Page 28 of Thicker Than Water
“Great.” I drop Julia’s hand to swoop up her phone. Then I punch in her passcode and call Maeve, putting it on speaker.
“Julia?” Maeve answers. “Is everything okay? Did something happen with Jason?”
Her words are blurred with fear, all of them mashed together in a breathless rush.
“Oh, no, sorry,” I say. “Jason’s the same. And this is Sienna, actually, but Julia’s here too. We wanted to ask you something.”
Maeve’s exhale shushes against the phone, and in her moment of hesitation, I imagine her with her hand on her chest, settling her surge of nerves. “Okay. What’s up?”
“It’s about Gavin. Have you ever seen him doing anything suspicious at work?”
There’s a beat before she responds. “Define suspicious.”
“I’m not sure exactly—something to do with Integrity Plus’s money?”
At Maeve’s silence, I look at Julia, who doesn’t return my gaze. She’s staring at the table, her palm pressed against it, like she’s propping herself up.
“Maeve?” I prompt.
“Yeah, sorry. I do the bookkeeping, and everything’s always above board with it. The cops took a look at it all on Tuesday. I hope you know I would never let Gavin put me on the hook for something illegal.”
I plop into the nearest chair. “Right, no, I didn’t mean—”
“But… did Jason tell you?”
Now Julia’s eyes zing toward mine. “Tell us what?” she asks, leaning toward the phone.
“About the warehouse?” Maeve continues.
Julia shakes her head, and I answer for us both: “No. What about it?”
Maeve’s quiet once again, and as seconds pass, my skin prickles with anticipation.
“I mean, it could be nothing,” she finally says. “But a few months ago—like, early December—I’d swung back to Integrity around nine at night because I’d forgotten this custom piece I’d brought in to work on at lunch; the buyer had requested a quick turnaround.”
“Uh-huh,” I say, impatient with her extraneous details. But Julia doesn’t seem to mind. Her gaze is hooked to the phone again, her brow dented in concentration.
“And as I was leaving, I drove out the back way, which takes you behind the warehouse—and I saw that the door was ajar. Which—I don’t know if Jason mentioned it, but in November, Gavin had to fire a crew member because he’d caught him stealing from the warehouse. So I was nervous he might’ve come back. Or someone else might’ve been stealing.”
“Who was it that got fired?” I ask.
“Dave Morgan,” Maeve says.
I look at Julia, who shrugs. The name is unfamiliar to us.
“So I checked it out,” Maeve continues. “I had my phone in my hand, ready to call the cops if I needed to. But then I heard this sound. Like a metal clang. Coming from the boneyard.”
“The boneyard?” I repeat.
“It’s this corner in the back of the warehouse where they store things too big to throw out. Damaged inventory. Broken power tools and ladders. There’s even stuff from the office itself: old desks, obsolete printers. It’s all junk. The crew strips things for parts sometimes, but mostly it just keeps accumulating. But when I heard the clang from that area, I crept in deeper to get a better look. And it wasn’t Dave Morgan or another member of the crew. It was Gavin.”
“Doing what?” I ask.
“Well—I don’t really know. He was kneeling next to this old gutter machine—”
“What’s a gutter machine?”
“It’s like… a long metal box with a giant spool attached to it. They’re usually in the trucks so the crew can measure and cut the gutters on the jobsite. But this one’s been in the boneyard for a while—as long as I’ve been here, I think—so it was weird he was doing something with it. And evenweirderthat he’d unscrewed the lid and was, like, rummaging around inside it. And the reason I’m even thinking about this at all is because you asked about money, and… there was a stack of cash on the floor, right where he was kneeling.”
