When I was close to the bottom of the stairs and could see the main part of the basement, I peered around. Five—no, six—young men sat at makeshift desks made of boards and cinder blocks, peering intently at the monitors of their computers. Rob’s interns.
None of them looked up.
I wasn’t sure whether to be impressed with their dedication or feel sorry for them for having to work with all the excitement that had been going on upstairs. I wondered if I should have a word with Rob about driving his staff too hard.
Around and behind the desks I could see sleeping bags, air mattresses, and the same piles of clothes, books, and electronics the drama students had created in the rooms they occupied upstairs. The computer interns were no tidier, but certainly no worse.
I tried to pick Danny Oh out from the crowd, but I couldn’t see any of their faces well enough. I was about to call out his name when one of the young men, who had been slouched back in his chair while studying something on his monitor, suddenly sat upright and slammed his fist down on the makeshift desk.
“Damn!” he exclaimed.
“What’s wrong?” another asked, almost shouting to be heard over the sound of planes and bombs on the TV.
“Ajax just plundered my new city,” the first one said.
“Lose much?” asked a third.
“Three million stone,” the plundered one said.
“Stupid to keep that much around,” one of the others said. “You knew he was going to hit you before long.”
“Josh’s right,” another said.
“I was saving up to upgrade my wall,” the first intern said. “Damn, but I hate Ajax.”
“What in the world are you guys doing?” I asked.
Six startled faces turned up to look at me. Someone hit the TV mute and the basement became almost unnaturally quiet. I could hear the whirring of fans in the computers and languid chords from the guitar upstairs.
“Are we bothering you, Mrs. Waterston?” the one called Josh finally asked.
“How could you possibly be bothering me, lurking down here in the basement like . . . like . . .”
I groped to find a suitable metaphor. Rats, mice, bats—I couldn’t think of anything likely to lurk in a basement that I’d want to call them. I decided to leave it dangling.
“I just wondered what this is all about,” I said. “All this about Ajax plundering and building stone walls.”
They all brightened.
“We’re play-testing Rob’s new online game,” Josh said.
I peered at the monitor of the nearest computer, the one belonging to Josh. In the center of the screen was a picture of green countryside dotted with castles and around the perimeter were so many words, graphics, and numbers that the whole was about as intelligible as the control panel of a jet aircraft. Around the room, every screen showed a similar graphic. Okay, if Rob was having them play-test games, I didn’t have to worry so much about him overworking them. They’d overwork themselves and consider themselves lucky. Rob’s games tended to be addictive.
“Is one of you Danny Oh?” I asked.
One of the six raised his hand, as timidly as if I’d asked who hadn’t done his homework last night.
“Did you get Rob’s call?” I asked.
Danny nodded.
“Can you help?”
He nodded again. I was beginning to wonder if he had a voice. I stepped onto the basement floor and glanced down at the clutter littering it. Three of the students leaped up from their seats and cleared a path before me by picking up armfuls of paper and equipment and throwing them out of the way. One of them pulled over a chair.
“Thank you,” I said. I didn’t follow it with “Get lost!” but they all acted as if I had and scurried back to their desks.
Maybe Rob was right. Maybe impending motherhood had made me begin to take on Mother’s commanding manner.
Scary thought.
“What did Rob tell you?” I asked Danny when the others were, if not out of earshot, at least not hanging over our shoulders.
“Find anything in the college system to prove Ramon filed all his paperwork and got approval for his dissertation,” he said.
“Correct,” I said. “And also, we’re looking for any dirt—um, information—on Dr. Wright from the English department and Dr. Blanco from admin. services.”
Danny nodded and scribbled something on a Post-it note.
“First names?” he asked.
“I’m not on first-name terms with them and probably never will be,” I said. “I can try to find out if you like.”
Danny scribbled. I heard keyboards rattling elsewhere in the room.
“Jean Wright,” said one of the other interns.