Chapter 1 - The Menu on the Floor
The menu hit me across the mouth hard enough to split my lip.
“Get me a real waiter,” Marco Bellini said.
A dozen people at Nashville’s Copper & Rye watched the laminated menu slide across the dark wooden floor. Nobody reached for it. A woman in a pearl necklace stared at her plate. Behind the bar, Devin stopped polishing a glass, his hands motionless.
Marco was forty-eight, broad through the shoulders, wearing a black shirt that cost more than my weekly grocery bill. His expression told me he expected an apology.
I was thirty-five, wearing a white blouse and a black waitress apron. My auburn hair was pulled into a ponytail, and my left knee still ached from a twelve-hour shift the day before.
I bent to pick up the menu.
Something slipped from my apron and struck the floor with a small metallic clink.
It was my corporate badge.
A rectangle of brushed steel, engraved with the oak-leaf logo of Redwood Table Group. Under that logo were three words I had kept hidden from every employee in this restaurant.
LUCY HART. OWNER.
I heard Marco draw breath.
“You just made a mistake,” I said, standing with the menu in my hand.
He gave a short laugh. “You planning to complain to corporate?”
“Actually,” a man behind him said, “corporate came to you.”
Frank Sullivan stepped out of the leather booth by the entrance. He was sixty, silver-haired, with rimless glasses and a charcoal-gray suit that looked out of place beside the waitstaff. He had been my attorney for seven years, and he looked sick about what he'd just witnessed.
Marco stared at him. “Who the hell are you?”
“Frank Sullivan. Counsel for Redwood Table Group. She owns this chain.”
The room went so quiet I heard grease popping behind the kitchen door.
Marco glanced between us. “That's impossible.”
“It's a controlling interest,” Frank said. “Fifty-eight percent of the parent company, with management authority delegated under the operating agreement. You're welcome to review the paperwork in my office.”
Marco's face changed. Not fear, exactly. Calculation.
I laid the menu carefully on the hostess stand.
“You're fired,” I whispered.
The words felt good for less than two seconds.
Then Devin made a small sound behind the bar. When I looked over, he wasn't smiling. He was looking at the security camera above the kitchen door.
Marco saw him looking, too.
“You sure about that, Lucy?” he asked. He spoke my name like he'd been holding it in his mouth for a week. “Because if I walk out, you ought to check what you're keeping in that office safe.”
Frank stepped closer to me. “Don't engage. We have a termination letter.”
Marco held up both hands. “By all means. Fire the guy who's kept this place profitable.” He turned toward the diners. “Hope you all enjoy your evening under new management.”
At the front door he paused to fix his cuffs. Two men in dark jackets, regulars who never ordered food, rose from their booth and followed him outside.
I knew about those men. That was why I'd been taking shifts here under my own first name, letting people assume I was just another server.
Six weeks earlier I'd bought control of Redwood, a struggling nine-restaurant Nashville chain, with the proceeds from selling my late father's diner and a loan that terrified me every time I opened the banking app. The books looked profitable. The employees looked exhausted. The reports didn't explain why servers kept quitting while cash deposits increased.
I'd believed I needed to see the operation without management watching.
I hadn't expected the man I was investigating to throw a menu at me in front of customers.
Frank handed me a clean napkin for my lip. “We should call the police about that assault.”
“We should ask Devin why he's frightened.”
Devin stared at his glass. When I approached, he said, barely moving his mouth, “You really own all of it?”
“Enough to fix it.”
“Then don't go in his office alone.”
My stomach tightened. “Why?”
Devin glanced at the door as if Marco could still hear him.
“He's got keys to the office, the safe, and the old payroll computer. If he's gone, somebody's going to need an answer for what he kept there.”
“An answer to whom?”
Instead of replying, Devin pushed a small key across the bar. On the plastic tag, someone had written STORAGE B in red marker.
“I'm sorry,” he said. “I should've given you this before tonight.”
Frank and I walked into the manager's office. I used my company key, then stopped. The safe was open. Inside lay a neat stack of envelopes, each labeled with a different employee's name.
On top sat a transfer authorization bearing my signature.
May you like
Except I'd never signed it.
And according to the date, the transfer had already been scheduled for six the next morning.
