My Missing Puzzle Piece (Creekside Falls #1) (4 page)

Trevor was aware of her presence behind him but was irritated that she started off by being short with him; he was also irritated at his attraction to her that was even more magnetic than before, how was that even possible? If they ever got together he’d probably spontaneously combust. He didn’t know why she was rude to him and he didn’t like him. He was definitely going to try and not only change that, but also find out why. He started to lead her towards his office but someone yelled Elle’s name. They both turned and he saw one of his guys heading their way.

When Elle heard her name she wasn’t sure if she was hearing things or what, she didn’t think she knew anyone who worked here besides Trevor. As she turned, she saw Rob Danty her boyfriend from high school, which right now seemed like a lifetime ago. She had always gotten the impression he wished they had hit it off as a couple and had stayed together. It wasn’t like that for her; she cared about him of course but only saw him as a friend. She hadn’t seen since him or anyone else from their group since sophomore year of college. When she reached Rob, she gave him a big hug and realized even more how long it had been since they had seen each other or talked.

As she hugged him, she wondered what Trevor was thinking, she couldn’t imagine it would make him jealous but she hoped that it would. Elle said, “Hey stranger, how are you?”

Rob said, “Hey to you too! I’ve been good. What have you been up to? What are you doing here?”

“I’m doing well, that doesn’t seem like the best answer though when it’s been so long. I’ve been running my own business for the past few years. How about you?”

He started to answer, and she sensed him hesitate, finally he said, “I got into landscaping a few years ago and really liked it so here I am now, I’m a route manager for Trevor doing something I really like. I’ve been good too, man I can’t believe how fast time flies.”

“What are you doing here?” Rob asked through partially narrowed eyes.

She softly laughed at his cool tone, but answered him anyway; “I’m here to help Mr. Cavanaugh with
some organizational strategies.” That was the answer she always gave if she was ever asked what she was doing for a particular company because she often dealt with sensitive issues for her clients.

They continued talking for a few minutes about former classmates and which ones of their old group they still talked to. As they talked Elle took in two things. One, Rob hadn’t changed at all, he was 5’10”, with strawberry blonde hair, light brown eyes, and was slightly muscular but still pretty scrawny, she was surprised he hadn’t bulked up more given his line of work. The second thing she noticed was Trevor watching them the whole time with a scowl on his face, it made her happy to think the interaction between her and Rob was making him jealous.

Trevor stood straighter as he watched the two of them talking. He couldn’t believe she knew Rob, what the heck was that connection he thought to himself...? Trevor felt annoyed and angry, and quickly realized he was jealous. Which was crazy since he didn’t have a right to be jealous but it was showing its teeth full force, he wanted to walk up to Elle and claim her as his but knew it wasn’t what he should do. As Rob and Elle talked he felt like an outsider but couldn’t walk away even though he was pretty sure Elle could find her way or Rob could show her. The thought hit him with more anger and jealousy than was probably appropriate. After a few minutes, it looked like Elle was finally saying her goodbyes and started walking back towards him. He didn’t know if he should ask her about Rob, but something in him was pushing him to do so.

As Elle walked back to Trevor she realized just how handsome he was and how the attraction to him was somehow stronger than last time. She also saw just how different physically he was from Rob, who wasn’t even her type although they had dated; Trevor was definitely her type. The two men really were night and day from each other. His broad shoulders were squared off tightly, his arms crossed, but the scowl was gone from his face. His lips were now in a tight straight line, which to her did nothing to complement those gorgeous lips.

Elle approached Trevor and said, “Okay now we can get down to business. Sorry about that.”

Trevor couldn’t hold back or hide his jealousy, he knew it would show in his voice, but at the moment he didn’t care. He had to ask, “What was that about? How do you know Rob?”

She bit her cheek slightly to hide the grin caused by the jealous tone in Trevor’s voice. “It was about catching up with an old friend, if you must know. Now that you’ve pried let’s get to work.”

