Page 58 of The Cinderella Secret
He also thought she looked like a princess. That made her smile.
The door to the restrooms swung open and banged against the wall. Ella held her breath. The guard flipped off the bathroom lights and she could hear him walking away as the door slowly swung closed, the draft strip dragging across the tile with a soft noise.
Aiden was right—the evidence helped her case. So it was logical that her side would be responsible for forging it. The problem with that theory was that she knew she hadn’t done it.
When she had received an offer of “some records” from a disgruntled former DevEntier janitor, she had been hoping for something showing that her father was an employee. She hadn’t been expecting an entire box of records. The box, as far as she could tell, was untampered with, and she had been the first to go over every single piece of evidence in the box. She had pulled out the Berdahl-Copeland report herself. But if she hadn’t faked it, that left only one option: it had been done by someone at DevEntier.
And the only reason she could come up with for someone at DevEntier to do that, was if they were planning on pointing it out in court after she had entered it in evidence. But Aiden wouldn’t do that. He certainly wouldn’t point it out to her before he did it.
She hoped.
There was only one way to be certain. She knew the date on the box. All she had to do was sneak into the DevEntier warehouse.
DevEntier had started life under Henry Deveraux and Charles MacKentier in the seventies in Manhattan proper, but in the early eighties they had relocated to Brooklyn and a brand new building fresh from the desk of a newly minted architect with all the futuristic pink stucco anyone could ask for. DevEntier corporate headquarters had eventually gone back to Manhattan, but the research and development—the actual work of DevEntier—was still in Brooklyn along with the records warehouse. So here she was perched inside one of the women’s restrooms of DevEntier Brooklyn, admiring the forest green tile, wondering if the grout had ever been white, and hoping that she could sneak out and locate the records room without getting caught. Thanks to her uncle’s research team and a very helpful breakdown of the building’s security patterns, and mention of a particularly bribable employee at the front gate, getting into DevEntier had been easier than getting out of the apartment without her security detail. Now she just needed to find anything near that date and look to see if they also contained Berdahl-Copeland reports with her father’s name on them. Then she was back out the door and back home before anyone realized she wasn’t in bed. Of course, if she did find records with her father’s name on them, that gave her with a whole new mystery to deal with, but at least that was a mystery she could take to Aiden.
She waited another thirty seconds and left the bathroom. The record room was in the opposite direction of the guard desk. As long as she didn’t do anything monumentally stupid, she should be able to sneak a peek at the records and then be out the side door that the Zhao security team claimed was never alarmed because it was inconvenient for the employees.
She walked on tip-toe so that her heels wouldn’t make a racket, and wished she’d worn flats. But heels went with the DevEntier lab coat and the sensible pencil skirt that she hoped made her look more like an adult and less like a child playing at dress up, which was what she felt like. She made it to the records room and slithered through the door, cringing at the creak it made as she opened it. She waited just inside the door, listening for anything besides the pounding of blood in her ears, but nothing moved.
The records room held metal shelves full of white boxes, each labeled with two stickers—one yellow, one white. The white sticker contained a list of what was in the box and the yellow contained a date for when someone made adjustments to the contents. Or at least that was the idea. The yellow sticker could easily be ignored.
Ella located the shelf that her box should have come out of and went down the aisle. She walked quickly, trailing her finger along the boxes, checking the dates. She stopped in the center of the aisle and stared at the blank spot where her box belonged. She scanned the shelves and, taking a deep breath, she grabbed the box from two years later, the year of her father’s death, and slid it off the shelf. Resting the box against her stomach, she flipped through the papers, and found a Berdahl-Copeland right where she would expect to find it—right where it shouldn’t exist.
“But why?” she murmured, staring at the pink sheet of paper.
“Exactly what I want to know,” said a voice and she jumped, dropping the box. Aiden swung down from the top of the shelves and landed with a light thump.
The box dumped its contents onto the floor in pile like a November blizzard of leaves.
She stared at Aiden. He looked angry.
“This looks bad,” she said.
“Oh, you think?”
“But it’s not what it looks like.”
“So you didn’t get your evidence from the box that goes here?” He pointed to the blank spot.
Ella hesitated. “OK, yes, I did.”
“You stole it!”
“No!”
She hadn’t seen him this angry before. At least not at her.
“It fell off the turnip truck?”
“In a manner of speaking,” said Ella.
“It may have, but I didn’t. You stole it.”
“No! I didn’t.” She knelt down and began to shovel the papers back into the box.
“Stop touching those!” he ordered. She looked up at him and in a fit of childishness, picked up a piece of paper and licked it.
“Ella!”
