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“Can I help you?”

Alli turned to see a woman leaning in a doorway with a coffee mug. She appeared to be in her early forties or maybe late thirties, with her dark hair scraped back, an ID badge clipped to a cardigan. She had a look on her face that said she already knew who Alli was, but she was wondering exactly what she was doing here.

“I think I’m okay,” Alli said. “Just getting the lay of the land, so to speak.”

“Maybe I can help you? Are you working on a purchase order?” She nodded at the clipboard. “That’s sort of my job. I process them going out and then the order coming in. Make sure it gets into inventory for the bean counters to depreciate. You know the drill.”

Should Alli tip her hand? It sounded like if anyone would know where this furniture had ended up, it might be this woman.

“Allison Crenshaw,” Alli said, holding out her hand. “I’m Sam Winslow’s new assistant.”

“Everyone knows who you are,” the woman laughed. “And I’m Miranda Bates. PO processor extraordinaire. In other words, I’ve been here for years. If you show me the purchase order, I can tell you about it off the top of my head.”

Alli handed over the clipboard, letting Miranda peruse the paperwork. The other woman frowned, shuffling through the sheets before shaking her head.

“I’ve never seen this. It must not have actually gone through,” Miranda replied. “If it were official, it would have crossed my desk, but I’ve never seen it.”

“It was signed and dated months ago,” Alli pointed out. “There isn’t anyone else’s desk it might have been routed to?”

“My desk and my desk only. I have to plan my vacations months in advance and never around fiscal year-end because no one else does my job,” Miranda said with a definitive shake of her head. “It might have been signed, but it didn’t go through. That does happen from time to time. The suits decide something and then change their minds.”

“You’re sure?” Alli pressed, but not too much. “This must be a canceled PO?”

“It must be. I sign for equipment deliveries and then tag each item with a bar code that links to the inventory system. I’d remember twenty desks. My back and knees would remember twenty desks, let alone the chairs.”

That much furniture wouldn’t be easy to hide, even in a building as large as Winslow Financial’s home office.

“I guess I won’t worry about this then,” Allis said, tucking her pen back into her pocket. “I’ll check with accounting to make sure these were actually canceled, though.”

“Are you settling in okay?” Miranda asked. “Being the new girl is never easy, but Sam always seemed like he would be a good guy to work for.”

“He is,” Alli assured the other woman. “I’ve had much worse bosses. Much worse. But it is strange. You know…sitting in someone else’s chair.”

“I would imagine that it is. She was good people,” Miranda said. “Leigh. Not warm exactly. She kept to herself; you could work near her for ten years and not know a thing about her life. But she was kind, which is rarer and worth more. When my mother was in the hospital, Leigh was the only one upstairs who asked about her by name. Every day. Nobody told her to.”

“That sounds like a good person to have known.”

“It was.” Miranda nodded, her gaze far away. “She’d been off, the last few months. Quiet. Quieter than her usual quiet, I mean. We all just figured it was work or nothing, because that’s the thing. You never knew with her. She’d play it close to the vest, which, of course, was her right. But we always thought she was something of a mystery, if you know what I mean.”

Alli nodded in agreement, remembering the graceful woman she’d seen that night at Tate’s. Leigh Gabler had a quietness about her that spoke softly but made a big impact.

“I’d see her outside sometimes,” Miranda went on. “On the phone. Out by the side doors where it’s quiet, not the smokers’ side, the other one. A few times. And she’d have a look on her, you know the one, when it’s bad news you’re managing.” She shrugged. “I didn’t listen. It wasn’t mine to listen to. But you catch a word crossing past. Somebody was sick. Somebody she was worried about. That’s all I ever heard, and I made myself not hear more.”

Somebody was sick.

Had that been Leigh’s sister who had passed on about six months ago? The information went in the folder in her head marked later, alongside a Florida condo, and a partner nobody upstairs had known about.

Nobody had known anything.

“That’s awful,” she said. “Carrying something like that alone.”

“That was Leigh. Carried everything alone. Right up to the end, apparently. It’s all very sad. Everyone has been out of sorts since it happened. Look at my boss, Henry. It’s certainly had an effect on him.”

Alli remembered that Henry was one of Joel Winslow’s best friends, and from what Sam had hinted, not exactly good at his job.

“How was Henry affected?”

As far as Alli could see, Henry lived to get under Sam’s skin and be a pain in the ass.