Pushing my self-observation aside, I moved around the room, humming to myself. Once the cloths were filthy, I picked up the broom. With less to focus on, my anger began to creep up on me, growing with each heavy push-pull of the broom. By the time half the room was done, I was muttering to myself.
“What does she know?” I asked the empty air. Push-pull. “Just because she has a perfect life with a perfect house and a perfect husband…” Push-pull, push-pull. “What the hell does she know about the fuzzy end of the lollipop? I mean, really?” Push-pull, push-pull, push…thwack! I hit the door with the handle, entirely by accident. Less by accident the second time. The third time, I dropped into a fencing stance and wielded the broom at the door like a sword at my greatest foe. “You don’t know anything about my life, you gossiping backstabber. En garde!” I stabbed the door with a sharp crack.
“I would appreciate it if you didn’t destroy my building,” an unfamiliar, haughty voice said, making every muscle in body freeze instantly.
I turned my body just enough to see the speaker. She was tall, maybe five foot ten plus an extra three inches of sharp-toed, cherry red, mankiller heels. Lean, too, with a navy blue skirt suit that fell exactly like a suit should on a woman. Something, maybe the straight-edged black hair or high-arched brows, reminded me forcibly of Morticia Addams. Confidence flowed from her like cold from a freezer on a summer’s day, thick, obvious, and enviable. I met her dark, imperious gaze and flinched.
“Y-Your building?” I asked, barely managing to get out the words.
She nodded slowly, her gaze scrutinizing me from bottom to top, her expression making it clear how lacking in impressiveness I was. “I am the owner, Mallora Zent. And you are?” She waved the question away impatiently before I even had a chance to open my mouth, let alone remember what my name was. “It doesn’t matter. Get back to your janitorial work, and leave my building in peace.”
“I’m the file clerk,” I blurted at her back. “Not the—” All she had to do was pause as she walked away, without turning even a little, and I got the hint. “Doesn’t matter,” I echoed. “Yes, ma’am.”
I scurried back into my room, leaned the broom against the wall, and watched the pointy woman disappear into Robin’s reception room through a tiny crack in the not-quite-closed door.
What the hell was going on?
Forgetting my anger with Mueller, I slipped out into the hallway and closed the file room door quietly behind me. I took one step before pressing back against it as a short, squat man in an ugly, olive green suit scampered past. He glanced at me with a spastic sort of gaze, his eyes buggy and set a little too close together. He looked about as worried as I felt, but didn’t stop to interact. Instead, he added speed to his uneven gait and followed after the self-proclaimed factory owner.
I listened for more footsteps before darting around the corner, down the stairs, and through the heavy doors. Mueller had his head buried in the access casing of the Fluffernutter, a machine that stuffed various toy animals with synthetic fluff.
I didn’t wait for him to notice me, merely rapped on the casing door.
He smacked his head as he jumped in surprise. Served him right. “Jeez, Hargitay. You coulda killed me. These parts are pinpoint sensitive—”
“What the hell happened to Maysie?” I asked, ignoring him.
“Maysie?” He blinked at me while rubbing the back of his head.
“Maysie Browning Fife, the woman who hired me. You know, our boss?”
Slowly, recognition dawned across his face. “She retired like a month ago. We threw her a big party, where you…you know.” He waved a wrench at me. “You shouldn’t keep secret talents like that to yourself.”
“What do you mean? No, wait. I don’t want to know.” I grabbed the wrench and his oily hand with it, staring at him with as much dire seriousness as I could muster. “Mueller, this is important. Was I here on Friday?”
“Like, three days ago Friday? Sure.”
“What did we do on Friday?”
He eyed me as if I were the one who had hit my head. “Same thing we do every day, Pinky.”
I ignored the invitation to lighten the situation. “Which is?”
