Leslie took her through a door, into a back room with boxes of merchandise stacked all the way to the ceiling. Along one wall Emma saw the time clock with two punch cards next to it. One card had her name—Earl, Emma—written on it. She didn’t get a chance to read the other one before Leslie cleared her throat again.
“You get two fifteen minute breaks and a half-hour for lunch. You can leave the grounds, but you get a ten percent discount at the cafeteria, so you might want to make the most of it. You’ll be working the counter. Members of the museum get a fifteen percent discount if they show their card. If they don’t have one, ask them if they want one. There’s a script beside the cash register.”
“I understand.”
“Good. Most important: if your drawer is more than ten dollars over or under at the end of the day, you’re fired. Got it?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“I’ll be floating between here and the cafeteria most of the day. Jim will be on stock. He’s worked here the last two summers, so if you get into trouble, you can ask him.”
Right on cue, the time clock banged as someone shoved a card into it. Emma saw a young man with tangled brown hair and a pointed nose dressed in a nearly identical fashion to her—except he had remembered a white undershirt to cover up his arms. When he turned and she saw one of his red-brown eyes, she put a hand to her lips. There was something so familiar about him.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m Jim Rizzard.”
“I’m Emma,” she whispered.
“Yeah, I saw it on your card.” With that, Jim went back into the store. Emma bit down on her lip and tried to keep from crying at the way he’d brushed her off.
“Don’t forget to punch your card when you go in or out,” Leslie said.
Emma nodded and reached for the card with her name on it. She stuck it in the machine; she flinched at the metallic bang—like a gunshot. She stuck the card back on the rack and then turned to see Leslie emerge from the tiny office with a black plastic tray.
“Make sure to count your drawer before you start and count it again after you’re done. And remember, no making personal withdrawals.”
“I won’t.”
“Fine.” Leslie stomped back through the door into the store. She pressed some buttons on the cash register and then turned back to Emma. “Once you’ve counted in, just insert the drawer and you’re ready. It should be pretty self-explanatory. If you get stuck, ask Jim.”
“OK,” Emma said, though she doubted Jim would be of much help. He hardly glanced at her as she counted the money in the drawer. When she finished she found she was alone in the store.
She used the first hour to familiarize herself with the cash register. There didn’t seem to be much to it, as Leslie had said. She was still practicing when her first customer came in. She was a heavyset blond woman in a leopard print jacket. Emma watched the woman drift aimlessly around the store; she occasionally picked something up to check the price.
“Can I help you find something?” Emma asked.
“I’m just looking,” the woman snapped. Emma’s smile faded as she felt almost as if she’d been slapped. She pretended to rearrange some pencils in a cup; she again had the feeling this wasn’t her real job.
The woman came up to the counter a few minutes later with a stuffed lion. Emma glanced down at the script by the cash register. She forced a smile she didn’t feel to her face. “Are you a member of the museum?”
“No.”
“If you join, you’re eligible for a discount of—”
“Just ring up the lion. I’m in a hurry.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Emma said. She punched in the buttons to ring up the order and give the woman her change. She was about to put the lion in a bag, but the woman snatched it away and stuffed it into her purse. “Have a good day.” The woman only grunted at this.
Emma knew she wouldn’t have a good day when the first tour group arrived an hour later. She found herself at the center of a hurricane of thirty screaming kindergartners. Their teacher tried to keep them under control, but she was vastly outnumbered. “Please don’t unfold the shirts,” Emma said with just as little effect.
She finally ran into the backroom, where Jim sorted through a box of wind-up toys. “Can you help me? A bunch of kids are tearing the place apart.”
“So?”
“Shouldn’t we try to stop them?”
“Not much we can do. Wait until they go and then clean up.”
“Thanks.”
For all the havoc they created, the kids bought very little. Emma didn’t bother to go through the script with them; kindergartners couldn’t sign up for any kind of membership. Their teacher was the last in line; she looked as wrecked as the store. “I’m sorry about the mess,” she said.
“It’s all right,” Emma said. “We’ll clean it up.”
Or rather, Emma cleaned it up. When she went to the back to ask for Jim’s help, he was still sorting through the wind-up toys. “I’m busy,” he snapped at her.
“Please—”
“I said I’m busy.”
She stamped her foot, but couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t a string of curse words. She turned and went back to try to clean up the mess. She hadn’t even gotten halfway when Leslie swooped down at her. “What the hell happened here?”
“Some kids came in. I tried to stop them.”
Leslie shook her head. Without a word she went back to the stockroom. Though Leslie hadn’t said anything, Emma knew she was already on thin ice.
***
She missed her first break thanks to another tour group. Despite that they were sixth graders, the end result was largely the same. Emma worked through her break to clean up the mess by herself—again.
By two o’clock she desperately needed to use the bathroom. She finally went into the back, where Jim stacked some DVDs. “It’s time for my lunch break,” she said.
“So?”
“So someone should watch the counter and there are only two of us here.”
He turned to look at her and nodded. “Fine.”
She punched out and then said, “I’ll be back in a half-hour.”
“I don’t care.”
