Never Murder a Birder

by Edie Claire

  “Which way?”

  Her thumb pointed up, and my spirits took a nose dive.

  “Himno,” Luba muttered.

  Kira looked at her. “What does that mean?”

  Luba wheeled back to her desk. “Let’s just say,” she answered, staring at her hourglass again, “that the English translation has four letters. And the first one is S.”

  Kira pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Gotcha.”

  Blood rushed into my cheeks. I knew it should make no difference to me who got promoted. It was no skin off my nose; I wasn’t in line for anything. But Morgan Bessel was a special case. The woman spawned green-eyed monsters like an alien on Viagra.

  “Why the hell is she getting promoted?” I asked, forgetting to whisper until the fourth word. “Promoted to what?”

  Kira shrugged. “Don’t know. Something new, maybe.” She jerked upright, ready to move on to her next audience. “Stay tuned, folks!”

  Her head and shoulders snapped around the panel. She was gone.

  My cheeks stayed hot. I clicked my mouse a few times, still trying to open Solve-Pro. The cursor changed into an hourglass.

  “This software,” I muttered, “is total himno. And Morgan is the one who pushed for IT to dump all our data into it before we could even test the system out. So what if she has an MBA from Harvard? This migration cleanup is going to put us months behind in the next catalog schedule. Can’t anyone in management see the flames shooting out of these cubicles? Feel the water rising around their ankles?”

  Luba snorted. “Something’s rising, all right.”

  I groaned. “Don’t start. I’m already nauseous.”

  “Hey, all.”

  A chipper voice sounded from the doorway. Darcy O’Neil, our thirty-two-year-old divorcee and mother of one, blew into the pod and dropped her purse on the front right desktop with a plop. She was slightly late, as usual.

  “Another pile-up on the parkway,” she griped, sitting down and retrieving her makeup case. “And I was supposed to be early for once.” She removed a tube of lipstick and applied it by looking at her reflection in her monitor. Then she fluffed her short, dark-rooted, platinum blond hair, tossed her belongings into her file drawer, and spun around.

  “So, what’s up?” she asked brightly.

  Luba and I exchanged a glance.

  “Meeting at 10:00,” I answered. “Reorg.”

  “Again?”

  We nodded.

  Darcy gritted her teeth a moment, then spun back around and grabbed her official Zomar Industries mug with a flourish. “Okay women,” she announced, “it’s time for a coffee run.”

  The gauntlet had been thrown down. With near-mechanical precision, Luba and I grabbed our own mugs and stood.

  “Where’s Whitney?” Darcy asked, tossing her head toward the still-empty, rear-left desk.

  “OB appointment,” Luba answered.

  “Right.”

  We moved in silence through the pod entrance and around the corner toward the main hallway. Lorna in the Wacko Pod looked up as we passed. The other occupants of the affectionately nicknamed pod were merely eccentric, but Lorna operated on a wavelength all her own. She’d been at Zomar since the dinosaurs roamed and had always done good work, but on any given day she was likely to overdramatize some random issue, explode into hysteria, and fall asleep at her desk, in no particular order. This morning, she watched us with surprise. The procession of the blondes was a daily occurrence, but we were rarely so quiet.

  We bypassed the nearest break room, opting for the one in Accounting instead. Fewer interested ears to overhear, not to mention better odds for decaf.

  “Okay,” Darcy said ominously, the second we were semi-alone. “Will someone please tell me that the ice woman is getting hers this time? Did the Powers That Be finally get the message that the data migration is a total disaster? That we should cut bait with this ridiculous new software and go back to our old system which worked perfectly fine?”

  I snorted. “As if! The decision’s been made. You know they’ll never go back.” I looked at the coffee machine and scowled. Half a pot of regular on the warmer, another full pot of regular on the main burner. What were people thinking? I lifted the fresh pot, took Darcy’s mug from her hands, and poured her a cup.

  “Kira says Morgan’s getting promoted,” Luba informed.

