Hiding in Plain Sight

by Valerie Sherrard

  I’d gathered that in the first moment there, but I nodded and said, “Hi, Janine,” as though I were hearing it for the first time.

  “Hello?”

  I turned to see that the greeting had come from a slender woman with greying hair who looked to be at least a few years older than my mother. She was dressed in a blue suit and short heels that clicked on the floor as she walked toward me. She held her hand out and I took it awkwardly, feeling a bit silly as she pumped it firmly in a strong handshake.

  “Darla Rhule,” she said with a smile that flashed for a second and was gone. “I assume you’re Shelby. We’re glad to have you here for the rest of the summer. If you have any questions or problems feel free to come and see me. Janine will fill you in on what you’re expected to do.”

  Without waiting for me to respond to anything she’d said, Darla hurried down the hall, tap-tap-tapping all the way to an office on the left. She closed the door as soon as she’d crossed the threshold.

  Voices behind me caught my attention as a man and woman came along. At first I thought it must be the Yaegers, but when they introduced themselves I discovered they were James Rankin and Angi Alexander. Both greeted me in a friendly way but neither stopped to chat before heading to their offices.

  “No one’s talking much these days,” Janine sighed, looking sad. “Everyone’s all nerved up because of the robbery. Well, you wouldn’t know anything about that, though, would you? ’Course not. You just started here.”

  She leaned forward, fluffing her hair for a second time. “I don’t suppose there’s any reason I can’t tell you about it. There was a break-in a couple of weeks ago. Or it was made to look like a break-in anyway. Me, I think it was an inside job.”

  The last sentence was delivered in a secretive tone, which almost made me laugh. From what Mrs. Thompson had told me, everyone was aware of the fact that the window had been broken from the inside. It was one of the strongest pieces of evidence against her, and I figured it would be the one that was the most difficult to explain away. After all, if she was the only person with access to the room and safe, both of which had been opened with apparent ease, it was going to be hard to prove her innocence.

  That might have been the first time it occurred to me that maybe she was guilty. As soon as the thought entered my mind, I felt horrible, like I’d betrayed my best friend by suspecting her mother.

  What if she was guilty, though? If I uncovered evidence that proved it absolutely, what was I going to do? I pushed the uncomfortable thought out of my head and tried to pay attention to Janine again.

  “It’s enough to give you the creeps, all right,” she was saying. “Imagine if there’s a criminal right in our midst.”

  “Do the police have any suspects?” I asked.

  “Well, sort of, but I think they’re on the wrong track. It’s not like they’ve arrested anyone or laid charges or anything. See, they can only go by what they find when they investigate,” she said with a wise nod, “but they don’t know the person, so they only have part of the story, if you know what I mean.”

  “No one ever knows what you mean, Janine.” This remark came from a guy who didn’t look to be much older than me, though he had to be in his mid-twenties. My assumption that this must be Joey Sands was confirmed almost immediately.

  “Joey, this is Shelby.” Janine jerked her head in my direction. “She’s going to be my assistant for the summer.”

  “Nice to meet you.” Joey smiled and shook my hand. “I can’t imagine what you’ll be doing, though, if you’re supposed to be assisting Janine. How do you help someone do nothing?”

  Janine swatted at him, but he easily dodged her hand, laughed, wished me luck, and sauntered off toward his office.

  All I could think was that neither of them seemed terribly concerned about the recent robbery. It was also interesting that Janine was so sure Mrs. Thompson was innocent.

  I wasn’t about to jump to any conclusions, but it seemed that these details were worth noting. I had a small memo pad in my pocket so I could jot things down throughout the day, not trusting that I’d remember everything if I waited until I was home.

  With Janine right there, a mental note would have to do for the moment, but I was sure I’d have lots of chances to keep up with note-taking. It’s been helpful to me a few times in the past.

  “So, is that everyone who works here?” I asked innocently, wondering where the others were.

  “Nope. Besides the ones you met there’s Carol and Debbie and Stuart. They’re married. Debbie and Stuart, that is. Carol’s not in yet, but I’m pretty sure the other two are in their office. They’ve been coming in early a lot lately. Must be working on some big project.”

  Carol didn’t show up for another half an hour. Janine had just put a call through to Stuart Yaeger and I was still waiting for instructions for my first task.

  “Don’t even think about starting with me.” Carol glared at Janine before anyone had said so much as a single word to her. “I had trouble with my car, and anyway, I work harder than anyone else in this building so if I’m late once in a while I shouldn’t have to defend myself.”

  “I couldn’t care less if you were late every day,” Janine retorted. “Don’t come in here hassling me.”

  “I don’t answer to you anyway,” Carol snapped back. She seemed to pause when she caught sight of me but didn’t bother waiting for an introduction before she stomped off down the hall.

