“And you’re not the least bit superstitious about what happened to the mail cart’s last passenger?” Jack asked.
“A sleuth has to take some risks,” Dad called as the mail cart rolled out of sight.
“I’d be a little less worried if I hadn’t heard him snoring the last time he passed my cube,” Jack said.
I sighed. “Here,” I said, picking up Spike’s crate. “Stick Spike on top of the mail cart with him. If anyone tries anything, Spike is sure to bark.”
“Good idea,” Jack said.
For the rest of the afternoon, Dad and Spike snoozed comfortably on top of the mail cart, and Jack spread the word among the staff to keep an eye on them, in case anyone tried anything. No one did. Dad awoke, near five o’clock, chagrined at having taken so long a nap, and I took advantage of his embarrassment to dump Spike on him for the evening. I had things to do and didn’t want dog walking duties to slow me down.
I found the disgruntled Eugene Mason’s personnel file singularly uninformative. According to the paperwork, he’d left at the end of his ninety-day probation period by mutual agreement. Not much grounds for discontent there. Then again, as Liz was always reminding people, anything we wrote, including e-mails, could be subpoenaed by someone suing Mutant Wizards. Perhaps Personnel felt it safer not to go into too much detail about why we hadn’t wanted to keep Mason on.
I hadn’t learned anything more that afternoon - not that I didn’t try to interrogate anyone unlucky enough to pass through the waiting room. By five o’clock, when I finally locked the doors and put the switchboard on night mode, I suspected most of the staff members were sneaking out the back door to avoid me.
I decided that I’d gone as far as I could with what little information I had to go on. I was going to come back tonight and snoop around.
Before I left, I strolled through the office. Either the afternoon’s build had gone far better than usual, or the programmers had decided to run the evening build on Luis’s spare server over at the Pines. At any rate, the Mutant Wizards staff was clearing out. Not entirely, though, and a few of the therapists had evening office hours and would be seeing patients as late as eight or nine o’clock.
Under the circumstances, I thought, pausing in a corridor, it didn’t make sense to come back before eleven, at the earliest. Perhaps even midnight. Or -
“Can I help you?”
I glanced up and realized I was standing outside the door of one of the therapists’ offices. The short, mousy, bespectacled man who was Dr. Lorelei’s partner. He was hunched over his keyboard, and his hands covered the monitor, as if to protect it, even though it was facing away from me.
Get a life, I wanted to say. Even if I could see, from here, what you’re typing, why would I want to? I doubt anyone wants to pry into your poor patients’ secrets. At any rate, I don’t.
“Sorry,” I said. “Trying to remember where I left something.”
He didn’t speak, and continued to clutch his monitor.
“Good night,” I said, and walked away.
When I was a few feet away, I heard the rattle of the keyboard start up again.
“Weird,” I muttered. And then pushed him out of my mind. I had more important things to worry about.
Like seeing what I could find in Ted’s house.
I looked up the address on the map before I set out. Not that I really needed to; I had a pretty good idea where it was. After so many months of house-hunting in Caerphilly, I could probably have walked blindfolded through any of the promising neighborhoods - promising, these days, began with any house that actually had indoor plumbing, and stopped only a little short of houses large enough to have their own zip codes.
Ted had lived in the country, about a twenty-minute drive south of town, an area I didn’t know as well because it was almost entirely farmland. As I drove, I brooded on the injustice of the fact that the beastly Ted had actually managed to snag a house in the country, while all Michael and I had found was the Cave.
At least he’d said it was a house. Maybe it would turn out to be someone’s old toolshed or a converted tobacco barn.
I finally came to a mailbox with the name CORRIGAN scrawled in black Magic Marker over another, faded name beginning with an S. I craned my neck to see the house, but the driveway was lined with boxwoods, ten feet tall and so overgrown they nearly met in the middle. I backed up, but the hedge continued across the front of the yard until it met the woods on either side.