Ostentatiously, I looked left and right, then leaned over the counter and beckoned her close. “Devon,” I said softly. “How about a trade?”
Fifteen minutes later, I’d ensconced myself in Eric Stull’s office with a foot-high pile of papers. When Devon had led me to a small conference room, I’d hesitated in the doorway. “I have an idea. What do you think about sorting these in Mr. Stull’s office?”
She made a face. “I’m not supposed to touch anything in there.”
“You wouldn’t,” I said soothingly. “And I won’t. But that way I could see how he files things, and he made up the filing system, right?” Without waiting for an answer, I headed back down the hallway. “This is his office, isn’t it?” I set the pile down carefully on the corner of Eric’s empty desk and pulled up the guest chair. “All I’ll do is peek into his files.”
“Well, I suppose it might be okay.”
“It’ll be fine.” I put on the special mom smile that was guaranteed to comfort and console. There’s nothing less threatening than a mom in calming mode. The knowledge is one of our secret weapons. “What harm can I do?”
“That’s true.” Devon nodded. “Thanks a zillion for helping me out. I’ll ask around for someone who’ll give goalie lessons.”
I smiled. The barter system was alive and well.
The phone rang. “Oh, rats,” Devon said. “Got to go.”
As soon as I saw the light on Eric’s phone turn from blinking white to solid red, I jumped out of the chair and hurried around the large expanse of desktop. Eric’s chair was tall-backed and leather and I felt like an imposter in it. Which I was, but I didn’t like feeling that way.
I opened the large file drawer on the lower right side of the desk and rifled through its contents. Everything I could read had to do with clients or conferences or shareholders. Everything I couldn’t read was in Spanish.
“Oh, dear.” The only time I came close to using my three years of high school Spanish was at an ATM when I accidentally pressed the ESPANOL button instead of the ENGLISH one.
I opened the rest of the drawers and found office supplies, a pile of coins, and some empty candy wrappers. “Now what, smarty-pants?” I glanced at the phone. The light was still red, and there was another light winking away, so I ventured deeper into Eric territory.
The wall behind his desk was lined with bookshelves and cabinetry. The bookshelves were full of textbooks, software documentation, and three-ring binders filled with software coding. Behind the door of cabinet number one were stacks of paper much like the stack I’d put on his desk. Behind door number two was more paper, but also a framed photo of a man and two young girls.
I looked at the telephone—one red light, two white—and picked up the picture. It was taken on a lakeshore and all three were in swimsuits and life jackets. The man had his arms around the girls and they were all grinning hugely.
“So that’s Eric Stull,” I said quietly. It was the man at the dance who’d been in line in front of Jenna and me. The man who’d slapped down a hundred-dollar bill and then another fifty. His dark blond hair was cut short and his stomach was flatter than most men’s his age. I studied the photo, trying to look into his head, read his thoughts, and analyze his personality, but all I saw was a father and his daughters after an afternoon of inner tubing.
As I put the photo back from whence it came, I realized there weren’t any pictures of Rosie, his wife. Strange. Or not?
“What are you doing?” Devon stood in the doorway. “I thought you weren’t going to touch anything.” There was a note of censure in her voice.
I put on a reassuring smile and shut the cabinet door. “Just looking for some paper clips. It’ll make sorting those papers easier if I have a way to keep similar topics together. Unless you want me to use a stapler.”
“No staples. Mr. Stull says so. Paper clips are good, though. I’ll be right back.”
Mr. Stull had a lot of rules. I sat myself back in the guest chair. To meet my end of the bargain, I had to sort these papers into some semblance of order. I’d convinced Devon of my capabilities when I’d mentioned how much lists helped me organize my life.
“Mr. Stull loves lists,” she’d said eagerly. “You must think like him. Let’s give this a try.”
Her confidence in me was heartening, and probably misplaced. But I couldn’t tell her that, so I settled down and was busy sorting papers when she came back with a box of paper clips. She hovered, then went back out front when the phone rang.
Anything with a lot of numbers went into one pile. Anything in Spanish went into another. Phone notes here, mail there. Junk faxes I tossed into a recycling pile. No possible way could Mr. Stull want to know about a $99 cruise to the Bahamas. Order now for four days and three nights!
Half an hour later, I’d sorted through the main pile. I got up, stretched, and started in on the stack of numbers. I spread the sheets out across the large desk and tried to make sense of it all. Bills here, statements there. Undecipherable printouts from spreadsheets way over there.
I looked at it all from the point of view of a business owner and saw nothing out of the ordinary, other than some statements from banks with Spanish names. I tried to see it as a law enforcement officer—suspicious and looking for wrongdoing—and didn’t see anything. But since I wasn’t a member of the police force, maybe I wouldn’t have known suspicious activity if it was in bright red letters.
Sighing, I paper-clipped the differentiated piles and stacked them to one side.
When the phone light was red, I got up and turned on Eric’s computer. As I’d expected, it was password protected, and all the combinations I tried got me nowhere but nervous. What if he’d programmed the thing to take surreptitious pictures of someone trying to access his computer? I gave up and shut it down.
Next was the Spanish pile. Hadn’t I seen . . . yes, there it was. A Spanish-English dictionary. Hooray for Beth’s habit of examining all book titles in a room! With the dictionary and about two weeks of time, I’d be able to decipher every paper in the pile.
I scanned a few sentences of each sheet, then opened the dictionary and started searching for key words. I soon found out that Eric’s dictionary didn’t contain any of the words I wanted it to.
“Silly thing,” I told it, and turned to the copyright page: 1989. Which could explain a lot if the words I was trying to translate were software-type words. I tried the same thing with other letters in the pile, and got as far as figuring out that somebody was trying to sell Eric a ranch in a remote location in an undisclosed country.
“Sure,” I murmured. “I’ll buy, too, if the price is right.”
On to the phone messages. First I arranged them in chronological order, then I went through them slowly, looking for patterns, names, anything.
“Eva called.” 10:15 a.m., Wednesday.
“Eva called.” 11:05 a.m., Wednesday.
“Eva called.” 11:25 a.m., Wednesday.
These I set aside. Some unfortunate soul must have been struggling with a tragic software problem. Poor woman.
I continued to sort. There were messages from computer dealers and messages from clients. There were lots of messages from salespeople, a couple of messages from Rosie, and a couple from the girls, Amelia and Chelsea, and a couple from someone named Chago.
I repressed an urge to toss all the slips into the air and run away before they landed.
“There has to be something here,” I said.
Not true, of course. I just wanted there to be something. I needed something tangible, some slip of proof, some indication of . . . something.
Fatigue was creeping up my back. I stretched, gazing at the sorted piles of phone messages. There was a secret; Violet had said so. And I had it on good authority— mine—that anything said in the midst of morning sickness was the absolute truth.
There was a secret here. All I had to do was find it.
“Right,” I said. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
“Are you okay?” Devon asked.
No, I wasn’t. I was hungry, tired of looking at papers, scared for Yvonne, nervous for my finances, and terrified about the future in general. “Fine, thanks.” I glanced at my watch. “If you wanted to run to get some lunch,
