“Well, okay,” Strutter huffed, offended, “but whatever scam she’s running, she’s got quite a following, unless you think it’s just a coincidence that Shelby Carmichael belongs to the Center for Universal Truth, too.”
“No kidding!” said Ingrid. I looked at Margo, and she nodded.
“Yup,” she affirmed. “She told me so herself, all about the classes she goes to at this Esme’s house in Glastonbury, the group meditations that are attended by dozens of people, and get this, a monthly channeling session where Esme communicates to entities in some other dimension and asks them to answer people’s questions. Each person is called on one at a time and gets to ask the spirits why their husband left or how come they can’t get pregnant or whether they should take that job in Bullfrog, Missouri,” she finished, rolling her eyes.
We all digested this information in silence.
Then Ingrid piped up tinnily, “I think we ought to go check this Esme out. I don’t know what the connection between the Center for Universal Truth and Alain’s death is, but I know in my gut there is one. The hair on the back of my neck is standing up.”
I had to agree. “It’s got to be more than a coincidence that two of Girouard’s former girlfriends are members. I’m with Ingrid. We’ve got to check it out, but how?”
Strutter looked smug. “That monthly channeling session is open to everyone. You pay twenty dollars at the door, and you’re in. The next one is this Thursday night. They’re usually held on Fridays, but because of the July fourth holiday this week, it’s going to be on Thursday.”
I looked at Strutter and Margo.
“Okay, I’m in,” I volunteered. I don’t think either Shelby or Suzanne knows me well enough to recognize me in a different setting, but Ingrid, I don’t think it would be smart for them to spot you there.”
Reluctantly, Ingrid agreed. “I’ve always been fascinated with the occult, but I suppose you’re right. Anyway, I’m spending the weekend at my sister’s in Rhode Island. She has a place on the shore, and I’m bored out of my wits. I’m going to go watch some fireworks and play auntie to her two boys.”
“Good,” I said. “Strutter and I will drop off our plant shots at the one-hour photo place on Farmington Avenue on Wednesday night, and you can pick them up Thursday on your way out of town. You can spend some time identifying them over the weekend.”
“Well, don’t be thinking that I’m going to go with you to any channeling session,” Strutter said, alarmed. “The idea of it scares me to death. I wouldn’t even use a Ouija board when I was a kid because I thought the forces of darkness would swallow me whole. Besides, my boy has a Cub Scouts meeting Thursday night.”
I looked at Margo. “Oh, you bet, Sugar! I wouldn’t miss this shindig for the world.”
“But won’t Shelby and Suzanne recognize you?”
“Not in a brown wig and dowdy clothes, they won’t,” she grinned. “By the time I get through disguisin’ myself, my own momma would have trouble pickin’ me out of the crowd.”
“Okay, that’s it, then,” I began, but Strutter flapped her hands wildly to shush me and tiptoed over to the door, which she put one ear against. After a second, she flapped her hands again and pointed at the door.
“What’s going on?” Ingrid complained, and I yanked the receiver off the cradle and punched off the speaker button, hissing at her to be quiet.
After perhaps thirty seconds Strutter unplastered herself from the door and eased it open a crack. “Huh, nobody there now, but I was sure I heard paper rustling or somebody’s sleeve brushing against the door or something a minute ago.”
“We’re just all nervous,” I offered, speaking into the telephone to include Ingrid. “It’s probably all this talk about the paranormal. Anyway, is everybody straight about what we’re supposed to be doing over the next few days? We’ve got to get back downstairs.”
After hanging up the phone and turning off the lights in the little conference room, we exited one at a time through the boardroom and returned to our pods to spend the rest of the afternoon toiling diligently and innocently at our computers.
That evening I accessed the Center for Universal Truth’s website on my home computer and read the mission statement that had so unnerved Strutter. I could understand why a good Baptist might find “drawing upon the forces of energy at work in the universe” a rather foreign concept, but the website’s contents seemed entirely harmless to me, scam or not. Whether Esme really had psychic powers or merely affected them in order to lighten her students’ pocketbooks, her stated intention of helping people to discover paths to personal growth, inner strength and better health didn’t strike me as sinister. After printing out directions to the Center and making a note of the time of the Thursday night channeling session, I shut down the computer and went to give Oliver a break from babysitting Moses.