With a sigh she went back out to the store. There was only a fat man in a baseball cap at the moment. “Someone will be with you in a moment, sir,” she said. She hoped Jim wouldn’t stay in the back until she returned or else there probably wouldn’t be any merchandise left. Then not only would she be fired, but she’d have to pay for it all too.
She found her way to the bathroom and finally got a chance to change into the shirt Leslie had given her. She took out all but one earring in each ear; she dropped the rest into her pocket. She tried to smile into the mirror, but couldn’t manage more than a feeble grin. Nothing seemed to be going right today. It was like she was cursed. With another sigh she left the bathroom to get lunch.
She shuffled along behind some patrons and tried to find something that looked edible, but nothing did. Then she saw a can of Red Bull and picked it up. She could definitely use an energy boost right now. To go with this she decided on a tuna fish sandwich and then checked out; this used up most of what little money she had in her purse.
The sandwich turned out to be a bad idea. The moment she took a bite she began to gag just as she had this morning. She fought the rising tide in her stomach to choke down that first bite and drained some Red Bull to help it along. She decided to forego the rest of the sandwich. The Red Bull went down much easier and as she stood up, she felt rested enough to face the afternoon.
On her way back across the main gallery, she saw the staff elevator. She was staff, wasn’t she? She pressed the call button; the doors opened immediately. There seemed to be a button missing below the one for the subbasement, but when she tried to remember what it was, she couldn’t.
Before the doors could close, she heard a man say, “What are you doing?”
She looked up to see a man with curly brown hair glare at
her from behind a pair of oversized glasses. “I’m using the elevator,” she said.
“This elevator is for staff. Patrons have to use the one on the other side.”
“I’m not a patron. I work in the gift shop.”
“If I catch you in here again, I’m going to call security. Is that clear enough for you, young lady?”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
The man shook his head as she stepped out of the elevator. She turned back to apologize again, but he had already gone. Like most everything else, something about the man had seemed familiar and yet out of place. Like most everything else, she didn’t know exactly how.
She trudged up the stairs to find the store not in complete disarray. Jim leaned on the counter; his chin rested on his hands. “That was quick,” he said.
“I guess so,” she mumbled before she went into the back. She still had ten minutes before she could punch back in. To pass the time, she picked up a book on whales.
She didn’t get a page in before she felt something wrong again. She had to read some sentences three or four times before she could understand them. A few words she skipped entirely, not sure what they meant. She closed the book and then finally let out the tears she’d saved up all through this horrible day.
After a couple of minutes, she felt someone put a hand on her back. “You all right?” Jim asked her.
“No. Everything’s going wrong.”
“It’s just your first day. Relax.”
She shook her head. “It’s not that. It’s like I woke up this morning and everything had changed. I mean like the whole world was different. I’m different.”
“Maybe you’re just paranoid. Happens to me when I smoke a joint.”
“I’m not paranoid. And I’m not on drugs either.”
“If you say so.”
She shot to her feet and poked him in the chest with one finger. “Listen, I don’t have to put up with this. You start pulling your weight and treating me with a little respect.” She didn’t give him time to respond as she stormed back to the cash register. She was glad there was no one in the store at the moment as she probably looked like a mess.
“Sorry,” she heard Jim say. She looked up to see him with his eyes on the floor.
“It’s all right. I didn’t mean to snap at you.”
“It’s fine.” He cleared his throat. “Listen, after work I was going to this party over on Clayborne Street—at the old train station. If you’re not busy, maybe you could come.”
“Sure,” she blurted out before she could stop herself. But when she thought about it, this answer seemed right to her.
Chapter 8
Renee’s father didn’t go to bed until three in the morning, after the Tokyo exchange closed. That gave Tim a narrow window to sneak out of the house before Consuela the maid showed up at six to prepare breakfast for Renee and her father. From what Renee said, Consuela would be at the house all day, which would make it far more difficult for Tim to get out if he waited.
Before she had finally drifted off to sleep at one, Renee told him to wait in the closet. “Daddy usually checks up on me before he goes to bed,” she said with a yawn. “Mostly he wants to make sure I’m still here.”
Not long after she said that, Renee fell asleep with her head on the foot of the bed. From that position she had supervised Tim’s drawings for the invention he had in mind. While he knew a lot about mechanical engineering, Renee’s encyclopedic knowledge had come in handy. She could calculate in her head what he would need a calculator or computer to do, which definitely saved time.
At fifteen minutes to three, Tim folded up his drawings and tucked these into a unicorn folder of Renee’s. Then he picked the little girl up from the end of the bed and carried her over to the head of it. She whimpered slightly as he carried her but didn’t wake up. As he gently set her down on the mattress, she turned onto her side. “G’night Daddy,” she mumbled. He pulled the covers up to her chin and resisted the urge to kiss her forehead as her father had done. She wasn’t his daughter; she was his partner in this mad scheme they’d concocted.
“Goodnight,” he whispered and then took the unicorn folder into the closet with him.
Right on schedule, the door to the bedroom opened. Tim squinted in the dark to watch as Renee’s father bent down to pat her head. She whimpered again but still didn’t wake up. “Goodnight,” her father whispered as Tim had.
