Retreat (22 page)

    
Clara sat down at her desk, reeling from
this latest piece of information. Her father sat across from her and swung his
foot up onto his knee, pulling it toward him.

    
“I know this is a bit of a shock,” he
began.

    
Clara just stared at him sullenly.

    
“I know you don’t agree with it.”

    
She nodded.

    
“But you have to put yourself in our shoes.
Here your daughter shows up, homeless, broke, with a child to take care of.
What do you do? We couldn’t send her away. She came to Josie for help.”

    
“But for how long, Dad?” Clara asked,
throwing her hands up into the air. “How long is she going to stick around? And
what happens when she leaves? You’ll be heartbroken if she disappears after
you’ve grown attached to Elizabeth.
Or if all of the sudden she decides that she doesn’t want you anywhere near her
because you’re not her real father. You know she wouldn’t hesitate to play that
card again. What if she leaves Elizabeth
behind for you and Josie to raise? Did you think about that?”

    
“Yes, I thought about it,” he said gruffly.
“But what would you have us do?”

    
“Well for starters I wouldn’t have you risk
the business by putting her on the front lines, that’s for sure. I can’t
believe that she’ll know how to behave with the customers and even if I can
teach her how to do it what happens when she ditches us again? It won’t just be
you and Josie who get screwed – it will be her customers, too.”

    
Bill
looked down at his strong hands.

    
“Dad?”

    
“Damn it Clara, I know it’s not ideal,” he
looked at her and clenched his fists in his lap. “I just don’t know what else
to do. I don’t want to just give her money and put her up. She needs to work
for what she gets if she’s ever going to grow up. At least this way we can keep
an eye on her and if she starts to slip up we can get her the help she needs.”
    

    
“She’s moving in with Josie?”

    
“For now, yes.”

    
“How are you going to explain this to the
rest of the team?” Clara asked, hoping she could get him to change his mind. It
was his company, damn it. He didn’t have to do this. “They’re going to wonder
who this strange woman is and why she has a kid with her on a corporate
retreat.”

    
“Don’t forget that for most of them it’s
two strange women,” he said, using the stern tone he’d always used when there
was no point in arguing. She sat back in her chair and crossed her arms as she
listened to him, now fully aware she wouldn’t get anywhere.

    
“They don’t know you, either,” he
continued. “They’re probably going to start wondering when the rest of the
relatives will start crawling out of the woodwork. I’ll deal with it. Karen is
insisting that we separate the men from the women, so I’m planning to drive up
to the campsite tomorrow with Mark, Joe and Patrick. I’ll talk to them then.
You’ll go up with Meg, Josie, Rebecca and the baby.”

    
“Poor Meg,” Clara said. “She doesn’t
deserve that kind of imprisonment. Three hours in a car with us.”

    
“Meg will be fine.”

    
“If we don’t drive off a cliff,” Clara
spit.

    
“Clara, trust me on this one. Everything is
going to work out. I need you to be strong about this. If you go off talking
about how you don’t think Rebecca will be any good at the job then you’ll
poison the well with the other employees before we even get started.”

    
She knew he was right, but she didn’t like
it.

    
“So now what?” she asked.

    
“Go home, get packed up, get some sleep.
We’ll meet in the parking lot tomorrow morning at eleven.”

    
“Okay. I’ll be there.”
   

    
“Clara, it will be okay,” he said as he
walked out.

    
She wasn’t hungry anymore. She turned back
to her computer and stared at the screen saver, trying to decide whether to
leave like her father advised or keep working. She sighed. The bungalow was too
quiet. She’d stay here where at least she had internet access. She needed to do
something to take her mind off the fact that she would be training Rebecca.
Part of her wanted to walk out, to quit. But she couldn’t do that to her
father. Not now. As hard as this was on her it would be even harder on him if
she left him alone to deal with her mother and Rebecca.

    
She logged on and tried to pull down as
much information as she could find about bio-fuels and their different
configurations and uses. She felt a little weak on the scientific background
and she knew from her days in Fort
Worth that in order to make any sale fly she had to be
on top of her game, which meant being on top of the technical stats.

    
She found information on a couple of
university websites and then discovered a whole site dedicated to bio-fuel
usage in Pennsylvania.
She was exploring the site when her computer screen flashed and went black.

    
“What the hell,” she said under her breath.
She clicked the monitor on and off a few times but it didn’t make a difference.
Then, just as suddenly as her screen had gone down it came back up again, only
this time the website was different.

    
“Tipsy Tops?” she said, her eyes growing
wide. That was a strip club chain down in Tulsa.
What the hell was the homepage doing on her screen?

    
She clicked on the little red box with the
x in it to close out the window, but another one popped up that had their hours
on it. She clicked to close that one and three more windows popped up. Clara
gasped.

    
It was her.

