Up and Down the Corporate Ladder

by Zoe Storm

[Content warning: grief, mention of death]

A soft knock, then the door opened. “Cameron?” Aunt Lara’s voice said. “May I come in?”

I kept staring out of the window without replying. It was raining, the kind of rain that falls softly but steadily for days on end, soaking trees down to their roots, buildings down to their foundations, and people down to their bones. Appropriate, since it hadn’t stopped raining for the past three weeks; it hadn’t stopped raining since we’d buried my parents.

Aunt Lara took my silence as an invitation. She stepped into the room – my father’s study, which was now mine – and closed the door, then pulled up a chair and sat next to me.

Her hand found mine as we looked out of the window together.

“I miss them,” I said.

Aunt Lara just nodded. I knew she missed them too: she’d known my mother and father longer than I’d been alive, after all, having gone to university together. Upon graduating, Father had decided to take over Samson Enterprises, the company which had been founded by his grandfather, and he’d asked Aunt Lara to join him. Through their wits – and a good amount of luck – they quickly made it big, becoming an unbeatable team, with my father as president and CEO and Lara as COO; my mother, meanwhile, wasn’t technically an employee, but she took the role of the company’s conscience, gently reminding the two hotshots to think about the effect their decisions would have on people when they became distracted by thoughts of money. The three of them had stayed together through thick and thin: Aunt Lara had been my mother’s maid of honour and my father’s best woman upon their wedding, and she was my godmother. She’d been such a constant presence in my life, she was so friendly and affectionate with both my mother and my father, that I was startled to learn, at age eight, that we had no blood relation to her.

And now she was the only one who was left.

“I still feel like it’s my fault somehow,” I murmured. “If I hadn’t insisted on them coming back home to spend time with me…”

“Don’t blame yourself, Cam,” Aunt Lara replied, shaking her head. “You couldn’t have known their plane would crash.”

I closed my eyes and silently nodded. Metal fatigue: that had been the official cause of the accident according to the investigation – a bolt had snapped when the pilot had pulled back on the yoke during take-off, the elevator had become jammed, the plane had stalled, and that had been that.

“I don’t know what to do, Aunt Lara. How can I take his place? I’m only eighteen.”

“You’re already eighteen, Cam. And Elmer had been teaching you all about how the company’s run, right? You’ll manage. And I’ll be here to help you.” She squeezed my hand and smiled warmly at me. “I’ve been named interim CEO until you decide to take up the post, and I can hold down the fort until you feel ready. Meanwhile, you can start taking care of the small stuff.”

I nodded. “Thank you, Aunt Lara.”

“Speaking of which,” she continued, “there is something you should know. I’d talked about this with your father about a month ago, but…”

I sighed deeply. “Yeah. Of course. What is it?”

“Someone’s embezzling money from the company.”

I blinked, and then my eyes went wide as I stared at her. “What?!” I exclaimed.

“It has been going on for a while, apparently,” she continued. “A few years, at least. I’ve looked through the books very thoroughly before telling Elmer.”

“A few years? How has no one noticed this before?”

“The culprit was very good at covering their tracks. I only noticed it because they took money from an account I handle personally, and the numbers didn’t quite add up. Only a few pennies were missing, but you know how particular I am about these things.”

I nodded; Aunt Lara always had a sharp eye for numbers. “So you looked into it. What did you find out?”

“I found other accounts which had a few pennies missing from them. Many other accounts. Samson Enterprises has literally thousands of bank accounts, after all, and I realised the missing pennies were probably being dismissed as rounding errors. But, you see, a rounding error here, a rounding error there…” She waved her hand. “You get the picture.”

“I do. Pennies become pounds, which become hundreds of pounds, which become thousands…”

Aunt Lara nodded. “Which become five and a half million.”

I inhaled sharply. “Five and a half million,” I whispered.

“That’s what I was able to track down, at least, but I suspect there’s more I haven’t found yet.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“It is,” she nodded again. “A mere fraction of a percentage point of what Samson makes in a year, of course, but it is a lot of money. And what’s worse, the only people who are in a position to do this kind of thing are the members of the board. With some help, of course, there’s no way a single person could’ve done it; but they’re the only ones who have the executive access needed to pull it off.”

“So that’s why you haven’t gone to the police yet. Because it would become a huge scandal.”

“It would be a big blow to the image of Samson Enterprises, yes. And the police would make a whole bloody mess of the entire thing besides, I don’t trust them not to bungle up the investigation. Elmer agreed with me: he wanted to wait, to look further into this, so we could find out who the culprit is and gather airtight evidence before turning them in.”

“Yes, that makes sense.” I bit my lip in thought. “And did you find anything?”

“Unfortunately not. Like I said, whoever did this covered their tracks very well. There’s only so much I can do without going to each department in the company and checking the books then and there, but that would surely attract attention.”

“Yeah, people will wonder why Lara Phillips, Chief Operating Officer, is concerning herself with things which are well below her paygrade. I get it.”

“I would need to ask someone way lower on the corporate ladder to do it for me, but I don’t know who to trust: anyone could be working for the embezzler.”

I quirked my mouth. “Can’t you ask Eleni? She could do it.”

“No, she can’t. Everyone knows she works for me, so it would be the same as if I were looking into it personally.”

“So we’re stuck.”

“No, maybe not,” Aunt Lara shook her head. “There is someone who can look into things on my behalf.”

She was looking intently at me, and I realised what she was getting at. “Won’t I have the same problem, though? Won’t people wonder why Cameron Samson, President and CEO, is concerning himself with things well below his paygrade?”

“You wouldn’t be Cameron Samson, though. You would be someone else. You would go undercover as a new hire.”

“There’s no way this can work,” I replied, shaking my head. “I can pretend to be someone else, yes, use a different name, but the point is, I’m famous. I was in the news very recently, I even gave an interview at the memorial service. Someone is bound to recognise my face.”

Aunt Lara smirked. “If you go along with what I have in mind, I doubt anyone will.”

I gave her a curious look. “Why, what did you have in mind?”