The phone clicked in the receiver, too sharply, too loudly. The wheels on Ann-Harriet’s desk chair creaked. Miriam walked the rest of the way to Ann-Harriet’s office door and stood in the door frame, checking out a scene she checked out at least once every weekday. Ann-Harriet was the kind of person who cluttered up her desk with personal things: pictures of brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces; the scroll she’d received for being half of the “cutest couple” in high school; her life horoscope engraved in brass. Miriam stared at the life horoscope and frowned—this was a Catholic town, for God’s sake—and then wrenched away from it, to look Ann-Harriet in the face instead. Miriam always looked Ann-Harriet in the face. It was one of her operational absolutes. It also raised the tension level of their every encounter by six or seven points on the Richter scale.
Ann-Harriet had stood up when Miriam first walked in. Now she stepped back a little and tried out a smile that didn’t quite make it.
“Miss Bailey,” she said. “I didn’t expect you in.”
“You shouldn’t have expected me in,” Miriam told her. “I never come in on weekends.” She nodded toward the phone. “Someone was telling you about Don Bollander being dead.”
“Oh,” Ann-Harriet said. “Yes. That was Bob Corliss, Miss Bailey, who works at the Chase branch out in Wender. You know.”
“No,” Miriam said. “I don’t know.”
“Oh. Well. He was telling me about Don Bollander, or as much as he’s heard. He was telling me Don Bollander had been murdered.”
“Maybe he has been.”
“Oh,” Ann-Harriet said again. Her desk was covered with computer sheets, some of them flat and some of them crumpled and still others folded neatly in half. She pushed her hands into them to no purpose and cleared her throat. “I was right in the middle of doing all this stuff,” she said, “when the call came, and then I forgot all about it.”
“Because Don Bollander had died,” Miriam said.
“Because he’d been murdered,” Ann-Harriet said. “And that girl was murdered, too.”
“So what did you think?” Miriam said. “That you were the most likely candidate for the next one?”
Ann-Harriet flushed. “I didn’t think anything, Miss Bailey. I was just shocked. Do you want to go over these papers? Is that why you came in?”
“It might be.”
Miriam was still standing in the doorway. Ann-Harriet looked at her there and seemed to make up her mind about something. Miriam could just guess what. Ann-Harriet shuffled her papers more decisively and sat down in her chair.
“I’ve been over these several times today,” she said, “and I’ve back-checked them with every confirming report. In my estimation, you were right to be concerned—”
“I’m always right to be concerned.”
Ann-Harriet flushed. “There’s leakage,” she said decisively. “Not very much leakage at any one time, but going back at least a year, and it adds up. To the best of my knowledge, after just a few days’ investigation, what it’s added up to so far is about a hundred thousand dollars. Is that what you wanted to know? Is that what you were looking for?”
“Maybe.”
“You need someone better than I am to tell you who’s doing it. I don’t have the expertise to trace something like this.”
“I haven’t asked you to.”
“What have you asked me to do?” Ann-Harriet demanded, beginning to sound a little wild. “I’ve been here all afternoon. I was here all night last night and all night the night before that. If I’m not looking for the right thing, you ought to tell me I’m not looking for the right thing.”
Outside Ann-Harriet’s single office window, the sky was beginning to cloud up again. It reminded Miriam of her last conversation with Josh, and started a whole stream of questions tumbling through her mind—but they were questions about the web of sex, and useless to ask. Besides, she didn’t really want to ask them. She just wanted to go on making Ann-Harriet uncomfortable. She had already made Ann-Harriet afraid.
Miriam left the door frame and sat down in Ann-Harriet’s single visitor’s chair. She wondered how Ann-Harriet felt about her office. There were secretaries on the first floor with better offices than this.
Miriam bent over Ann-Harriet’s papers and said, “I’m going to stay here for a while. I want you to take me through it, step by step, all the paper trail you’ve managed to find. I want to see what it looks like.”
“Now?”