Jo hadn’t just kept her desktop scrubbed clean. She’d kept her whole machine nearly pristine. Unnervingly clean.

That meant that the only record of what Daniella was looking for had to be a paper copy. Daniella turned around, started looking through the shelves again. Row after row of those binders were labeled as Inventory, by year.

Bingo.

Daniella flipped through the binder labeled Inventory: 2017–2020. Everything looked fine. Mostly normal. But the systematic nature of the numbers she had in her sales ledger bothered her for some reason. They were random, in a way, but they were also tracking downward so steadily, so perfectly.

She looked at the distribution graph in her personal notebook. But she still didn’t buy it. She started plotting some of the most recent sales. Again. This time just the numbers over time. They were down, but they weren’t down exponentially the way they should have been. They should have looked like a hockey stick, sliding down until they hit a tipping point of no return. Instead, they were just down, down, down, like a perfect little escalator.

Daniella got up, found another binder. This one was from five years ago.

Holy pickles, Batman.

The sales were down because the inventory was down.

By a lot.

Archer Hunt Junior was buying about half of what he used to just five years ago. And Daniella knew it was Archer because he was such a control freak, he refused to hire a book buyer for the store. He did all the buying personally.

Daniella went back to the sales ledger, noting the places where Imogen had left those little notes in the margins about buying copies. She checked that against the actual inventory that the store had bought. Nothing. They’d bought none of the customer requests. Nothing new, either. Just a slowing trickle of classics and bestsellers.

Archer Hunt Junior was unwittingly hampering the sales with what he was buying.

But why?

A new wave of nausea hit. And this one had nothing to do with the hangover.

She went back to the laptop. But instead of looking for answers on the computer, Daniella clicked through to the browser, trying to see if she could find any records of the actual accounts online.

And Jo, God bless her, had left herself logged into her password manager.

Daniella suddenly had access to nearly everything. She went looking for the petty cash first, knowing that was the easiest thing to fudge, the easiest thing to fake.

And that’s when she saw it—an inventory transaction for over nine thousand dollars in the account. Daniella looked over the business-expense totals in the binder again. She had records up until the last week. So unless the transaction happened literally last night, there was nine thousand dollars that went missing, somehow. But that didn’t make any sense at all. Nobody just misplaced nearly ten grand. Not overnight.