AS SHE ENTERED THE office, Molly had to be careful where she walked. Nearly every inch of floor space was covered with books, pencils, pens, paper cups, paper clips, index cards, and slippery sheets of all kinds of paper … lined looseleaf, newsprint, stationery, post-it notes, all of it scattered across the hardwood floor as if a wild, roaring wind had blown in through the windows and swept every desk, every shelf, every filing cabinet free of litter.
A war zone, she thought as she picked her way through the debris, it looks like a war zone.
Most of the staff was standing around in small, silent groups of two or three, surveying the damage with wide, stunned eyes.
Molly stepped in ink. It seemed to be everywhere … pools and puddles of it lying on the scattered papers, splashed on the white walls in vivid, surrealistic streaks and blotches, dark slashes of it on the white ceiling tiles. Each time she put a foot down, she left a slender black footprint on the paper-covered floor.
If I never see another droplet of ink again in my life, I’ll be happy, she thought angrily.
Her eyes found Hank, sitting on the edge of a desk off to her right. He looked shell-shocked. As if a bomb had landed at his feet. His face was pale, a strained expression tightening the edges of his mouth. But it was his eyes that tugged at Molly’s heart. They were dazed, completely free of expression.
He was listening to Ken, who seemed to be trying to console him.
She was hesitant about approaching them. Hank looked so … so defeated. She turned and made her way instead to Tony, Donovan, Dana, and Ava, standing near a file cabinet to her left. It was clear when she reached them that the cabinet, its drawers standing open, was empty, its contents scattered somewhere among the paper carpet.
“What happened?” she asked quietly. “Who did this?”
Tony shrugged. “Who knows? It was like this when we got here this morning. Melanie called the campus police.”
“They should have been here by now,” Donovan complained, using his foot to push aside a pile of papers. “Hank says we can’t start the cleanup until they get here.” He shook his head, his round face twisted with anger. “Nothing like this ever happened at The Flame’s office. My high school newspaper,” he explained. “I was editor.”
Dana snickered. “Well, I won writing awards in high school, too, Donovan. And now here we are. I’m supervising a bunch of temperamental artists and you’re an eminent copy boy. How far we’ve come.”
Donovan shot her such a look of hatred, Molly was surprised that Dana didn’t melt under it. Dana didn’t even blink an eye.
Ignoring the bickering, Ava said angrily, “We’ll be here all day and all night taking care of this mess.” Her fingers twisted a lock of lank, pale hair as she spoke. “My files are never going to be the same. And all the stuff for this month’s issue is out there somewhere,” nodding toward the floor. Her lower lip jutted forth. “We are never going to get this issue out in time!”
Hank overheard her. The remark seemed to snap him back to reality. He stood up. “Oh, yes, we are!” he said grimly. “I don’t care if we have to work around the clock, Odyssey will be out there on campus when it’s supposed to be, Anyone who isn’t willing to work his or her tail off to accomplish that can leave now.”
Donovan and Ava exchanged a glance that Molly interpreted as, “Yeah, and guess who’s going to do most of the work?” But all Donovan said was, “Well, why can’t we get started now? We’re wasting time, waiting for the security guys.”
Hank shook his head. “Melanie wants to know who did this, and so do I. Maybe the creeps left fingerprints or something. We’ll wait.”
They couldn’t even make coffee, because the glass coffeemaker had been shattered. They couldn’t begin cleanup, and they couldn’t work until some order had been restored.
There was nothing to do but wait.
Molly leaned against Ava’s desk and surveyed the scene. It was hard to digest all of the damage. Wild animals, she thought … it looks like a pack of wild dogs got in here and went crazy. As her head turned slowly, she noticed that the tall, wide windows had been streaked with thick stripes of ink, and wondered numbly if they would keep the sun out. This had been such a sunny room yesterday…
Yesterday seemed a million years ago.
She was trying hard not to think about the mud in her car, and the ink-stained clothing, and that odd photo attached to the article from the first issue …
All of those things had happened after she agreed to work on Odyssey.
After Norman had apologized to her for losing his temper.
Had he meant that apology? Or was he still angry, and taking out his anger not only on her, but on this office, as well?
She still couldn’t shake the spine-tingling feeling that someone was watching her. It wasn’t Norman, of course. He’d be too obvious. The trouble was, he kept collecting new members for his group, and she had no way of knowing who they were. Anyone could belong to that group now, and could, under Norman’s orders, be watching her every minute.
Tommie, like Hank, pulled herself out of her shocked stupor, and began glumly picking her way through the chaos to join Molly and the others at the filing cabinet. Tommie shot a curious look in Molly’s direction. “Don’t you think it’s kind of an odd coincidence,” she asked, “that it was your car last night, and our office this morning?”
Molly felt her face growing warm.
“I mean,” Tommie continued, “it’s like the minute you agreed to start working on the magazine, bad things started to happen. First your car, and now this …” She spread her hands out toward the center of the room. “You don’t have a history of bad luck, do you?”
Tommie only suspected bad luck? Molly had expected a different kind of suspicion. Like asking if Molly knew anyone who didn’t want her working on the magazine.
But Tommie hadn’t asked that, had she?
“No,” Molly said, “I don’t think so.”
“This isn’t bad luck,” Hank interjected. “This is vandalism. It’s got nothing to do with luck.”
When two campus security officers pushed their way through the crowd and entered the room, Molly wondered what they would say if she told them about her car and her laundry, and the doctored article. Would they see any connection between those incidents and the wreckage in this room?
The staff worked all day long, cutting their classes to restore order. At times, it seemed hopeless. Every so often as they bent and stooped and retrieved and scrubbed away ink and attempted sorting papers, someone would cry out, “Oh, this is impossible!” But they kept working.
