“Call me,” Charlotte told her when they reached the front doors. “I’ll be over the second you do.”
Phoebe nodded and let Mitch guide her back to the limo and follow her inside. He held her hand the whole way back to her place and even helped her get up the stairs to her door. He took the key from her when her fingers fumbled trying to get the damn thing in the lock.
“Thank you, Mitch. You didn’t have to do this,” she said.
“I said I’d make up for my behavior, and I fully intend to follow through. If you need anything, just call me, all right?”
She thanked him again, closed the door, and listened to his footsteps retreat down the hall.
Chapter 13
Phoebe hardly slept, thinking of her mom and what lay ahead of her. She went to work that morning in a daze. Thankfully, no one came down to the archives room to see her sitting at her desk, staring blankly at the wall. Work piled up, but it could wait a day. She wished she had more vacation days, but she’d used them all up. She could not afford to take any more time off.
Charlotte texted her throughout the day, but there were no good signs that her mom was coming out of the coma yet. Not that she expected anything different. She was just packing her bag to leave when the door opened.
“Sorry, just about to close up…oh, Mr. Yancey. Can I help you with something?”
He looked over, startled. “Ah, Ms. Baron. I thought you’d already left for the day.”
“No, not ‘til five, which it is now. Is there something you need from the archives?”
She watched as his hands twitched on the file folder he carried. He glanced around, running a hand through his hair and smiled—a very wide smile. “No, I was just going to drop this off on your desk for tomorrow morning. Nothing to fuss over.”
“If you’re sure?”
“Yes, quite. Please, head home. I’m sure I will see you tomorrow.”
“Okay, night, Mr. Yancey.”
“Good night.”
She strode past him and out the door, walking down until she hit the corner. After she turned, she waited a few seconds until she heard the door click shut. Glancing back, she saw he was still in there. Quietly, she crept back down the hall to the door and pressed her ear against it. He was typing on her keyboard. What was he looking for? He could’ve just asked her to look it up for him…or gotten it from his own computer. So why go all the way down to the archives room to search for something? She wanted to go in there and see, but what if he fired her? That file he took the other day…he’d been a bit freaked when she started asking questions about it. Was that what he was up to?
Her chair rolled across the floor, and she heard several drawers opening, followed by his cursing. A few seconds later, Phoebe rushed back down the hall and disappeared around the corner just as the door opened and Yancey stormed out, his steps heavy as he vanished in the other direction. The elevator dinged and she waited until he was gone before she headed back to the archives’ door.
She sat back down at the computer and tried to track whatever Yancey had been looking up. It took a few minutes, but she managed to find the file number. “What? That’s the file I gave him the other day…” She glanced down at her desk to find the files he’d had in his hand. “Why did he leave these behind?” She flipped through them, something she usually did not do, and frowned. “Empty, these are all blank pages. What the hell is he up to?”
Phoebe glanced towards the door, but she was alone down here. She rolled her chair over to the file cabinets and started to find the location of whatever Yancey had pulled out. When she found the right drawer where the original file had come from, she pulled it open and stared.
Half the drawer was empty.
Why had he taken all of those? They’d had nothing to do with the other files he’d wanted. At least, she didn’t think they did. It was a little past five now, which meant most everyone was heading home, including Yancey. She tossed her purse and coat back onto a chair in the corner and sat down at her computer. No one should be around to bother her now. Phoebe checked her computer records for the day before and found someone else had been searching for files that day, too, and the day before.
“What about my vacation week?” she whispered as she went all the way back to last Monday. “Son of a bitch!”
Yancey had been using her credentials to search and, from what she could tell, remove files from the archives. Files that dated back several months and even several years. She had no idea what he was up to but spent the next few hours tracking down every single one in the archives room. Half of them were missing or had blank pages in them, like the one she’d found on her desk. It was going to be a long night, trying to figure out what he was up to.