    
She was there on her own computer screen,
except it wasn’t really her. It was her face and hair, but she’d been edited
onto another woman’s body. It had to be one of the Tipsy Tops strippers because
in the second picture she was wrapped around a pole and in the third she was
leaning down provocatively over a burly guy in a black Stetson, showing way
more cleavage than she had.

    
She closed her eyes and shook her head.
When she opened them again the pictures were still there. She tried to close
out the windows but more kept popping up.

    
She reached down and pressed the power
button on her CPU, forcing the whole system to shut down. Her hands were still
shaking when she heard someone rap on her door.

    
“Come in,” she said, still half in shock.

    
A young man in tan khakis and a black polo
shirt strolled in and looked at her curiously.

    
“Are you okay?” he asked, giving her an odd
smile that showed half of his perfectly straight teeth. Clara bet his parents
paid a lot for those teeth. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

    
“Yes. Fine,” she said, giving him a polite
smile. “And you are?”

    
He held out a hand to her. “I’m Patrick,”
he said. “The IT guy?”

    
Oh shit, she thought as she shook his hand.

    
“I need to take a look at your computer.”

    
“Why?” she asked, trying to sound innocent.

    
“Because we just had a security breach and
I’m trying to figure out how they got in. I want to check your settings to see
if they’re set to allow others to access your system remotely.”

    
“Why would they be?” she asked, wondering
if there was any way of talking him out of starting her computer back up. She
was petrified of what might pop up on the screen next.

    
She positioned her chair so he’d have to
tackle her and push her out of the way to get to the computer.

    
“They should be set to give you offsite
access to our server so you can work from home,” he said. “But someone else
came in and took control of our main server and I want to figure out how the
hell they did it. That kind of security breach could bring down the whole
operation.”

    
She studied him for a moment.

    
“I just met you,” she said, tucking her
hair back behind her ears.

    
“So?” he asked. She could tell he wasn’t
sure what to make of her.

    
“So … what I have to tell you is probably
not appropriate in a number of ways but I need you to just trust me that I’m
not a total flake.”

    
“Okay,” he said, narrowing his eyes at her.
“What’s going on?”

    
“I don’t know how much Bill told you about
me …”

    
“Just that you’re his daughter and the best
sales rep he knows.”

    
“What about why I came back?”

    
“He didn’t say anything and I didn’t ask,”
Patrick said, half-sitting on the edge of her desk and crossing his arms. “What
does this have to do with your computer?”

    
She took a deep breath. “I came back
because I broke off my engagement to a guy down in Tulsa.”

    
“Okay. Sorry to hear that,” he said,
although she thought he looked slightly amused.

    
“Anyway, I think the guy I broke up with
might be behind your breach. My screen went black and then like fifteen seconds
later some really, really inappropriate photos came up on my screen.”

    
“What kind of photos?” he asked, a little
smirk crossing his lips.

    
“Doctored ones. They look like me but they
aren’t really me. I’m embarrassed to turn my system back on and have you see
them.”

    
“They won’t be there,” he said confidently.
“When you shut down everything closed out. I cut all outside access to our
server so at this point we don’t even have an internet connection, so you don’t
have to worry about me seeing something you don’t want me to see.”

    
Clara let out a breath. “Okay,” she said.
“Then it’s all yours.”

    
She stood and let him take her seat. He
started the computer back up and made a few adjustments in the control panel.

    
“I’m sorry that happened,” he said,
sounding sincere. “I can see that it shook you up and honestly no one should
have been able to get in except you unless they know your password. Are you
using something that someone would be able to guess at?”

    
“My user name is ClaraS and my password is
the same thing.”

    
He dropped his head and stared down at the
floor. “That just slays me,” he said. “You don’t know how many people use
passwords that are so easy for anyone to figure out, like their own names or
their kids’ names or their pets’ names. We’re going to change it right now. Use
something that is not a word and that has a letter, a number and a symbol.”

    
She thought about it for a moment and then
gave him a new password.

    
“That should make it much more difficult
for anyone else to get into your system,” he said. “You may want to do an audit
of your other passwords for all your online accounts and make sure you’re using
something that isn’t so easy to hack into.”
   

    
“Thanks, Patrick,” she said.

    
“No problem,” he stood to leave. “Are you
going on the retreat?”

    
She smiled, deciding that she liked him.
“I’ll be there.”

    
“Should be interesting,” he said. “I’ll see
you there.”

    
“Okay,” she said. “See you there.”

CHAPTER
11

    
After Patrick left, Clara plowed through
the final stack of client folders her father had stacked on her desk. All of
her customers were in Pennsylvania,
a strategic decision her father made when he decided to refocus on bio-fuels.
State regulations were lengthy and complex when it came to alternative energy,
and his plan was to become expert in their own state laws before branching out
into other territories. It was a smart move, Clara reasoned, but she also found
herself itching to see the company ramp up and take off when they began
reaching out first regionally and then nationally.