The word spread quickly on campus, and it was heartening when small groups of people began appearing at the door offering to help or carrying food and drinks, bringing extra trash bags or cleaning supplies.
By noon, there were a dozen or more people helping who had no connection with the magazine except that they enjoyed reading it. Several professors even showed up, offering to help, but were sent away with a gentle refusal from Tony. “They’d cramp our style,” he explained with a grin.
Phoebe showed up to help as soon as she heard what had happened. Molly was grateful, until Phoebe whispered, as they bent to scoop up scattered sheets of paper, “Do you think Norman had anything to do with this? I’ll bet he’s not happy about you working here, is he?”
That was so close to what Molly feared that she snapped, “Norman wouldn’t do this! He’s eccentric, he’s not crazy!” She even managed to sound as if she believed that.
“This is really awful,” Phoebe said quietly as she and Molly lifted an overturned table and set it upright. “It’s like someone went crazy in here. Poor Hank.”
“Be careful,” Molly warned as Phoebe picked up a chair with a broken back. “Of your hands, I mean. There could be splinters on that chair, and you’ve got that recital coming up.”
Phoebe laughed. “I’ve played with splinters before, Molly. And with paper cuts and bruises and swollen knuckles.” Striking a pose, she said in a broadly accented voice, “A true artist plays no matter what the adversity,” and then laughed again, this time at herself.
Spying a campus security officer standing in the doorway, Molly took a deep breath and let it out. It was time. She had to tell someone in authority about her car and her laundry, or she wouldn’t be able to sleep that night.
She walked over to the uniformed officer. “Could I talk to you out in the hall for a second?” she asked.
“I’m pretty busy right now.” He looked her over carefully, as if he were checking to make sure she wasn’t carrying a concealed weapon. “Does it have anything to do with this business here? ’Cause that’s all I’ve got room for on my mind right now.”
“I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “But it could. It’ll just take a minute.”
He went with her. In the hallway, she told him, in detail, about her car and her ink-stained laundry. She didn’t show him the doctored article. It wasn’t threatening in any way, just odd. He’d think she was nuts, showing it to him.
“You report these incidents?” he asked abruptly when she’d finished.
“Well, no …”
He shrugged. “No report, not too much I can do. Sounds like pranks to me. Happens all the time. Not just on this campus, either.”
“Well, I know that,” Molly said sharply. “But don’t you think it’s odd that both of those things happened to me the day after I started working here? And now this,” she waved a hand toward the office.
The look the officer gave her made it clear that he had decided she had a very vivid imagination. “You think mud in your car and some ink on your clothes had something to do with that mess in there? I don’t see it.”
She thought about telling him about Norman and the Others, and decided against it. She wasn’t ready. She had no proof at all that they were involved.
“Seems to me,” the officer said, turning away, “what you’ve got there is a harmless prank, someone trying to scare you.”
Well, it had worked, hadn’t it?
“On the other hand,” he continued as he left her, “the mess inside this office isn’t any prank. It’s vandalism on college property. Can’t have that. Oh,” he added, “you let me know if you find out who pulled those pranks on you. I’ll give them a talking-to.”
Finding out things is your job, not mine, Molly answered silently. You’re supposed to look at evidence, sort it out, put two and two together and get four.
But the officer had already gone back inside the office. Besides, she didn’t have any evidence.
Molly sighed, disappointed. So much for asking for help.
When the security officers finally left, later that day, they were unable to pass on any information to Melanie or Hank. They had found no fingerprints so far, no evidence of any kind that would allow them to arrest a suspect or suspects.
But they would keep looking for information, the staff was assured.
“Then why are they leaving?” Dana complained when the officers had gone. “Are they going to look for information somewhere else? I mean, wouldn’t all the clues be here?
“Maybe they’re tired,” Donovan muttered. “Lord knows I am.”
“We’ve done enough for one day,” Hank told everyone, “go home, relax, and we can start again first thing tomorrow morning. Oh, and Molly, could I see you for a sec?”
Her stomach turned over. He’d seen what had happened to her car and then he’d walked in on the wreckage in this office the very day after he’d hired her. He too believed that the chaos had something to do with her. He was going to fire her.
Dana shot Molly a look that was impossible to interpret. Did Dana already know that Molly was about to be sacked? If she did, how she felt about it wasn’t showing in her face.
But Hank didn’t fire her. “Sigma Chi is holding a boat party on Bottomless Lake at the park this weekend. They’ve rented one of the paddlewheels for a cruise. I thought you might like to go. With me.”
“I’d love to. If I finish ‘Solitaire.’ Maybe I can get it done tonight.”
“Great. I know it looks like we’ll never get the issue out on time, but we will. We’ve got all day tomorrow to put things back together.”
As they walked out of the building, she confessed, “I thought you were going to fire me. Tommie thinks I’m bad luck. I thought maybe you did, too.”
“I’m not superstitious,” he said calmly.
“Before Dana left, she gave me this look … I thought maybe she was in on it. My being fired, I mean.”
“Dana wants your job. Like Donovan, she was a newspaper editor in high school. She wasn’t the least bit interested in handling the artists. Said they’d be a pain in the neck.” Hank laughed. “Of course, she’s right. Especially Tony. But he’s very good at what he does, so we put up with it.”
“Dana wants to write?”
“Sure. Donovan, and Ava, even Tommie, I told you that. They’re working hard, hoping to get a break. The break you got without even trying. Ken, too. He’s my right-hand man. Don’t know what I’d do without him. Look, don’t let it get to you. They’re all treating you okay, aren’t they? They’re just disappointed, like I said.”
Disappointed? They’d all been disappointed that Dr. Theodore had chosen her?
Remembering the ink-stained clothing and the mud, Molly wondered just how disappointed they’d all been.