Broken Trust by Shannon Baker Read Free Book Online Page B

spoke to the intercom.
    Sylvia must have already hung up.
    “How are you?” Nora asked.
    Petal shrugged. “Darla was my friend.” Her voice sounded like a drop of water on a still lake.
    “I’m sorry. Do you think you should go home?”
    Petal shook her head, sending her dreads into a frantic dance. “Sylvia has work for me to do.”
    Nora couldn’t say what she wanted to say, which was, Screw Sylvia. Could this really be her first few hours of her first day at the first shot of a job in a year?
    “Well, let’s go see the office, then.”
    Petal led the way down the narrow stairs through the kitchen. Someone had propped the back door open and a breeze blew away the scorched popcorn odor. Past the door, a few feet beyond the kitchen and an open storage area, Petal stopped in front of a closed door. She opened it and stepped back.
    Nora hesitated before entering. The room was by far the largest in the building. It accommodated what appeared to be an antique banquet table in the center of the space, scattered with maps.
    “Welcome!” Sylvia swept from behind a desk, graceful as a supermodel in her high heels. “What do you think?” She stepped back and displayed her kingdom as if she were a hostess at t he White House.
    “Impressive,” Nora said, not lying.
    Sylvia waved that away. “The Trust was too cheap to give me a separate office , but I’ve adjusted to the constraints.” She led Nora from the door, around the center table to the far side of the room.
    The area Sylvia chose as her personal office occupied a whole corner. Her massive cherry wood desk nestled in the space created from two walls of the suite and one wall pieced together with file cabinets.
    “I spent quite some time scrounging in antiques stores to find this bookcase.” She indicated an ornate wood bookshelf occupying the wall behind her desk. A Tiffany lamp on her desk cast a glow to reflect off the polished wood furniture. The bookshelf held her framed diplomas, a bronze of a nude , and volumes of expensive-looking hardcover books.
    “But this is my real treasure.” She swept her arm in front of her to showcase the antique dining table taking up the center of the room. Maps sprawled across the table. “I’m quite proud of that table. It was an amazing deal I found at a shop in Aspen. Darla questioned the expense and said a fifty - dollar table from Costco would work just as well , but Mark backed me up.”
    Petal slinked away to another corner and folded herself into a chair. She rolled it close to a desk more like the humble discount office store kind the rest of the Trust staffers used. A small lamp sat on her desk, draped in a pink scarf. She hunched over a keyboard and began to type.
    The addition felt tacked-on, without the charm of the turn-of-the-century farmhouse. Nora pointed to a stack of computer processing units. These weren’t typical CPU towers to power a regular PC. Next to the tower stood a giant, high-tech scanner, almost as large as the antique table. “What is all this for?”
    Sylvia seemed pleased to be asked. “The Cubrero Family Foundation paid for sophisticated modeling software and sufficient power to run it. We needed to have the tools so I could create the maps.” Sylvia indicated the scanner. “This machine prints with the necessary detail and size.”
    Nora studied the 3 x 4 - foot color maps tacked on the walls.
    Sylvia spoke as though conducting a grade school field trip. “ The m ountain pine beetle is infecting the forests at a rate ten times any previous infestation. It’s at about three-point-six million acres in Colorado and Wyoming alone. Common wisdom says the large beetle population is the result of climate change. But I’m suspecting the beetle is actually altering local weather patterns and air quality. There’s a big difference between the effect of a living forest and a dead one on the environment. I’m studying the age - old question: what comes first, the chicken or the egg ? ”