‘You’ll catch your death, Mr Abimbola!’ Stacey said. Sitting warm and comfortable at the front desk, she looked mildly scandalized.
‘I was only out for a few minutes,’ Greg said, by way of defense. It had stopped snowing a little earlier and, driven by an impulse he hadn’t fully understood at the time, he’d stepped outside and circled the long oblong of Calderhill Academy’s main building. He hadn’t bothered to put on coat, hat, and gloves. He’d simply tramped through the wet snow in his plaid-patterned, open-neck shirt, wool-mix jacket, and gray pants – a look he hated, but which was well within the mainstream of faculty fashion. As a result, his shoes were soaked through and dripping on the lobby floor. But he’d found the bracing cold to be exhilarating. And informative.
There was no explaining this to Stacey, though.
‘Well, don’t blame me if you call in sick tomorrow,’ she said. ‘If I’d known you were going to be out for so long, I’d have said something.’
‘You sound like my mother,’ Greg laughed.
‘It looks to me like you need one. Or maybe a slap upside the head. Knock some sense into you.’
‘You may be right, Stacey. If I had any sense, I’d be tucked behind that nice warm desk of yours.’ He peered over the top of it, looking down. ‘This thing has more controls on it than the Starship Enterprise. What are they all for, anyway?’
‘These,’ Stacey said, pointing to a panel of dials, ‘are for the PA system. So if we have a fire or some kind of emergency, I can make the announcement from here. But I can also have the PA sound out on a particular floor, or even a single classroom if we need a student to come down for any reason.’
Greg nodded, looking impressed.
‘And all this?’
‘Security cam stuff. This screen here, which is split three ways? Those are the views of the school entrances: main entrance, the loading bay, and the door from the gym out to the playing fields.’ She toggled a switch. ‘We can concentrate on just the view from one camera, or two, or back to all three.’
‘Wow. It’s like you’re guarding a super-secret facility in the movies.’
Stacey giggled at that.
‘And the cameras,’ Greg asked. ‘Can you make them move?’
‘Sure, but we never do. They’re set up fine just the way they are.’
‘Cool. So, if this were a movie, and I was an action hero trying to break in here, you’d see me?’
‘For sure.’ She grinned widely. ‘It’d be a very short movie.’
‘And at night, when you’re not here?’ Greg grinned back and pointed to a large red bell above the main entrance. ‘Assuming I could get in without tripping the alarm, how would you even know I’d been in? Of course, in this movie, I could disable an alarm like that!’ He snapped his fingers to emphasize the point.
‘Well,’ Stacey said, still smiling, ‘you’d better be good enough to disable the cameras first. The system records everything. I think it gets sent to some computer at the security company.’ She pointed vaguely upwards. ‘Or the cloud.’
‘And if someone here wanted to see the feed, how’d they do that?’
Stacey looked slightly uncomfortable.
‘I’m not sure I sh—’
‘Aw c’mon now, it’s not like I actually want to see it. But how you get to see it can’t be that big of a secret, can it? I mean, what would you tell the police if they asked about it?’
‘They did ask. I told them to go see Ms Pasquarelli. She’s in charge of talking to the security company and stuff.’
‘Makes sense. After all, Ms Pasquarelli is pretty much in charge of everything around here, isn’t she?’
‘She surely is, Mr Abimbola. Don’t tell Principal Ellis, though.’
Greg tapped his nose conspiratorially.
‘Your secret’s safe with me.’
With much to think about, Greg Abimbola climbed the stairs toward his classroom, his steps slow and deliberate.