He shrugged. “We did our work until noon, when we had lunch. Oh, we shared a bottle of that new fizzy pop while waiting for the truck to arrive. Damn thing was three hours late, and lost the damn manifest.” Latent irritation flared in him, but vanished almost immediately as the sly look of amusement I was coming to both enjoy and fear replaced it. “And you undressed the Chisel with your eyes. I thought you were gonna rip off his clothes and mount him right there on the factory floor. That’s weird taste you’ve got there, by the way. Passing me up for a night on the town to go out with some local nerd all the while fantasizing about a guy with a reputation worse than a gangster with an itchy trigger finger.”
“Passing you up?” I pressed a palm to my forehead as if I could force my brain to make sense with my bare hands. “What?”
“Way to kick a guy twice.” He mimed a heart attack, but stopped when he saw I was unimpressed. “You’re serious? You don’t remember me asking you to that new club downtown?”
All attempts to retain sanity or find logic ended in futility. “Why would you do that when you have a girlfriend?”
“I wish. It’s been eons since I got laid. But it’s not like I go anywhere I can meet women. You were my last shot for not ending up with a mail-order bride from some backwoods region of Russia where the women are as burly and hairy as the men.” He shuddered.
The room began to spin. I sank to the floor, resting my head between my knees, forcing myself to breathe slowly.
“You okay?” Mueller asked, crouching beside me and ruining my Strawberry Shortcake tee with an oily hand on my shoulder. “If you’re gonna puke, do it that direction, away from the open machinery.”
“Why does everyone keep asking me that?” My voice was soft, weak, and trembly. Pretty much like the rest of me felt. “I started here a week ago. Maysie hired me after I found an ad in this weird paper given to me by an old guy named Harry Roundtop who sells roses in the park and who my mom thinks is the Trapperstown Trapper.”
“The Trapperstown Trapper only killed people in the early 1900s,” he interrupted. “Everyone since then is a copycat.” When I wrinkled my forehead at him, he gave me a one-shouldered shrug. “I have hobbies.”
“A week ago,” I went on, “this factory was filled with workers. Then the Ogre collapsed on top of us, and you and I kind of became friends because we saved each other’s lives.”
“A week ago? Tessa, that happened a month ago. And we didn’t so much save each other’s lives as save a couple of fingers. Bastard keeps trying to take one off.” He waggled his fingers in front of my face, as if I needed proof that they were worth stealing.
I shook my head, denying that I was the crazy one as emphatically as I could without bringing back the need to pass out. “This morning, the machine operators were supposed to come back to work because you had everything fixed. Maysie was going out of town, and she asked me to keep an eye on Robin to make sure she didn’t go all short-dictator on everyone.”
“And Robin is…?”
“The receptionist.” Nothing. “Red-haired chick with aqua streaks who chewed a lot of gum and apparently drove you crazy?”
“Sounds hot,” he said. I smacked him, though it was a weak, pathetic move. “Ow. I just mean I would remember someone like that, and I got nothin’.”
I cast around for something that might strike a note of reality, that might answer the question of who was crazy here. I found one without too much trouble. Problem was, I didn’t want to bring it up. If he didn’t know yet, I would be giving him fodder with which to tease me until the end of time. But if he already knew, without my remembering having told him before, then he was the sane one and I was the one who needed a padded room. Better to know, though, right?
“Who was I married to before I moved back to Colora
do?” If I had really known him for months, it would have come up. No matter how hard I tried not to talk about it, he would have seen the magazines or heard the rumors and asked about it when it hit the front pages.
“Shit. Am I supposed to remember that? You know my policy on exes.”
“He’s kind of famous,” I prompted.
“Now I know you’re punking me.”
“I’m being one hundred percent serious.”
He frowned at me. “Fine. I’ll bite. Who were you married to?” When I hesitated, he added, “You know I’m gonna Google it now.”
I sighed. “Kyle Channing.”
“Where’s the camera? I didn’t see it on my morning inspection.” He glanced around the machines nearest us.
