Chapter 5 - The Campaign That Never Ran
Someone had taken three attachments out of the Alder Media file. That was what the portal showed. It did not show where the files had gone, who had removed them, or what they contained.
I wanted to call Grant and ask him all three questions.
Claire set her pen beside the laptop.
“If you ask him now, you give him the chance to answer questions we haven’t finished asking ourselves.”
“What if he’s already changing more records?”
“Then we document what’s available and request preservation of the underlying history. I’m drafting that request. First, Dana wants to show you another entry.”
Dana turned her screen toward me. She had filtered the routine accounts-payable export by the campaign code on Alder’s entry. Four charges appeared beneath a name I barely remembered: Cedar Row.
“It was supposed to be a spring campaign for the storefronts,” I said.
“Was it?” Dana asked.
I pictured the row of vacant windows we had struggled to lease. Sloane had proposed photographs, signs, and a small online campaign to bring prospective tenants to an open house. I remembered approving a budget to develop the idea. I did not remember seeing finished ads.
Dana pointed to the first charge. Alder had been paid for planning and initial creative coordination. The description was specific enough that I recognized the work. Two later entries described a completed set of display ads and a live landing page.
The third named Mara Ellis under “outside design,” followed by the words *final artwork delivered*.
My chair creaked as I leaned forward.
“Mara made the Harbor Street ads,” I said. “She’s the designer we spoke to yesterday.”
“Right. Those were real. I don’t want to make this work disappear just because these charges trouble us.”
Dana placed a pencil against the Cedar Row dates. The initial planning charge came first. The charges for finished work came weeks later.
“Do you have anything showing the Cedar Row campaign launched?” she asked.
I searched my memory for an open house invitation, a photograph, even a complaint from the leasing team that the ads had brought in the wrong people. I had none.
“That doesn’t mean it didn’t.”
“No. So let’s look.”
We checked the campaign calendar in the records I normally used to reconcile spending. Cedar Row appeared as *proposed*. A later line listed an expected launch window but no launch date. The leasing report showed ordinary property inquiries, not a campaign referral count.
Dana made a note. She did not circle the payments in red or call anyone a thief.
“I can ask the leasing staff,” I said.
“Later, perhaps,” Claire replied. “Right now, a question from you could travel through the office before we understand the records. And I don’t want someone feeling they have to guess at an answer because you own sixty percent.”
The reminder stung because she was right. I had spent years feeling powerless in that firm. It would be easy to mistake my voting interest for permission to demand certainty from an employee who had none.
Dana found an old email chain in the materials I had brought. Sloane had introduced Mara to the Cedar Row concept, and Mara had sent over a preliminary estimate. Nothing in the chain showed acceptance of the later work. The last message I had was Sloane asking Mara to hold off while the schedule changed.
“Would Mara know what happened after that?” I asked.
“She can tell us what happened with her,” Claire said. “Not necessarily with the whole campaign. We should keep those questions separate.”
I called Mara on speaker with Claire and Dana beside me. She answered from what sounded like a busy studio; a door closed, and the background noise faded.
“Evelyn? Did you find the Harbor Street files?”
“We did. Thank you. I’m sorry to call again, but I’m looking at the proposed Cedar Row campaign. Is now an okay time to ask about your work on it?”
“Sure. I remember Cedar Row.”
“What did you make for it?”
“A few rough concepts. Type treatments, sample images, a color direction. Nothing final.”
I looked at the line on Dana’s screen: *final artwork delivered*.
“Do you remember why it stopped?”
“Sloane emailed to say they were putting the campaign on hold. I asked a couple of weeks later whether they wanted me to revise the concepts. She said the project was canceled.”
“Did you make the display ads or a landing page after that?”
“No. I didn’t get a brief for either one.”
Mara paused.
“Is something wrong?”
I could hear the apprehension in her voice. She worked with companies like ours for a living. A careless question from me could sound like an accusation, especially with an attorney listening.
“Your name appears in a company billing description for later Cedar Row work,” I said. “I’m checking whether it matches work you actually did. I’m not saying you sent the bill.”
“I didn’t,” Mara said. “I sent one invoice for the concept work. They paid it. That was it.”
Dana held up a finger and wrote down the distinction.
Claire asked whether Mara could send a copy of her cancellation email and the invoice she had submitted, if she still had them. She explained that Mara did not need to search anyone else’s accounts or speculate about how the company had recorded the project.
“I should have both in my sent folder,” Mara said. “I’ll check.”
After the call, I stared at her name on the billing line.
“If we ask Alder about this, I don’t want anyone telling them Mara took money for work she didn’t do.”
“We won’t,” Claire said.
“She was careful with Harbor Street. She answered us twice. Her name shouldn’t become a warning label because it’s in our records.”
Dana nodded.
“What we know is narrower,” she said. “Mara says she did not perform the later work attributed to her. We still have to determine who submitted each charge, what services Alder says it provided, and where the payments went.”
Claire added a sentence to her notes, reading it back to me before moving on. She described Mara’s account without calling the entire Cedar Row campaign fictitious.
I thought of Grant at Bellwether, trying to buy a written description of me as drunk and threatening. He had counted on the difference between what happened and what somebody could be persuaded to put on paper. I would not close that difference by putting words in Mara’s mouth.
Dana reopened the accounts-payable export. She matched the Cedar Row entries against the payment register, checking invoice numbers, dates, and amounts. The initial concept work had gone to Mara. One planning payment had gone to Alder. The later charges were harder to follow because the campaign code was shared across vendors.
“Here,” she said.
A payment for $9,640 carried the Cedar Row code and a description reading *campaign completion and deployment*. Its payee was not Alder Media.
It was Lark Strategies.
“Who are they?” I asked.
Dana brought up the vendor profile available through my ordinary account access. It showed a mailing address, payment terms, and a masked account number. The payment register marked the $9,640 as paid.
The contact field held a general email address. The ownership field was blank.
“Could Alder have hired them?” I asked.
“Possibly. They could also have been engaged separately. This record doesn’t tell us which.”
“But Cedar Row never ran.”
“Mara says her part was canceled. We haven’t established that nothing else ran.” Dana looked back at the calendar. “We have a payment labeled deployment and no launch evidence in the records we’ve checked. That’s a question worth pursuing.”
I wanted the answer immediately. Instead, I watched Claire add Lark Strategies to the records request she was preparing. She would ask for the vendor setup materials, the basis for the payment, and the ordinary records identifying who had approved it. She also kept the Alder attachment history and the Northline approval bearing my name on the list. None of those questions had disappeared because we had found a new one.
My phone lay faceup beside the keyboard. Grant had not called that morning. The quiet felt less like peace than a closed door.
I thought about the people working at Cedar Row: the leasing assistant who fielded calls, the maintenance crew keeping empty storefronts ready, the employees expecting their paychecks while three of us examined a campaign they might never have seen. If money had been spent for work that was not done, they would live with the cost. If we accused the wrong person, they would live with that, too.
Dana printed the payment entry and set it beside Mara’s name in the invoice description. On paper, the two lines looked as though they belonged together. She drew no arrow between them.
“Let’s wait for her email,” she said.
May you like
I nodded. For the first time that morning, I could point to an actual destination for part of the Cedar Row money. Lark Strategies had received the payment.
I looked again at the blank ownership field. The payment had reached someone. We still could not say whose hands it had reached.
