Lena slapped at Hal’s hand and shook her head. “I verified all the paperwork myself. Nothing was out of order. I checked everything thoroughly.” She had no idea how she could have been fooled. She had been burned at the last job she had and she had been very careful. In the banking business all a person had was their reputation and it was very easily damaged.
“Why, why would you do this for me? You don’t know me. I can’t pay you. I can’t even afford the rent on the craptastic apartment I have. You can’t know how exciting it is to have to crawl over homeless people and fight off the drug dealers and pimps just to live in one room. My wonderful apartment, where I push the dresser in front of the door every night so no one walks in on me while I sleep. And now you tell me that someone is probably after me for helping that sniveling weasel of a man who called me sweetheart and said he loved me, while all the time he was screwing half the women in the accounting department,” Lena finished with a sob. Where had she gone so wrong? All she had ever wanted was to make her own way and help people. She didn’t think that was too much to ask.
When Lena started crying, Hal couldn’t help himself and pulled her into his lap, holding her close and trying to soothe her. “Honey, we’ll help you and you can stay here with us or we will put you up in a hotel. You never have to go back there if you don’t want to,” he said, holding her close and rocking her in his arms.
Lena sniffled and looked into his steel-gray eyes. “Why would you do that for me? You don’t even know me.” She couldn’t understand the feelings she had for these men already and was afraid of making another mistake. She pushed off of Hal’s lap and immediately felt the loss of contact but couldn’t let herself give in to the feelings she had. That was why she was in this mess. She gave in too easily and trusted everything she was told. She needed to learn not to trust anyone but herself. She was the only person she had to depend on.
“Are my clothes back? I think I need to go home and think about some of this,” Lena asked, looking around for her things.
“Hold on, Lena,” the voice on the phone said. Lena had almost forgotten about Melvin Ashcroft, her new boss. “I think we need to talk some more. It’s not safe for you to go back to your apartment alone. If you want to go and get some things, Hal and R.J. will go with you, but we don’t want you going back there alone.”
Lena really didn’t want to go back to her apartment alone but wasn’t sure she should listen to these men. “How do I know I can trust you and no one told me who’s going to pay for all this.”
R.J. pulled a file folder out of his briefcase that was beside the couch and laid it in front of Lena. He flipped it open and the first picture was of her and Simon, the man she had been dating at her first banking job. “Lena, do you know who this is?” he asked.
“That’s Simon. He was the manager over the loan department at the first bank I worked for. I went out with him a couple times.”
The next picture was of her and Simon at his father’s mountain cabin, skiing. There were several more of her and Simon, then several of her and her best friend Trina. The last few pictures were of her and Frankie. Someone had been following her for months. “How long have you been watching me?” she asked, starting to shake.
R.J. slid one arm around her and pulled her to his side. “Relax, honey, we haven’t been on the case that long, someone else took the pictures of you before we started.”
“Who, who’s been watching me? Why were they taking pictures of me? Some of these pictures go back several years.” Lena was starting to panic. Hal, Mel, and R.J. knew they had to do something to calm her down before she went into a full-blown anxiety attack.
Mel quickly decided the best way would be to tell her the truth and put all his cards on the table. It would be better to be able to talk to her in person, but there was no way to do that right now. He couldn’t let her work herself up all night. He had to tell her at least part of what was going on.
R.J., Hal, and Mel had worked together long enough that R.J. and Hal knew what Mel was going to do and prepared themselves to handle the fallout. They hoped they could keep Lena calm enough to keep her from running screaming and never talking to any of them again.
“Lena, you need to know that the FBI has been watching you for a long time. They were watching Simon and the bank before you started working there. After Simon realized he could keep up his illegal activities but pin the blame on you, he got even deeper involved in the criminal world. How he and Franklin Frank II are involved we aren’t sure yet, but we are sure they are. They both travel in the same circles and have several of the same contacts.”
“I’m being watched by the FBI. Am I going to go to jail?” Lena put her hands over her face. What was she going to do?
“Lena, don’t worry about it, honey. We’ll be here to help you. Nobody’s going to put you in jail. From now on one of us will always be with you,” Hal told her as he pulled her into his arms. He knew they were rushing things, but he couldn’t help it, he had to touch her.
Lena was so confused and overwhelmed. “Am I safe going home? You probably know my apartment isn’t in the best of neighborhoods. I never really felt very safe there anyway.” Lena quickly thought of places she could go. She couldn’t afford to get a hotel. Maybe she should call Trina. Then she thought what if she got Trina or someone else hurt. What was she going to do?
R.J. could see the
panic on her face. He reached over and pulled one of her hands down and held it between his own.
Hal wrapped his arms tighter around her and they both tried to reassure her everything would work out.
“Lena, I know you don’t know us very well, but please trust me and my friends. We’ll do our best to keep you safe. We want to find out who is doing this and why.”
“Why do you want to help me? You don’t even know me.” Lena let herself relax onto Hal’s lap. She knew she shouldn’t but for some reason she felt safe with these men and in her heart she knew they would do as they promised.
“Lena, I’m working with my contacts in the FBI to find out what is going on and why they picked you to take the fall for all of this. It could be you were just a nice woman in the wrong place at the right time for them to take advantage of,” Mel told her. He hoped what he was saying was true and that she wasn’t involved in all of this. From what they had been able to determine she had just got caught up in something she didn’t understand, but the FBI wasn’t sure that she wasn’t involved. It would be all he could do to keep them from taking her into custody and questioning her. He was pretty sure she didn’t know anything. If she did know something, she wasn’t aware of it. They would have to tread carefully with her.
Lena realized she was still sitting in Hal’s lap and her robe had flapped open, leaving a fair amount of cleavage and leg showing. Pulling her hand away from R.J., she pulled the edges of the robe together and pushed herself away from Hal, getting to her feet. “Are my clothes ready yet?” she asked, pulling her robe so the edges overlapped and walking a couple steps away. She needed to get out of there and figure out what she was going to do. She couldn’t think straight around them.
She looked around for her phone and remembered she had left it in the bedroom. “I really need my clothes,” she told them again as she walked back to the bedroom to find her phone.
She found her phone on the bed and sat to make her calls. She sat looking at her phone for a few minutes, trying to decide who to call. Trina was pretty much her only friend, but she didn’t want her to be involved in anything that could get her hurt. She could call her parents or her brother. Her parents would help her but her dad would tell her what a failure she was and how she should have gone into the family business of farming and stayed to help him like her brother did. Her brother would tell her about how since she had to go off and live in the city he had had to stay and help with the farm. A bunch of guilt she didn’t need. They had given her enough when they learned she had lost her first job. She hadn’t even told them about losing her last job. She was determined to make it on her own.
Lena put her phone down and started crying. She wasn’t a failure but felt like it in this moment. After crying for a few minutes she looked up and saw R.J. and Hal standing in the doorway looking at her.
Hal held her clothes in his hand. “Thurston just brought these up. He’ll take you wherever you want to go…but we’d really like you to stay here or let us put you up in a hotel until all this calms down and we find out for sure what is going on. All we want is to keep you safe and we feel we could do that better if you were here with us.”
“But we understand if you’re not comfortable with that,” R.J. added quickly.