Nowhere to Run. Nancy Bush

the front parking lot and drove to the west side of the building, the unofficial employee parking lot. The building itself was concrete on all four sides, with a glass atrium entryway complete with double doors and a guard of sorts, Paul de Fore, a total tool, in Liv’s biased opinion.

      Liv parked nose out, climbed from the driver’s door, remote locked the Honda and started around to the front of the building. She didn’t even think of using the back door as Upjohn wanted all his employees to enter through the front. The back door automatically locked whenever it was used, and could only be accessed from inside. Upjohn was very, very cautious about anyone learning anything about his newest game models created by the nerds/techies who worked in the upstairs office with its glowing screens and simulations and miles of computer code. Liv had only peeked in once when Aaron, Kurt’s son, had practically dragged her up the stairs with him, and she’d been half-awed at the way the room looked like a control room straight out of some high-tech adventure movie.

      Now, as she entered through the mahogany front door—a door surrounded by windows—Paul gave Liv a narrow-eyed once-over, as if he’d never seen her before. Liv clutched her purse harder, an automatic reaction she couldn’t quite repress even though she would never bring her handgun to the office. She wasn’t that crazy.

      Jessica Maltona, Zuma’s receptionist, smiled at Liv as she entered, then slid a sideways look toward Paul who was still standing by the front door, arms crossed, watching Liv walk across the polished floor to her cubicle on the far side of the large room. Though the two women weren’t friends exactly—they didn’t know each other that well, Liv’s fault mostly—they shared a silent communication about Paul whom neither could stand.

      Liv smiled at Jessica as she passed. He’s a tool, all right. To which Jessica, as if hearing her, nodded emphatically.

      Settling herself at her desk, Liv stuffed her purse into a lower cabinet with a lock. She twisted the key and pocketed it, then settled down to the night before’s bookkeeping entries. It wasn’t an exciting job. It was rote, by and large. But rote work was exactly what kept her from thinking and imagining and worrying. No, she wasn’t bipolar. No, she wasn’t schizophrenic. She was just . . . damaged . . . for lack of a better word. From the moment she’d discovered her mother’s body, she hadn’t been the same.

      An hour into the job, safely ensconced at her work station, which was about a hundred feet from the front doors and the floor-to-ceiling windows splayed with the Zuma Software red neon logo in script, backward from inside the building but dramatic nonetheless, she picked up the phone and dialed the number before her brain, with its strong governor, could stop her.

      “Crenshaw and Crenshaw,” a woman’s voice answered in that slightly bored, slightly snooty tone that seemed to invade the better law firms.

      “This is Olivia Margaux Dugan returning Tom Crenshaw’s call.”

      “Mr. Crenshaw is not in yet.” There was a small rebuke there, as if she felt Liv should know someone of Mr. Crenshaw’s importance wouldn’t deign to get to work so early. “Would you care to leave a message?”

      “Just give him this address.” She told the woman Zuma Software’s street address and finished with, “If he wants me to have the package in his care from Deborah Dugan, he can send it here.”

      “May I tell him what this is concerning? Something further?” she asked, sounding a bit miffed by Liv’s high-handedness.

      “He’ll know what it’s about.” And she hung up.

      Two hours later the package arrived by special messenger. Liv looked up from her computer first with annoyance, then surprise at the speed, then trepidation, as Paul de Fore walked toward her, holding out the 8 ½ x 11 manila envelope. Liv had been inputting figures into a computer program, compiling information to be turned over to Zuma’s accountant, who in turn would pore over the data as if it held the answer to the universe’s deepest questions, who would then pass it along to Kurt Upjohn, the original developer of the war-game-type video games that had put his software company on the map. Her head was full of numbers and seeing Paul coming her way pulled her out of that world and into the present at hyperspeed. She almost felt motion sick.

      Paul slapped the envelope on her desk without so much as a word. He was no conversationalist, which suited Liv just fine.

      Gingerly picking up the package, she looked it over, her gaze jumping to the return address of Crenshaw and Crenshaw. She’d been alarmed when Tom Crenshaw had asked her birth date, where she grew up, the names of her parents, and a myriad of other questions. She in turn had demanded to know to whom she was speaking. How had he found her number? What did he want really? What were his credentials? He explained about Crenshaw and Crenshaw and what a long-established, trusted firm they were. Then he told her about the package and when he invoked the name of Deborah Dugan she dropped the receiver.

      But now here it was. The package from her mother, nineteen years after her death. It was a large manila envelope with her name typed on a label affixed to its center. She laid it carefully on the desktop. She almost wanted to poke it with a stick, though it was clearly just some papers. Papers about what, though? She couldn’t think of anything that—

      “Hey!” Aaron Dirkus snapped his fingers in front of her face.

      Liv sat bolt upright, as if goosed. “Aaron,” she said tightly to Kurt Upjohn’s son, her only “friend” at Zuma.

      “Didn’t mean to scare you,” he answered affably, though he clearly didn’t care one way or another. Aaron’s last name was different than his father’s, due to some undefined wrangle between Kurt and Aaron’s mother—Kurt had only managed to marry her after Aaron was born and that pissed her off but good, so much so that she’d given her son her maiden name rather than Upjohn. Then later, she and Kurt had divorced anyway. The story went something like that. Liv had never quite got it in full detail, but it didn’t really matter. She’d never wanted to question Aaron further because that would have given him carte blanche to ask her about herself and she didn’t want to go there. Ever.

      “You’re kinda in a fog. C’mon, let’s go out back and have a smoke,” Aaron said.

      “I’ve got some work to catch up on.” She wasn’t interested in smoking anything, especially Aaron’s type of cigarettes.

      “Bullshit. You work too hard as it is. You’re giving the rest of us slackers a bad name.”

      “The boss is your father. You can get away with it. I can’t.”

      “People are starting to hate you around here, you know that? You gotta come with me.”

      He wasn’t going to take no for an answer, and he’d been known to actually pull her out of her chair to get her to comply, so she reluctantly got to her feet. Truthfully, she really didn’t take enough breaks, according to the law, so she followed him to the back door on the first floor and outside to the enclosed patio-type area, with its overhang and its gate that led to the employee parking lot. Her blue Accord was three in, facing out as if ready to take off.

      Aaron normally stuffed a brick-sized rock in the door to keep it ajar, but today he actually pulled out a key and unlocked it from the outside, so that the door would stay open until he relocked it.

      “Where’d you get that?” Liv asked.

      “Kinda lifted it,” he admitted. “Don’t worry. I’ll lock up before we leave tonight. I just can’t stand walking by that asshole de Fore every time I want to breathe some fresh air.” He shot her a quick smile as he pulled a joint and lighter from his pants pocket.

      Aaron liked to smoke “maree-wanna,” as he called it. Liv stayed away from all drugs; she’d been encouraged to take enough during her yearlong treatment at Hathaway House to last her a lifetime and then some. She liked a clear head and, apart from a very occasional drink, mostly steered clear of alcohol, too.

      “You don’t say much,” Aaron observed with a sideways look as he belched out a lungful of smoke. “I like that about you. Although you’re kind of shut down.”