Later, I lay awake in the light of the full moon that was ushering out what had been the most astounding June of my life. I took comfort in knowing that thousands of miles away, Armando was bathed in the same light.
However slim, it was a connection, and I clung to it.
Nine
On Tuesday morning Strutter and I took turns leaving the pod for a few minutes carrying a clipboard and a disposable camera. At first, we limited ourselves to the public areas, snapping photos of potted plants located in the reception area and the rooms used for client conferences, but as time passed and we realized yet again that secretaries are invisible to lawyers, we became bolder. If a lawyer’s office was unoccupied, we stepped in and snapped any greenery. Whenever the coast was similarly clear around a secretarial workstation, we photographed it, too. I was asked what I was doing only once, and the floating secretary who inquired wasn’t even interested enough in my answer to pay attention.
“Oh, good,” she said absentmindedly and returned to the timesheets she was entering.
The top sheet on the clipboard Strutter and I carried around appeared to be a half-completed inventory of dictation and transcription equipment. It disguised the sheets underneath, which we slowly filled with employee names, film roll and frame numbers so that Ingrid would know whose plants she was identifying when she picked up the processed film.
Not wanting to risk being overheard, we kept each other and Margo apprised of our progress via e-mail. We could tap away at our keyboards and appear to be busily at work, when in reality we were sending each other progress reports and instructions. Several times a day, we carefully deleted all of our Sent messages and then emptied our computers’ Recycle bins in case Harold Karp or anyone in IT decided to monitor our exchanges for any reason. If they were really interested, IT had the tools to find even our deleted messages, but why would they be?
Stealing a few minutes here and a few minutes there, we managed to cover all four floors, with the exception of Harold Karp’s office on the thirty-sixth floor, by lunchtime on Wednesday. We knew that Karp would never buy our equipment inventory cover story, since he was the one who would make any such assignment. We also knew that he kept a rigid schedule and lunched between 12:30 and 1:30 every day. Tuesdays and Thursdays, he ate soup and crackers in the Metro Building’s second-floor cafeteria. Mondays and Fridays, he dined at the salad bar on the main level. On Wednesday, the day we planned to photograph his office, he treated himself to lunch at one of the trendy little eateries on Pratt or Asylum Street.
Shortly after 12:30 on Wednesday Strutter e-mailed me. “Karp is probably checking out the menu at Black-eyed Sally’s by now, so the coast should be clear. Go on down. I’ll be right behind you.”
I read her message and hit Reply, adding Margo’s name in the Copy field and putting Karp’s name in the Subject field. “Okay,” I responded. Just give me a minute to check it out, and I’ll call you.” I hit Send and waited to hear the little bell tone signaling Strutter’s receipt of my message. It sounded, and she opened my e-mail. Then she turned as pale as it’s possible for a black woman to get.
“What is it?” I as
ked, seriously afraid that she might faint. She checked for passers-by and then waved me frantically to her terminal. My message was open on the screen, and she jabbed a finger at the fields on top. At first, I didn’t see it. Then my breathing stopped. I had accidentally reversed my entries, putting Karp’s name in the Copy field and Margo’s name as the Subject. I had just sent Karp a copy of our message, which left no doubt that Strutter and I were up to something we didn’t want him to know about.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” I babbled, clutching the back of Strutter’s chair for support. “What are we going to do? He’s probably down there right now reading his e-mails.”
Strutter glanced at her watch. “Get a grip,” she said, struggling to follow her own advice. “He’s out to lunch, I’m almost sure of it, so we should have a little window here, but he’ll read it as soon as he gets back. That’s the first thing everybody does after lunch.” She chewed on a thumbnail. “We’ve got to go down there, find it on his computer and delete it.”
