Hiding in Plain Sight (6 page)

I followed her down the hall, carrying the letters that needed mailing and a handful of envelopes to go with them. Waiting outside Darla's office, I listened as Janine explained why she needed the room opened.

“Don't touch anything else in here,” Janine told me once Darla had unlocked the door and switched on the fluorescent ceiling lights.

As I sat down at the computer I wondered what she thought I was going to touch. From the quick glance I'd taken around, there didn't exactly seem to be much to get into.

The desk where I found myself working was in the corner to the right of the only window in the room — a large, single-pane sort that didn't open. On the other side of the window was a water cooler, and past that, a small safe sat in the corner opposite mine.

A row of filing cabinets ran behind me, lengthwise along the wall. They were all locked, though a few books were held upright by thick bookends that appeared to be made of stone. If there was such a thing as a decorating theme in the room, stone seemed to be it.

A big stone eagle, wings spread, sat in a pre-flight perch in the centre of the long table that ran most of the length of the room. The table was otherwise bare.

An even larger stone carving, this one of a wolf, sat on the floor along the other wall, its head raised and its jaws open in a silent howl. This piece looked
far smoother than the eagle, which had a rough-hewn look, while the wolf seemed almost shiny. It was darker, too, and looked like it would be cool to the touch.

Disappointed that there was so little to see in the room where the robbery had occurred, I turned my attention back to the task I'd been given. None too soon, either, because Janine stuck her head in the doorway a few moments later to ask if I was almost finished.

“Uh, well, I'm getting there,” I hedged.

“Good, because apparently one of those letters — from Stuart to some company called Dymelle Enterprises — was supposed to go out on Friday. He was just asking about it. He says heads will roll if it doesn't get there in time. Hurry, or he'll kill us both.”

The threat to my life seemed a bit unfair since I hadn't even been there Friday, but I hastened to find the letter and get it ready to mail.

“Better send it Xpresspost,” Janine told me as soon as it was in the envelope. “I see that it's only going to Saint John, so it will just cost a few bucks, and that way Stuart will never know we didn't send it when we were supposed to.”

Again, I didn't see how she'd managed to make me a partner for the blame since this was something
she'd
neglected to do the week before, but I said nothing and set out for the post office.

As soon as I was out of sight of the NUTEC building, I pulled the notepad out of my pocket and jotted down the few things I'd learned so far. None of them seemed very important, but you never knew.

Remembering that the student — I searched my memory but could only get his first name, Gary, to come to the surface — had gone to Saint John, I wondered if this important letter had anything to do with him. If so, was there a tie between the student and Stuart Yaeger, and if so, what did it mean?

“Don't jump to any conclusions!” I told myself firmly. Still, I added the address of Dymelle Enterprises to my notes, just in case.

I
was engrossed in thoughts of the robbery when I got back to NUTEC, which is how I managed to walk straight into the stone wolf in the conference room. Luckily, my instincts kicked in faster than my brain seemed to be working, and I grabbed it before it could topple over. It was heavy, but I managed to right it okay. I noticed that the depression in the carpet where the base had left an imprint didn't quite line up with the wolf's current placement, which suggested that some-one else had walked into it, knocked it right over, and then hadn't quite gotten it back in the same spot. At least I wasn't the only klutz.

I figured it would have made quite a loud crash, carpet or not, and considered myself very fortunate not to have attracted any unnecessary attention.

Then it occurred to me that maybe the wolf had
been knocked over during the robbery. The safe was in the corner past it, so the robber would have needed to walk past the wolf. Anyone familiar with the place would have known about the wolf, though, and therefore shouldn't have knocked it over. That might shoot down the theory of an inside job.

Or it could simply mean that the culprit had an outside accomplice. And, of course, it could have been knocked over at some other time and have nothing to do with the robbery. There were just so many possibilities; narrowing down ideas was going to be rough.

I finished typing the rest of the labels and getting the letters all ready to mail, and I might as well confess that I had a quick peek at each of them before stuffing them into their envelopes. I wished I'd thought to do that with the “urgent” letter I'd just mailed to Dymelle Enterprises. Too late now.

There was nothing that caught my attention, but then I didn't suppose the thief was likely to send off any correspondence that would give him or her away. At least, not from the office.

The smell of nail polish was in the air and Janine was blowing on her fingertips when I got back to the reception area.

“Thank goodness you're done,” she said. “The phone never stopped the whole time you were doing that, and we have to start on this month's billing.”

“Will I need to do address labels for the bills?”

“No, those are mostly saved on a file and they print automatically. There might be a few new accounts, but they would just need to be added to the billing program.”

“What can I do?” I asked.

She took about fifteen minutes to show me how to input details that had been submitted by (as she insisted on calling them) the computer geeks. I was surprised to discover that, in addition to developing software, NUTEC also managed a large website program. Companies, both big and small, paid them to create and maintain websites, with varying fees for services.

Some of the accounts were the same from month to month, and those companies were billed a flat rate depending on the size of the site. Anyone who'd had updates or changes was billed the flat rate plus specific fees for the work done. The billing program did most of the work; our main task was to type in the correct codes, click “update,” and then print.

I kept an eye out for Dymelle Enterprises, but it didn't appear on the billing list. If only I'd been nosier when I was mailing the letter earlier. How was I going to help clear Mrs. Thompson if I didn't take advantage of every opportunity to gather information?

Promising myself I'd be a better snoop from then on, I did my best to eavesdrop on Janine's phone calls
while I worked. Most of them she just put through to the workers' offices.

Some calls were clearly personal, but I listened to them anyway, just in case. I didn't learn anything about the robbery, but I did find out that her sister is a back-stabbing lowlife who makes moves on Janine's boyfriends, and that her neighbour deserves to be shot for listening to country and western music at full volume. I also noticed that she casually mentioned Joey a couple of times, which made me think she might be kind of interested in him.