Elle turned to walk away and Trevor smelled her amazing vanilla perfume. Trevor moved faster so he could walk beside her. He couldn’t resist saying, “I didn’t mean to pry, I was curious especially based on your reaction to him. And you’re right this is just business so let’s just work on that.”

Elle couldn’t believe what she said about prying because now Trevor had put up a wall and became very professional and distant; he didn’t have that wall up before Rob. She ignored his clipped tone and just said,
“Thank you. I’m going to need the whole story so I can start making a plan to fix this.” Trevor led her into his office and shut the door.

Elle looked around Trevor’s office; it looked the same as last time with his massive dark wooden desk, dark plush chairs, a book shelf filled with landscaping books and picture albums he kept as references for clients. She couldn’t help but smile at remembering she had helped him put together those reference books. She noticed he added pictures on the bookshelf as a personal touch and had put up two wooden file cabinets to match his desk.

Trevor gestured to a chair on the other side of his desk for Elle to sit in as he edged the corner of the desk to sit in his chair. He got right to it, “When calls come in either my assistant Becky or I take them, usually she does. She inputs the schedules in the module if I don’t, then I check the schedules again on Thursdays to be sure nothing is double booked and that all the appointments make it onto the calendar. Friday mornings I send the schedules to each of the guys so they know where they’ll be going the following week. About a month ago clients started calling saying my guys weren’t showing up for scheduled work. When I looked into it, I discovered the appointments were not on the schedules. I had seen those jobs posted, so I know someone changed it. I had to start jobs myself and then pay my guys overtime because they had to stay late to get work finished. Finally last Monday three clients called and said my guys weren’t there. I looked into it and three crews were booked for meetings with me so they were here; I had nothing in my
book about a meeting. I was out finishing up one project and estimating another, so I wouldn’t have scheduled that meeting. My guys are all pretty frustrated and some may quit soon. Customers are annoyed; if they don’t like what they get from me they’ll stop calling and won’t give referrals. I need this to stop or I’m going to lose current or potential customers or my employees. I can’t afford for this to interfere with my busy summer season too. The spring season is bad enough. Thankfully the people affected have been very understanding, but I don’t want them thinking, or around town saying, “don’t hire them they’re idiots, they can’t even manage scheduling.”

Elle realized she’d have to be here a lot until this was straightened out. She decided she would spend mornings here when necessary and the rest of the day with her other clients. This wasn’t the schedule she was hoping for; it would be torture to have to see him every day for hours, since it didn’t seem he’d give her much space as worried as he was.

Elle finally spoke, “Okay well that’s what I’m here for. We don’t want this to hurt your business even by one client. First, I need to know who has access to your schedules and who knows when everything is finished on Thursdays and sent out on Fridays?”

“Also, given the way this is going I am thinking I may have to be here most days to look into records for everyone and prepare any press releases that may be needed. I’ll work here mostly in the mornings for a few hours then head back to my office for other clients, will that schedule work for you?”

After Elle told Trevor when she would be working on his situation, her heart started to flutter at the prospect of spending so much time with him continuously. She knew he wasn’t going to sit back and not help find who was screwing with his business. She looked up at Trevor but couldn’t read the expression on his face, so all she could do was wait for him to answer her.

Trevor couldn’t believe he could see her almost every day, it made him see a bright spot in this whole ridiculous mess. He glanced at Elle and realized she was looking at him, with a nervous look behind her gorgeous green eyes, why was she nervous?

He said, “Every day is fine, as long as you can fit it in, I’m good. I’m usually here in the mornings anyway and then head out in the afternoons to jobs and appointments so the timing actually works out pretty well. The people with access are Becky, my route managers and myself. There are ten route managers, each has a team they “supervise”, and most teams have five to ten people on it. I print the finalized schedule out to give to everyone. Since we both know I’m not sabotaging my own business you can rule me out and move on, even though I have a hard time believing one of my people is doing this. Not every team has had problems, most have though and I want to keep this contained as much as possible. Anyway, what do we do next? And how can I help?”