“How can we do that? We don’t know his password,” I protested, although I desperately wanted to believe it might be possible.
Strutter thought for another moment. “Listen, he logs onto the network first thing in the morning and uses his password to access his mailbox. If he’s like everybody else, he leaves it open on his desktop until he quits for the day. It’s worth a shot. What other choices do we have?” Beginning to look more like herself, she turned our phones over to the receptionist and prodded me into action.
We raced down the back stairway to the thirty-sixth floor. I carried the clipboard, and a fresh disposable camera was in the deep pocket set into the side seam on my skirt. Leaving Strutter at the foot of the stairs, I walked briskly past Karp’s office, noting with relief that it was unoccupied and that the agency temp, who was filling in until Karp hired a new assistant, had also gone to lunch. I signaled Strutter to come ahead.
While Strutter stood guard outside Karp’s office, flipping unseeingly through a file drawer full of numbered dividers that were used to prepare litigation binders, I eased into Karp’s office and snapped a few photos of everything on the walls, his bookcases and his credenza. I turned slowly between shots to be sure they would overlap when we put them together later. Then I nervously moved behind his desk, where his computer hummed quietly.
He had been gone long enough for his screensaver to kick in. I wondered what the elapsed time setting was. Even if I could find and delete my e-mail, would there be enough time left for the screensaver to kick back in before he returned to the office? If it didn’t, he would know that somebody had been using his computer. I clicked on the envelope at the bottom right of his screen that indicated he had a new message waiting. It was the one I had sent inadvertently. So far, so good. With my hands shaking, I carefully selected Delete, then closed his mailbox window. I was about to open the Recycle Bin on his computer desktop when Strutter said loudly, “Gretchen! Good to see you, girlfriend!”
Panicked, I bumped my shin on Karp’s wastebasket as I scrambled into a less incriminating position by his bookcase and returned the camera to my pocket. After a few seconds, I peeked outside the office and saw that Strutter had neatly trapped the clueless Gretchen by the water cooler down the hall.
I hurried back to Karp’s computer and double-clicked on the Recycle Bin. Careful now, I told myself, don’t screw this up. The message I had just deleted from his mailbox should be right at the top of the Recycle Bin. There it was. My fingers were so stiff with fear that I could hardly position the mouse, but I finally managed to highlight the message and click Delete. A pop-up message asked if I really wanted to delete the selected message permanently. I assured the machine that I did, and the message disappeared into cyberspace, never to be seen again, I fervently hoped.
I knew the IT people could retrieve it if they really wanted to, but since no one except Strutter and I knew it existed, and it was now buried among weeks, maybe months, of e-mails to every one of BGB’s hundred-plus employees, we should be okay. I closed the Recycle Bin, positioned the mouse exactly as Karp had left it, and backed away from his desk, praying the screensaver would take over very soon. I took one more look around and left the office, gave Strutter a quick thumbs-up and bolted back to the stairs. I discovered that my legs were too shaky with adrenaline and relief to climb them.
A moment later Strutter found me sitting on the bottom step with my head between my knees. She collapsed next to me, and I could feel her trembling. Through some miracle, nobody passed by or used the stairs, and a few minutes later, we managed to pull ourselves together and return to thirty-seven, vowing never to use e-mail again for anything but the most innocuous communications.
On my way home several hours later, I stopped at the one-hour film developer on Farmington Avenue, as promised, and dropped off the half-dozen disposable cameras Strutter and I had used. Then I headed toward Ingrid’s place. She didn’t answer her buzzer, so I sealed the receipts for the film in a plain white envelope with her name on it, put it in her mailbox and went home to feed my feline housemates and hope for a call from Armando. It had been days since I had heard from him. I didn’t know what to make of that.
Sorting through the usual stack of junk mail and bills later that evening, I was amused to find a notice of a special meeting of The Birches’ Condominium Association. It was to be held at 6:00 sharp on Monday evening, July 14. The purpose of the meeting was to ratify proposed amendments to The Birches’ parking regulations, the text of which was enclosed for review. I unfolded the enclosure and burst out laughing. The previous parking regulation had been about three sentences long. The proposed revision filled an entire page and was organized under subheadings and sub-subheadings. Many of the words were underlined.