At four minutes before twelve o'clock, Janine pushed a button on the phone and stood up, stretching and yawning like she was just waking up.

“Time for lunch,” she said. “We can keep working on those after we eat.”

As I followed her along the hall, I wondered whether “we” would turn out to mean “me” again, as had been happening since my arrival. The lunchroom, located right across the hall from the conference room, was the only area I'd seen so far that wasn't a soft ecru colour. It was done in an antique yellow wash with burgundy and teal accents.

“Different decorator?” I asked, looking around at the striking effect.

“Debbie designed this.” Janine smiled. “Nice, isn't it? The workers that did it were fast, too. Just a few days
and it was done. Good thing, because everything was a mess with the room torn apart.”

“Where'd everyone eat then?” I asked.

“At our desks,” she said. “I hated that, it was so boring. Plus the microwave was in the Yaegers' office and the fridge was stuck in the conference room. It wasn't exactly convenient if you wanted something hot or cold.”

“How long ago was it done?”

“I dunno, three, four weeks, I guess. Wait, it was right around the time of the robbery. I remember because water leaked all over the carpet in the conference room and we didn't know if the fridge was doing it or if it was the water cooler.”

“And which was it?”

“The repairman couldn't find anything wrong with either of them, so he said it was probably the fridge. Like, something leaked out from it being moved around or tipped the wrong way or whatever. He must have been right 'cause it never happened again.”

“Huh,” I said, which might not have made me sound much like a brilliant detective. To be honest, it was only day one and I was already discouraged. Short of someone jumping up and confessing, I didn't see how I was going to figure this one out. Not with leaky fridges and urgent letters as my only clues.

Carol was the next to arrive for lunch. She made a big production of seating herself as far away from us as
possible, then opened a brown paper bag and pulled out a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper. It looked like the twin of what Janine was eating, a thin slice of ham on white bread. I felt a bit smug chomping into my thick sandwich of tuna with chopped celery on whole wheat.

Joey and the Yaegers wandered in next, and I noticed that Janine sat up a little straighter and seemed much more animated. Remembering her comments about a boyfriend earlier, I wondered if perhaps they had a secret relationship. There was no sign of anything like that from him, but then he might just be better at hiding things.

Angi sailed in a moment later, breezing by with a burst of friendly chatter directed, it seemed, at everyone in general and no one in particular.

“I just don't know,” she said, waving her hand dramatically, “how one person can be so creative. I believe I might be a genius of some sort.”

“All that and beauty too,” Stuart said dryly. This earned him an elbow in the side from his wife, but then she laughed and patted the seat beside her for Angi to join them.

“I suppose,” Angi slid into the seat, “you're all dying to know what brilliant design I've come up with this time.”

“Not really.” This came from Joey, who was opening a container of yoghurt. “But you're going to force it on us, so we might as well get it over with.”

“Those two will kill each other one of these days,” Janine hissed into my ear.

“Ha! You'd just love that, wouldn't you?” Angi said with a toss of her head. “Like I'm going to talk about it in front of a thieving scoundrel such as yourself.”

I could hardly believe my ears! She'd just out-and-out called Joey a thief, right in front of everybody. I snuck a furtive peek at him to see how he was reacting, but he seemed remarkably undisturbed.

“You, Angi dear, wouldn't know what to do with a unique idea if it smacked you in the forehead,” he tossed back, plunging his spoon into the yoghurt. “We couldn't possibly expect you to recognize originality in others.”

This remark earned him a grape, which Angi hurled at him from her seat. He caught it easily and popped it into his mouth with a smile.

“Surely we haven't sunk to the puerile level of having food fights.” Darla stood in the doorway, arms folded and one eyebrow raised. In spite of her serious tone and stance, there was a slight twitch at the corner of her mouth, and I could tell she was just barely keeping her-self from laughing.

“Food fights?” Angi echoed innocently, getting ready to lob another grape even as she spoke. “Of course not.”

Another grape flew through the air, but too high, and Joey had to half-stand to catch it. He popped it into his yoghurt dish and stirred.

While Angi and Joey continued the playful combat throughout lunch, I heard Janine let out a barely audible but obviously longing sigh.

I
spent the rest of the day working on the bills while Janine managed to look busy without actually (as far as I could see) accomplishing anything. She kept up a steady stream of chatter between talking on the phone and telling me bits of gossip about the various staff members. Unfortunately, none of it was likely to be helpful in my investigation, unless the fact that Carol wore dreadful colour combinations or that James smoked cigarillos on the sly somehow figured into the solution.

James hadn't joined us in the lunchroom, and I wondered if he'd kept working and eaten at his desk, or maybe gone out somewhere to eat, or what the story was, but I didn't want to ask any more questions than I already had. It was true that Janine seemed only too happy to have something to talk about, but too much curiosity was bound to strike her as odd at some point.

By quitting time I'd learned nothing that seemed the least bit helpful. If anything, the bits of information I'd gathered throughout the day were likely to confuse me. It was pretty discouraging.

It's only the first day, I reminded myself, but that did little to cheer me. Mrs. Thompson was supposed to go back to work in two weeks, and it was vital that her name be cleared before then.

I'd promised Betts and her mom that I'd stop by on my way home each day, but somehow I wasn't all that eager to admit that I hadn't made the slightest progress. It was probably for that reason I popped into the hospital to see Mr. Stanley first.

He was propped up, with the top of his bed raised, and his dinner was there on a tray but it was almost untouched.

“Aren't you hungry?” I asked as I plunked down in the visitor's chair beside the bed.