Nashville: The Mood (Part 4)

NASHVILLE: THE MOOD

PART 4

by Donald H. Carpenter

Copyright ©2016 by Donald H. Carpenter, LLC

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Cover design by Charles Hooper

Printed in the United States of America

NASHVILLE: THE MOOD

PART 4

Cassie Iles finished the last letter she had been typing from dictation and printed it out. She heard the sound of the printer down the hall, and thought about how noisy even modern-day printers sounded when there was no other sound. Everyone had left the office at least twenty minutes ago, and until a few moments before, the only sound had been of her fingers hitting the keys on the keyboard.

She remembered the old printers, the ones before laser printers came into being, the so-called dot matrix printers, which made quite a racket when a long document was being printed out. She wondered what made her even think of them.

She retrieved the letter and placed it on her desk along with others she had typed within the last hour. She picked up the small digital recorder used by her boss, and went through the process of deleting the remaining recordings. Her boss had gone on a tear during the middle part of the afternoon, dictating more than twenty-five letters of varying lengths, and had stressed to her the urgency of getting them done as quickly as possible. He hadn’t insisted, or even suggested, that she stay late to do them all; he knew by now that she would take that upon herself. She didn’t mind, really, because she knew her boss appreciated her willingness to do whatever it took, even on a moment’s notice, and always allowed her flexibility in her scheduling after each such task. She wondered if he would mind if she took most of this coming Friday off. She handwrote a note to herself to ask him about that tomorrow.

She walked from behind her desk to the entryway of the office and looked into the office directly in front of the doorway, without entering. Then she looked to her left down the long hallway, to the far end, then back down the hallway to the right. She took a long, slow breath and arched her back, trying to straighten her posture. She walked to the right all the way to the end and looked into the office there. It was empty, the light out. She then made her way methodically back up the hallway, stopping to look into each office, glancing over to a wall on the left, across the desk and chair to the window, if there was one, and then glancing at the wall to the right. She then stepped away and repeated the process with each office, crossing the entranceway again and making her way slowly to the other end of the hallway. Once she had gotten completely to the other end, she turned around and came back to the third office from that end and stopped at the doorway.

She wondered why, at this point, she even bothered to be cautious, and maybe a little nervous, about it. Or, rather, perhaps it was more that she found it surprising that she still took those precautions, that she hadn’t slipped into a sense of carelessness. One might have thought it was a sign of how important she regarded what she was doing, but she never actually made that connection in her own mind. It was more that what she was doing wouldn’t be looked upon favorably by anyone else, although she had never really regarded it as doing anything wrong.

She went to the window in the office and looked outside, out into the air and on toward the downtown area, some five miles away. It was a beautiful, cloudless midsummer day, obstructed only by a faint hot weather haze that hung in the air. Generally, though, the skyscrapers downtown were very visible, and in a way they almost seemed closer than normal. She had looked at that view many times before, and for some reason the details of the buildings were more noticeable today.

The computer in the office had been turned off. Sometimes the woman who used the office, Grace Kennedy, accidentally left it on, and Iles liked that. It was a small office, and the security elements within the computer system were not sophisticated, but she always worried about whether someone could tell she had turned the computer on after office hours. She didn’t really know much about computer security, but she knew enough to know it was possible for someone to rig a computer like that, either the primary user, or an outside computer expert. It didn’t really seem to matter, though; she had been doing this a while now, and no one had raised a fuss.

She turned on the computer and waited for it to boot up. While she waited, she stood up and looked outside the window again. All the windows in the office fronted the main parking lot for the building, and she could see some individual stragglers heading for their cars five floors below. She always found it peaceful watching people come and go. She had often been in the office long before most people in the building arrived, and had also often been there long after most workers had departed, and she always enjoyed seeing the early arrivals as the morning sun was just beginning to rise, and those leaving late as the sun was fading. It seemed peaceful, almost as if their motions were in slow motion; they seemed to move at less than half the pace of people she encountered at ground level.

As soon as she thought the computer had booted up, she moved quickly back behind the desk. She knew right where to go, clicking on the file directory and scanning through the lengthy list. Kennedy had several Correspondence directories, and Iles always had to go through them all to find what she was looking for. She had seen Kennedy working on what seemed to be a lengthy letter during the past week, and she had been looking for an opportunity to find it. Some of the other employees worked on their own business letters at work as well, but this time Kennedy had quite obviously been in the office well before normal working hours, and had stayed late as well, somewhat unusual for her. The only other times she had done that had usually yielded a letter of some sort.

Iles had not yet learned how to get into Kennedy’s e-mail. She had thought about it and thought about it, but she simply was not computer-savvy enough to gain entry there. She knew there must be a way, and had wondered if she could find someone, an outside person, to help her with that task. But as much as she had thought about it, she had taken no action. In a way, because of that, what she was doing seemed almost harmless.

She clicked on a subdirectory marked Personal. She began to scan the letters, and immediately most of the names of them looked familiar; she had been through them often enough. Nothing new jumped out at her, so she clicked to sort them by date, a technique she used often in this task. Nothing newer than two weeks old, which seemed puzzling.

She went to another subdirectory named Documents II, in which she had found personal letters in the past. However, she found the same thing as in the Personal directory. She recognized many of the file names, but there were no recent files.

Iles began to move through the remaining Correspondence directories, occasionally checking the time on her phone. Kennedy utilized a variety of Correspondence directories for business-related files, so Iles sorted them by date and tried to work quickly through those dated within the last week or so. However, all the letters seemed to be business-related, and after about twenty minutes, she began to grow frustrated. It was very like her, if she thought she was on the right track, to be enthusiastic about her mission, to move quickly and efficiently and purposefully toward the goal. But sometimes even the slightest sense of failure discouraged her and overly frustrated her, and she felt that sense coming on quickly.

She sorted all the directories by date, but nothing jumped out at her that would be relevant. She looked under the C directory but found no files that could be personal. She clicked on the download folder, the photos folder, and other folders that had any name that might indicate files of a personal nature, but still found nothing. Finally, she threw up her hands, turning from the computer to the desktop, and letting her right hand smack down hard upon it. The noise of it surprised her, and she seemed to come back to reality.

She thought about shutting down the computer. She had taken a good stab at finding whatever it was she was looking for, and hadn’t been successful; perhaps she needed to break for the evening and pick it up again another night. Perhaps Kennedy had simply deleted whatever she had written, or hadn’t even saved a copy.

But first, Iles needed to make certain that the various directories were re-sorted by name, the way she had found them; otherwise, Kennedy might notice that something was amiss, although it probably was unlikely. She began to re-click on the various correspondence directories and subdirectories, and the other personal directories, re-sorting the files within slowly and deliberately. As she did so, she tried to think again of anything she might have missed.

She heard the sound of the main office door opening down the hall. She started, but quickly assumed