“I’m serious, Mueller. We met in college, got married right after graduation.”
“Kyle Channing…that doofy guy dating Serabella Angelique? You’re shitting me.”
My confusion coalesced into irritation. “Doofy. Thanks a lot.”
“I didn’t mean that as an insult to your taste or anything. I mean, you have the hots for the Chisel, so you’re clearly insane. But that’s not what I meant.”
My stomach gremlin snarled. I got to my feet as slowly and carefully as possible, not looking at him. “What’s a doofy guy like that doing with a hottie like her, you mean. Me, sure. But her?” He started to object but I waved him off. “No, it’s okay. Everybody’s thinking it. Hell, I’m sure everyone’s saying it. I’m hardly the most gorgeous woman in the world, and that’s just something I have to live with.”
I took a few steps away from him. He didn’t try to argue with me, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. On the one hand, he wasn’t full of placating but otherwise empty words. That was a nice change. On the other, it kind of hurt. Whatever. I had more pressing matters to deal with.
“I don’t know what’s going on here, Mueller, but something is seriously wrong. It’s not me,” I pre-empted him, then paused to listen to the factory. It sounded normal, or what I had come to think of as normal—all the same noises and clunks and whirs without human voices. “There should be other people here. It shouldn’t be just you and me.”
He sat back against the quiet Fluffernutter, draping his elbows over his knees. “You really know how to stick it to a guy.”
I was in no mood to placate male pride. The sigh that rushed out of me was more growl than despair. “I’m trying really hard not to go crazy here. That woman upstairs, whoever she is, she’s not supposed to be here.” I thought back to my meeting with the tall, sharp woman, and shivered. “Whatever happened, happened over the weekend. And now she’s here and Maysie and everyone else is gone. Which suggests it might be her fault.”
Mueller squinted up at the Fluffernutter before getting up and returning to the open access panel. He poked at it with a screwdriver as he said, “So what do we do to fix it?”
A feeling welled up in me, warm and gooey and full of sunshine. Something I hadn’t felt in a decade. I picked up a wrench from his toolbox and brought it to him. “Here’s what I’m thinking…”
Chapter 13
“It’s not working,” Mueller grumped at me. Leaning over his shoulder, I couldn’t really tell what he was doing. It had to do with a programming language and some sort of shell, but I had no idea what any of that really meant. “Her computer has a firewall like I’ve never seen! Like the friggin’ Great Wall of China in binary.”
“Come on, Mueller,” I said, goading him just a little. “You’re better than any wall.”
“Damn straight I am.” He cracked a couple knuckles and got down to it. Except from the level of swearing and bear-like snorts that issued from him, it wasn’t making a difference. “Seriously. Like nothing I’ve ever seen! I’d love to get a look under the hood. Who the hell made this thing?”
I perched on the desk beside the workstation in his office. I thought it had grown considerably since Friday—both the office, and the workstation. How that was possible, I had no idea. Probably just the power of suggestion. But then, wiping Mueller’s memory and creating a new one seemed more science fiction than reality, so I just kind of turned my logic brain off for a while. When the impossible became reality, what else was there to do? “So that’s that, then. Blocked before we even get started.”
“Well, we know there’s stuff on her hard drive that’s worth protecting,” he offered. “That’s something. We just have to go old school.”
I clicked my teeth together, thinking. “You mean sneak into her office?”
“Sure. She always leaves for lunch.” He glanced at the screen. “So we should have half an hour to get in and get out.”
There was an innuendo in there waiting to be made, but I left it unsaid and nodded once. “Let’s do it.”
Like two really flamboyant spies, we crept out of his office, down the long, nondescript hallway, past the break room and bathrooms, and up the stairs. We paused at the top, pressing ourselves to the wall as we listened. Only the muffled sound of the factory greeted us. Mueller made a hand gesture that was halfway rude and halfway military and headed for Maysie’s office. Er, the new boss’s office. Whatever.