  “Well, that was Carol.” Janine rolled her eyes but didn’t say anything more just then.

  “Does she have an office?” I wondered aloud.

  “Nope. She works mostly in the copy room. Makes copies, shreds things, gets stuff ready to mail, that kind of thing. She’s here to free up the computer geeks from tasks like that so they can concentrate on the important stuff.”

  “Is she always like that?” I asked cautiously.

  “Pretty much. She’s here on some kind of government program for people who aren’t very employable. I don’t see that much of her, thank goodness.”

  “Do you spend much time with the others?” I asked, wondering when I was going to have a chance to see the rest of the place. So far, we’d stayed in the reception area, and aside from a couple of phone calls, which Janine had taken, we hadn’t done anything.

  Before she could answer me, a red light appeared on Janine’s phone. She pressed a button and I heard a female voice tell her she was needed to take dictation.

  “You sure you don’t know shorthand?” she sighed as she stood up. “Well, you might as well come along anyway. There’s not much you can do here.”

  She pressed a couple of buttons on the phone, grabbed a steno pad from a drawer, and went off toward Darla’s office with me in tow.

  The older woman sat behind a huge wooden desk, the surface of which was cluttered with files and books and loose sheets of paper. She offered another brief smile and pointed me to a chair where I sat and watched while Janine scribbled strange-looking symbols on her pad.

  The letter being dictated seemed boring, but I forced myself to listen while trying to look fascinated with the office. Darla sure didn’t believe in making her work area too cozy, so there wasn’t much to look at. The place was practically bare except for a fluffy fern and a professionally done photo of her with her husband and children, both perched on top of a bookcase along the wall. The plant looked a bit droopy.

  “Would you like your fern watered?” I asked once Janine was finished.

  Darla glanced up at me with a smile. “Thanks, but I kind of like to take care of it myself, silly as that is. Nice to see that you’re taking a bit of initiative, though.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  While Janine typed up the letter back at her desk my thoughts drifted to the conversation I’d had with my parents the night before. It hadn’t gone quite as I’d hoped.

  They’d been fine with my announcement that I was going to work at NUTEC, but things got a little tense when it became clear t
o them that I hadn’t told them the entire truth. I honestly don’t know why I try to hide stuff from them, since it never works. I must have some subconscious desire to embarrass myself.

  “How nice,” Mom had said in reply to my news. “It will probably be fun for you — working with Betts’s mom.”

  “Well, uh, she won’t be there, actually,” I stammered, making it abundantly clear that something was up.

  “No? Oh, they’re on holidays, aren’t they,” Mom deduced on her own. “But then, how did she arrange for the job for you if she’s out of town?”

  “They didn’t go away this summer,” I said. Of course that just brought a fresh onslaught of questions. Why hadn’t I had any contact with Betts for the past two weeks if her family was right here in Little River? Why hadn’t the Thompsons gone away as they do every year?

  There were more, but I knew after the first few that there was nothing for it but to tell the whole story and hope they didn’t forbid me from getting involved. There’d been plenty of discussion, let me tell you, and it was close, but I managed to convince them that it wasn’t a dangerous situation.

  A bigger question came at the end of that whole conversation, namely, why hadn’t I told them the entire truth in the first place.

  “It’s hard for us to trust that you’re making good decisions when you hide things from us,” Dad pointed out.

  I insisted that I was just trying to protect Mrs. Thompson’s privacy, which was, after all, part of it. Dad looked a bit sad and disappointed anyway, and that really bothered me.

  “Earth to Shelby.” Janine’s words penetrated my drifting thoughts, and I drew myself back to the present to find her staring at me curiously. I blushed and cast about in my head for something to say to cover my distractedness.

  I was about to blurt out some inane comment when I saw that it wasn’t really necessary, since Janine had apparently lost interest almost immediately and gone back to her nails. I was starting to wonder when she was going to get some work done, and more importantly, when she was going to give me something to do.

  As if she’d read my mind, she nodded toward a pair of stacked baskets on her desk marked IN and OUT. “You can get the letters in the ‘out’ file ready for the mail,” she said. “Type and print out the labels first. You’ll find envelopes in the third drawer of my filing cabinet.”

  I picked up the stack of correspondence that was waiting to be mailed. “Uh, where will I type the labels?” I asked, since Janine was sitting in front of the only computer in the reception area.

  “Oh, yeah,” she giggled and rolled her eyes. “I guess you need something to type on.”

  I waited while she thought this problem through. It was obvious to me even after such a short time that there was no hurrying Janine.

  “I know,” she said at last. “You can use the spare computer in the conference room. It’s probably still locked, since no one has used it yet today. I’ll get Darla to open it up for you.”

  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.

  CHAPTER NINE

  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 lea
st, 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.