From what I could make of all that language, no one was allowed to park anywhere at any time except in their garages. I shook my head, imagining the hot and heavy debate among The Birches’ residents that would continue well into the night, if my experience at the one Association meeting I had attended was any indication. Then I carefully folded the proposed revision into the pointy shape I remembered from my youth and sailed the little airplane across the room, much to Moses’ delight.
~
On Thursday the office was exceptionally quiet, since many of the lawyers, including Bellanfonte and Bolasevich, and the support staff had taken the day off to beat the July 4 holiday traffic and make a four-day weekend of it. Chastened by our near-miss the previous day, Strutter and I kept our heads down and our minds on our jobs for most of the day. At five o’clock, we walked out to the Main Street parking lot together. I promised to call her after the reading with a full report, and we trudged to our respective cars. At this hour of the day, when one’s car had been baking in the summer sun for a full nine hours with the windows tightly closed, it was necessary to open all four doors and allow the pent-up heat to escape for a few minutes before attempting to sit on the vinyl seats or touch the scalding steering wheel. After that one started the engine and put all the windows down, hoping the air conditioning would provide relief very soon.
As The Birches was right over the Connecticut River from Glastonbury, where Esme conducted her mysterious readings, Margo and I had agreed to meet at my place at 7:30. I fed the beasts and ate cold pasta salad, bought ready made from a local market, standing up at the sink. I wondered what the evening would bring. Then I took a quick shower and dressed in a sleeveless denim shift and sandals. At the last minute, I picked up a navy blue cardigan. Who knew? Even mystics might be partial to air conditioning.
At 7:20 my doorbell rang. I had left the garage door open for Margo, who had been instructed to come in that way and knock on the connecting door to my kitchen, so I was annoyed at the prospect of a visitor. I hoped it was Mary, who would understand when I explained that I had plans for the evening, but the dowdy woman on my front porch was unfamiliar to me. She wore a flowered sundress, and her short, mouse-brown hair was cut in unattractive bangs that touched
the rim of her cheap sunglasses. Her face was devoid of make-up.
“Yes?” I said, frowning a little and glancing at my watch to indicate that I was in a hurry.
Margo pulled off her sunglasses and grinned at me. “Gotcha!” she said. “I told you nobody would recognize me. So are we ready to dabble in the occult, Sugar?”
Half an hour later, I exited the highway and wound my way through the streets of Glastonbury with the help of Margo, who read from the directions to the Center for Universal Truth that I had printed out earlier in the week. With every turn the neighborhoods grew a little older and had more substantial houses set farther back on their lots, sheltered by ancient elms and pines. The Dutch elm disease that had destroyed so many of the old trees in the 1950s had apparently been kinder to Glastonbury than it had been to so many other Connecticut towns.
At a few minutes before 8:00, I parked my car at the end of the block on which Esme’s house, a.k.a. the Center for Universal Truth, was located. It wasn’t difficult to identify, since a steady stream of pedestrians made their way by ones and twos up the cement walkway of a three-story Victorian structure that was partially hidden from view by two enormous trees.
“Well, it sure looks the part,” Margo commented, removing her sunglasses in the dusk after ascertaining that nobody she knew was in the vicinity. We joined the dwindling ranks on the sidewalk, hanging back a little to be sure we would be able to slip into seats at the rear as unobtrusively as possible.
I had to agree. “All it needs is a big hoot owl calling from that tree over there. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find the Hound of the Baskervilles chained in the back yard.”
Despite my joking tone I was only half-kidding. No doubt about it, the house had a presence. The heavy, wooden front door stood open, and I looked around curiously as we waited our turn to go in. No one was behind us, so apparently, we were the last to arrive.
Waiting for Armando (Kate Lawrence Mysteries) Page 11