  Darcy’s mouth hung open. I pushed her mug against her knuckles until she opened her fingers and grabbed onto it. “You have got to be kidding me,” she croaked.

  “We kid you not,” I answered, rinsing out the empty, orange-topped carafe to make some decaf. “At least that’s what Kira said.”

  Darcy took a few steps back and leaned heavily against the break room table. “Oh, this is bad,” she drawled. “This is very, very bad. One of the designers told me they overheard Morgan saying that if she had her way, we wouldn’t have any regular hours at all. We would just work until the job was done, period!”

  “That would be 24/7 for at least four months,” Luba calculated. “Perhaps we could come in pajamas, and IT could wire our brains to doze while we’re hourglassing.”

  I humphed. “I’m not sure I could sleep 14 hours a day.” I opened a packet of decaf, filled the filter, and hit the brew button. The machine began to churn.

  “All I want to know is this,” Darcy said, her voice a whisper again. “Who the hell is that woman sleeping with?”

  A tall man we didn’t recognize wandered in and poured himself a cup of regular. We stayed quiet, making him suitably self-conscious. He left with haste.

  “You don’t think she’s doing Gary, do you?” Darcy mused, referring to the Communications Department’s corpulent — and entirely clueless — director.

  “We can all do without that mental image, thank you,” I retorted. I turned to Luba. “Mug.”

  She handed me hers, and I prepared for my performance. A steady stream of decaf was now pouring into the carafe. It was time.

  “Karen’s right. No job is worth that kind of sacrifice,” Luba remarked, easing my mind a little. Luba liked to joke about how Morgan had slept her way to success, but unlike Darcy, she didn’t really believe it.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” Darcy said smugly. “Morgan’s got ambition written all over her. But she would be selling herself short to settle for Gary. He’s not in a powerful enough position.” She paused in thought, her heavily made-up eyes narrowed. When she tried to open them again, her mascara stuck. “I bet it’s one of the VPs.”

  Trying my best to ignore the ramblings of Darcy’s gutter mind, I swung the carafe off the burner with my right hand and slid Luba’s mug smoothly under the stream with my left. Perfection.

  Luba made a gurgling sound in her throat. When people first heard the noise, they tended to think she was either choking or spitting chaw. It actually signified deep thought. “Of course, Morgan wouldn’t necessarily have to sleep with Gary,” she mused, tapping her finger to her cheekbone. “She’d only have to make him think she would. And how hard could that be?”

  My cheeks grew hot again. I swapped out Luba’s mug for mine, and a spurt of coffee hit the burner with a hiss. Darcy’s belief that everything in the world revolved around sex didn’t surprise me — she’d had the libido of a sailor ever since her divorce. But I had fully expected Luba, who had been married since puberty to a man she hardly ever mentioned, to take my side.

  Morgan Bessel could not be sleeping her way up the corporate ladder. I could deal with management that was incompetent, shifty, self-serving — even subhuman. But sexism… that bothered me. I refused to believe that here in the twenty-first century, in my very own corner of the business world, any semi-intelligent, self-respecting female could lower herself to such a tactic — and succeed.

  “You know,” I chastised, “if Morgan were a man, we wouldn’t be talking like this.”

  Darcy scoffed. “If she were a man, Gary never would have hired her in the first place.”

  “You don’t kno
w that,” I argued, proffering Luba’s mug. “It’s been pretty much universally established that Gary is an idiot, right? So why couldn’t an idiot do something as stupid as hire and promote another idiot, even if sex had nothing to do with it?”

  I switched the carafe back into place, and another stream of coffee sizzled into oblivion. Damn. I was losing my touch. I grabbed two packets of cream and turned around to leave.

  Darcy remained by the table, smirking at me. “Karen, Karen,” she said in a motherly tone, forgetting, evidently, that I was seven years her senior. “You are so naive…”

  Keep reading here! Thanks so much!

  Edie