Reception was empty. “Looks like that creepy guy with her is gone, too,” I said, staying close.
“Od? I don’t think she goes anywhere without him. Whatever floats her boat, I guess.” He raised a hand to knock on the door, but I stopped him.
“What do we say if she answers?” I whispered.
He grinned. “Leave it to me.”
That grin made me nervous, but I decided to trust him. He could think fast on his feet, and that was more important in shady breaking-and-entering shenanigans than any future embarrassment might be.
He knocked. No answer. He knocked again, called out, “Miss Zent?” Silence. “Gimme your pass,” he ordered, snapping his fingers.
I gave him my best ‘I am not amused’ expression, the one perfected over a decade of marriage, but handed him my security badge, anyway. He swiped it over the reader and gave a little whoop when the light turned green and the door clicked.
We swept inside and shut the door softly. Mueller was at the computer in a flash, navigating the system before I had a chance to even cross the room.
And the room! What had once been an overtly elderly female room before, with its kitsch and cross-stitch and throw pillows, was now bordering on Medieval dungeon. The beautiful lead-paned windows were now an enormous fireplace that could roast a whole cow with room to spare. Or maybe four or five plump children, which was more the vibe it gave off. The lights were now silver and black teardrops hanging from the ceiling, giving the room a clear yet cold aura. One wall had been painted deep eggplant purple to accent the other grey walls; that, at least, I liked. Everything else made me want to shiver.
“Anything?” I asked, wrapping my arms around my middle.
“What am I looking for?” he asked without taking his eyes off the screen. “Financial reports, calendars, what looks like a little black book of male strippers. Nothing that will tell us why you remember things wrong.”
“Differently,” I corrected. “You’re the one who’s wrong.”
“I’m never wrong,” he muttered, glaring at the screen.
“You embody wrong,” I retorted, too filled with tension to just stand there.
He chuckled. “Yeah I do. This might be…” He leaned closer to the monitor, as if that would help.
I crossed the room to look, but found him peering through the personnel files of ‘C.K.E.D., the parent company of W-International.’ “Don’t waste time,” I snapped, trying to steal the mouse.
He held on with an iron grip. “I think I’m onto something here.”
“Stop being a creeper!” I bent his fingers back, but he used his free hand to grab both of mine.
“No, really. Do you see these names? Real women don’t look like this. I mean, what self-respecting Regional Manager has blue hair?”
I stopped fighting.
He had a point. We stayed in that position for a good few minutes while he scrolled through page after page of black-clad, bright-haired business people. “They look more like a goth rock group than a business entity.” He scrolled through a few more when a shock sizzled through me. “Wait, go back. One more. There! That’s the old man who gave me the rose in the park.”
“Harry Wenceslas,” Mueller read. “He doesn’t look that old.”
He was right. Harry Wenceslas looked an austere fifty-five, nothing like the seventy-plus of our meeting. “Maybe it’s an old picture?”
“Kinda looks like Harry Potter in those glasses. All he needs is a—holy crap! He even has a scar! You got a rose from old Harry Potter!”
I shoved him almost hard enough to topple him out of the enormous desk chair. “That scar isn’t a lightning bolt, even if that were possible. Which is isn’t.”
“Anyone ever tell you that you take the fun out of everything?”
“My ex-husband, all the time.”
“Shut up, Mueller,” he intoned. “Check. So, what are we really looking for?”
“Open the financial records. How far back do they go?”
“Seven months.”
“Liar.” I leaned so far over, I was almost in his lap.
“For her region. Looks like Mallora Zent is W-International’s Regional Manager of East-Western Production, whatever that means.”
“What about for the factory?”
A couple mouse clicks, and then, “Shit.” He sighed. “It starts yesterday. Why the hell do I remember differently?” His eyes took on a haunted look, almost like he was more deeply disturbed about being crazy than I had been.
One Good Wand Page 13