Elle smiled compassionately at the slight tremor in his voice when Trevor talked about his people and the possibility that they could be trying to sabotage his business. She said, “First I am going to need you to make yourself
the only one who has any type of access to the scheduling module especially editing and making changes. Send everyone else a “Read Only” version. Also, attach an alert to see who tries to log on and look at the schedules and when. Then either give me access or a history of who logged in, when, and for how long. If we could see what they were doing while logged in the system, that would be great.”

Elle took a deep breath and continued, “I’ll also need the names, files and information of everyone who had access to the schedules prior to today. I’ve got to establish a motive to find out, for example, if a rival company is paying anyone. I am going to draw up a strategy for you in case news of this gets out. I’ll have a statement for clients and employees, and ways to avoid this in the future. We’ll create publicity notes to have on hand in case you need to issue an apology to clients and ideas on how to advertise to bring in business whether the scheduling issue gets out or not.”

“You can also help me by telling me about the clients whose jobs were getting screwed up. I’m going to need a list of the teams who were on the wrong schedules and jobs that didn’t match the ones you gave out and the list of clients that were affected. Do we know how your employees’ got the revised schedule or was it wrong when you handed them out? This would change the window of opportunity someone would have to make changes, then I will need all the files.”

Trevor noticed the smile on Elle’s face, he wasn’t totally sure what he did to get the smile but he liked it and wanted more of it. He was also glad she agreed to
spend time with him going through all the information; it meant they’d be spending time alone together.

“I’ll get you all those lists you needed but I don’t know when the changes were made, I usually glance over the schedules before I give them out to make sure everything is right but I may have missed something. I email the schedules to the route managers too. Each team’s job is highlighted a different color, so it’s easier to see gaps or overlapping of projects. If it weren’t for my guys calling me and some of the customers I still might not know this was going on.” Trevor said with a disgusted tone.

Elle felt so bad for him, “Don’t blame yourself, you didn’t do anything wrong. We’ll figure this out. It’s what I do.”

Elle remembered when they worked together last time she suggested he take pictures of all his work not just the “big” projects and catalogue them as references and samples for his customers. Most people were visual, especially with landscaping, and would want to see what could be done. She wondered if that would help somehow. “Do you still take pictures of your jobs when they’re done?”

“Sure do. Why do you need them?” Trevor asked.

“Maybe if I saw the pictures from jobs similar to the ones we’re talking about there will be something that stands out.”

“Okay, I’ll get you copies.” Trevor grabbed the list of clients and his teams off the printer and handed them to Elle.

Elle took the lists and started to compare, when she noticed the teams who were scheduled weren’t the same
each time her theory of it involving only one team was ruled out. Some of the clients were repeats, but not all were “high-profile” so that theory could be ruled out as well. Elle made notes on what he gave her and her thoughts as she looked through it all then the files were next.

Trevor gathered the list of files she requested and handed them to her. He sat down to start helping sort through them, too. “Should we start with the most recent employees with access?” Trevor asked.

“That would be a good place to start.”

Elle took the stack and split it into two piles, one she kept and the other she handed across the desk to Trevor. “Thanks. What are we looking for? Is anything supposed to stand out?” Trevor asked.

Elle looked up and answered, “Anything that might give us a clue. Like if someone was or is having financial troubles, most companies document that stuff.” He told her they did if they knew about it. “Then that person could potentially be bought by your competition, anyone with shady past incidents that seem to stick out, someone with personal or family problems, or just anyone who may have seemed more “off” to you in the past few months.”

Although Trevor was upset about the situation he said, “Okay, I can do that. But we may want to double-check each other’s stacks to be sure we didn’t miss anything. Becky also takes notes on employees who have asked for advances, all their sick days, vacation and of course any of their insurance changes so we should look at that stuff too. If there is something for Becky’s file I make a note of it.” He was willing to help out as much as he could.
“Before you ask, the hardcopies of all files are kept in the file cabinets over there,” he pointed towards the cabinets on the opposite wall of his office. “They are kept locked and I have the only key, every time Becky makes a change she prints it off and gives it to me.”