Then the folder slipped from Tim’s hand to land on the floor of the closet; one corner stuck out beneath the door. He tried to remain completely still as Renee’s father looked right at the closet. Renee’s father picked up the folder and then flipped through the pages Tim had drawn with Renee’s help. Her father shook his head and then set the folder on the desk. Tim resisted a sigh of relief as Renee’s father padded out of the room.
The only sound in the room came from Tim’s pounding heart for a minute. Then he heard a door close and finally let out that sigh of relief. He opened the closet door and took the folder before he tiptoed over to the door. He eased the door open and stuck his head out into the hallway to make sure it was clear.
Downstairs, next to the front door, he found the controls for the security system. Renee had given him the combination to disarm the system. He programmed it to turn back on in thirty seconds, long enough for him to get out the door.
Once outside, there was nothing for him to do but go to a neighbor’s house two doors down. From what Renee said, the neighbors wouldn’t be home for another month when they returned from Europe. Tim settled into the narrow space between the bushes and the side of the house; he lay on his side as Renee had, though his bed was far less comfortable. Still, it beat the hard prison bunk he’d slept on for two years.
He awoke to someone rustling the bushes. He felt around him for something to use as a weapon. His hand found something, but when he held it up, he realized it was only a pinecone. “Yeah, you’ll really hurt me with that,” Renee said. She handed him a bundle wrapped in brown paper.
Inside the paper he found an army uniform, complete with shoes. “That belonged to Granddaddy,” Renee said. “He was a little taller than Daddy. Just try not to get it too dirty.”
“You want me to change in the bushes?”
“Why not?” They stared at each other for a moment. She sighed and then rolled her eyes. “Fine, I won’t peek.”
Tim squatted down behind the bushes; he did his best to squeeze into the uniform without dirtying it. The pants were still a little short—and about two sizes too narrow in the waist—but it would do. The jacket fit well enough to conceal that the shirt was a couple sizes too small as well. So long as he didn’t have to run or really do anything more than walk he would be fine.
He folded his clothes up and stuffed them into the brown paper to carry under his arm. The unicorn folder he handed to Renee to carry outside the gates. After he stepped from the bushes, he turned so she could see how the uniform fit. “You think it will work?”
“They aren’t going to look really close,” she said. “They worry more about who’s going in than who’s going out.”
Renee’s theory turned out to be correct. Tim shambled after her in the tight uniform; he turned away from the guardhouse to make it more difficult for the guard to see his face. He turned to the right along with Renee and waited for someone to yell for him to stop.
Someone did yell for them to stop, but when Tim turned around, he saw only a very fat girl who galloped towards them. “Wait up!” She came to a stop in front of them, her pudgy face red while her breath came out in gasps. When she looked up at him, he thought there was something familiar about her blue eyes. “Who’s this?” she asked between gasps.
“My cousin Tim,” Renee said.
“Your cousin?”
“By marriage,” Renee added. “Tim, this is my friend Aggie.”
“Hi,” he mumbled. Between the fat and the long brown hair, Tim hadn’t recognized Sylvia’s sister Agnes. Now he realized why her ey
es were so familiar, except there was something missing—they didn’t have the same wise look he remembered from when she’d come to visit him in prison. He supposed it was because here she was just an ordinary teenager, not a five hundred-year-old witch.
“You didn’t say you had a cousin staying over,” Aggie said with a hint of a whine.
“You didn’t ask.” Despite that she was years younger and much smaller, it became clear during this conversation that Renee was the boss and Aggie her loyal sidekick. Tim thought again of the S. Joubert in the phone book and wondered what might have become of Sylvia.
***
He left Renee at the bus stop with her friend. Before they parted, she actually jumped up to kiss him on the cheek. “See you later, cuz,” she said with a wink. Aggie met his eye for a moment before she looked shyly at the ground and climbed onto the bus.
In the pocket of his borrowed pants, Tim found a wad of five-dollar bills and a note from Renee that said, “From my piggy bank.” He counted forty-five dollars. He shook his head; he’d never had more than eight bucks in his piggy bank.
Renee had already told him where to find Gustafson High, where she went to school with Aggie. He didn’t want to linger around the school, especially dressed in her grandfather’s ill-fitting uniform, so he went into a place called Olga’s, which he took to be a McDonald’s equivalent. There in the bathroom stall he was able to change back into his clothes.
With some of Renee’s piggy bank money he bought an Olga Muffin with Egg. He found out when he unwrapped it that it was similar to an Egg McMuffin. He also bought a cup of coffee, which he refilled three times while he waited for Renee. He wished he hadn’t left the plans with her so he could work to refine them. There would still be a lot of work to do, but at least he had an overall concept now.
He didn’t know if it was a very good—or very plausible—concept. To create a rat-shaped robot that worked by remote control was one thing; this was on an entirely different level. There had been some breakthroughs in this area, notably to help people with missing or paralyzed limbs by allowing them to use a mechanical device. Still, that was child’s play compared to what he wanted to do.
Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis Page 148
