’d have been warned to leave before you came back there.”

  “But if you could take things out the front door in plain sight, why bother stealing things at night?”

  Arthur shrugged. “There were a couple of accounts I supplied that you didn’t know about over in Centerville. I was afraid if I changed the amounts in the charge accounts or reduced the sales figures too much on the till, you’d get suspicious. Besides, I was behind on the payments for my Jag.”

  Lili’s mind whirled. His Jaguar? “But I thought you inherited the money from your mother to pay for that?”

  Arthur shrugged. “She didn’t leave half as much money as everybody thought.”

  “So that’s why father thought our store was losing money. Don’t you realize that that’s why he sold it, because he thought there wasn’t enough profit in running it for me and my mother?”

  Arthur shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. Can’t ask him now, can we?”

  “No,” she agreed painfully. “We certainly can’t.” But she could avenge her father. She could see that the man who had caused Robert to sell her birthright was punished, not rewarded for it. Helping him continue to steal was not the way to do it.

  “Well?” he said, twisting the arm he still held tighter.

  She winced against the pain, pretending not to know what he wanted an answer to. “Well, what?”

  “Are you going to forget this and help me? Think of the extra money you’d have by going halves with me on this. Especially when I get Renee to include some accounts from the other stores. She pays the invoices for some of the stores, she could just type in the wrong store number and no one would be the wiser.”

  With a sinking heart she knew he was right. If the computer was manipulated so that the losses from one store were spread among all of Ken’s stores, the percentages would be so skewed as to make it very difficult to tell where the problem was coming from, or how to fix it. If Arthur succeeded, and Renee helped him, Ken would be robbed blind. He wouldn’t know how.

  “I’d know!” Lili said incredulously.

  “So what? Mr. Mills must be worth millions already. He can afford it.”

  Reason flew away as she heard the slur against Ken. Arthur’s big mistake, she realized, was not understanding that she loved Ken, loved him more than anything else in the world. Even more than Adams’ Foods or her family pride. “You’re crazy if you think I’d even consider that. Let me go!” She kicked at his shins at the same time as she bent her head and bit at him again, trying despe
rately to free her hand from his iron grip. But all those years of lifting beef quarters and boxes of groceries had made him very strong. Her struggles were useless.

  “Cut it out,” Arthur growled at her again, only tightening his grip. “I might have known you wouldn’t see reason.” He gave a yank on her hand, flipping her around against him, then throwing her over his shoulder easily and carrying her back to the meat department.

  “What are you doing?” She kicked frantically at him, wondering if he meant to kill her with his knives or meat cleaver. The thought sent a frantic shudder through her.

  “Buying some time for myself. If you won’t see reason, I’ll have to have time to get away.” He opened the heavy door of the walk-in meat cooler, lowered her from his shoulder and shoved her inside. She fell into a heap onto the cold sawdust covered floor, landing on her rear, her chin slamming onto her knees. Blood spurted from her lip as her teeth cut painfully into it.

  Staring up and him and wiping at her mouth with a numb hand, she repeated, “You’ll never get away with this!”

  “Sorry, Lili. I really did like you, you know. I used to think you liked me, too. I even fantasized about us getting married someday. But I guess I never could compete with Mr. Mills and his piles of money.”

  She scrambled back onto her feet, desperately wondering if she could shove him off balance enough to get past him. She yelled angrily, “If Ken didn’t have a penny, he’d still be a better man than you.”

  “Maybe,” he shrugged, seeing her intentions and barring the door with his burly body. “Speaking of money, I’m a little short of traveling cash tonight. So, I’ll just take the cash we took in today.” At her gasp of outrage, he grinned. “What’s one more little theft? As soon as I’m out of the country, I’ll be able to tap my foreign bank accounts. I had a good New York broker, you know. I planned for all possibilities.”

  “Out of the country? But what about your son? You can’t just leave Sammy.”

  Pain swept across Arthur’s face. For a long minute, he said nothing, and she held her breath, thinking she’d reached him, that he was going to change his mind.