Sinister: A Paranormal Fantasy (Sinisters Book 1) (9 page)

“We need to hide.” A wooden door led off of the bathroom. He strode over and tugged at the handle to reveal a tiny closet, with just enough room for one person or two if they squeezed in.

“You two go in here. I’ll hide under the desk,” Matt ordered.

“What about the lights?” Oliver finally spoke, the words tumbling one on top of another in their haste to get out.

“We have to leave them on. People forget to turn lights off, but if someone sees them flip off on their own, they’re not going to believe this place is empty. Get in! I’ll shut the door behind you.”

As soon as Anna and Oliver were tucked between the soaps and towels, Matt forced the door closed and raced to the main office, sliding under the desk. He could hear footsteps by now, heading directly toward him. He adjusted the chair slightly so it hid his body, then held his breath. The footsteps stopped just inside Caracalla’s door.

After what seemed like an eternity, the footsteps started again, but not heading away as Matt had hoped. They were walking towards the bathroom—which Oliver had left in complete disarray. All he could do was pray that whoever was walking around didn’t know what the bathroom normally looked like.

The footsteps stopped again, and Matt imagined the person was surveying the mess. He could feel the adrenaline pumping through his body now that the need for action was over, and he suddenly became aware of an uncontrollable tickle in his nose. He fought the feeling, but the need to sneeze was becoming overwhelming. Pinching his nostrils together with his fingers, he hoped the person would leave soon.

The soft pad of footfalls started again, and Matt had never been happier to hear that noise. He heard a light switch flip and was plunged into darkness. The steps continued out the door, and he let out the breath he’d been holding, which triggered the sneeze he’d been keeping in. His hand muffled it, but he still heard the footsteps falter and cursed himself. He could imagine the person, standing in the hallway, trying to figure out what he'd just heard. Was it a person, or just the creaks of a building? Should he go back?

Matt held his breath, ears straining for any sound. The footsteps started again, and for a second he couldn't tell if they were coming back or going away. After a second, he realized the noise was fading. He didn’t move a muscle until he heard the stairwell door close, then he let out the breath he'd been holding. He could feel his arms trembling as he pushed back the chair and peered around the desk.

The room looked empty, and Matt cautiously stood up, stretching to relieve the tension. He released Oliver and Anna, who looked cramped and shaken from the experience.

“Thank God,” Oliver whispered.

Matt nodded fervently. “Can you clean this up, Oliver?” He gestured to the drawers spewing their contents like mini-volcanoes of toiletries.

"Clean that up?" Oliver pointed at the mess but made no move toward it.

Matt rolled his eyes. Even if Oliver was the biggest slob in the world, he had to see that the place looked like a tornado had ripped through it. Caracalla was definitely going to notice.

"It was like that when I got here."

"Seriously?" It made no sense. The rest of the office was spotless. Whoever had taken the time to organize even the pencils on the desk into straight lines wouldn't have been able to resist putting the soap back into the drawer. What would someone be searching for in a bathroom? And for that matter, who?

Matt walked back to the main office, his thoughts still on the mess in the bathroom as he collapsed in the desk chair. His legs shook from nerves as he pieced through the information. Someone had searched the bathroom, but apparently left the office itself intact. Was that a clue? And had the person found what they were looking for?

Someone else is here right now
, he reminded himself. The mess in the bathroom was puzzling, but it was more pressing to search for other clues and get out of the place as soon as possible. He wouldn’t be able to turn the lights on again. The guard, or whoever was walking around, would instantly know someone was here if they saw this office lit up again. There was plenty of light streaming in the glass walls from the square, though, so he could still see enough to do a search.

Though he didn’t expect the computer to easily yield its secrets, Matt still tapped at the keyboard. He was unsurprised when faced with the Windows login screen. He had taken a few computer science classes and actually enjoyed programming, but unfortunately, his classes didn’t teach him anything illegal.

“You don’t happen to know how to hack into computers, do you?” he asked Anna. Even knowing the floor was empty, he couldn’t help but whisper.

Anna looked up from the filing cabinet she was pawing through and shook her head apologetically. Matt shrugged. He hadn’t really expected her to.

He turned his attention to the drawers. There were three on either side of him, one small one at the top and two larger ones below. Each one had a small silver lock in the center, and when he tugged at the handle of the first, he found it sealed. Calling Oliver over, he pointed out the problem.

“He’s a paranoid fellow, inn’t he? He’s locked all the filing cabinet drawers as well, and even one in the bathroom with nothing in it but soap. I'd wager the rest were locked before—”

He waved a hand back at the mess as he bent over the drawers. Since he didn’t seem to expect an answer, Matt let him work in silence, his thoughts elsewhere. A minute later, the top drawer popped open.

“I’ll do the other side so you can look through this.” Oliver moved around the chair Matt occupied and started in.

Matt extended the drawer to its full length. The contents were sparse; it contained only a notepad and a phone charger. He picked up the notepad and began to leaf through it, looking for anything that resembled the diagrams on the bathroom floor. The dim light made it hard to read, but he soon realized it didn’t matter. All the pages were blank. He tossed the notebook back and turned to his left.

The first two drawers were open, but Oliver was still wiggling a pick in the bottom drawer’s lock. And chewing. Matt narrowed his eyes at his partner in crime.

Feeling Matt’s eyes, Oliver looked up.

“What?” he asked, the innocent tone in his voice slightly muffled.

Matt could definitely smell pistachios. “Tell me you didn’t come over here and steal a bunch of nuts off Caracalla’s desk. Because that could be a pretty big indication that someone was in here. Especially if the shells are lying all over.”

“Okay, I didn’t.” Oliver grinned at him, and bits of nut were still visible in his teeth.

Matt shook his head, baffled that Anna’s cousin could be so casual about their burglary. Oliver returned to work. A second later, the lock gave and the pistachio thief pulled that drawer open as well. Matt began to investigate the contents. The top drawer on this side was empty, so he skipped over it and began in the middle. He saw with dismay that this drawer was filled with reams of paper, stacked sideways to fit as many sheets in as possible. There was no chance of going through all of that. He started to wonder if they were going to get anything useful out of this trip. The symbols on the floor had given them proof that Caracalla was doing something strange, but they’d already known that. What they needed was details on what exactly he was doing.

With a sigh, he started flipping through the papers, looking for the symbols he’d seen earlier. Most of the papers appeared related to the company; Matt caught the words “election” and “usage agreement” on quite a few. He’d gotten about halfway through the drawer when he saw the word “confidential” emblazoned across the t op of a sheet. He slipped the paper and its stapled companions out of its slot.

The pages appeared to be a contract providing software for the election. No surprise there; that made it into the local news at least a few times a week in Madison. It had been the first thing that came to Matt’s mind when Luke asked if he knew who Caracalla was. Matt struggled to read through the legal gibberish, skipping the words that looked Latin. Even skipping every fifth word, he grasped the concept of the sheets. Matt let out a whistle. He’d known that VoTech was providing the election software for the gubernatorial election, but he hadn’t realized the contract wasn’t confined to Dane County. Caracalla had somehow managed to get a contract to provide software for the entire state's election, down to every tiny village. He supposed it made sense; why spend the money on software if you weren't going to use it everywhere? Still, he thought they would test it out first before just installing it. He tried to remember the day they’d talked about the election in his political science class. VoTech had, of course, come up, but he didn't remember Mr. Rodney saying anything about it being in use before this election. Dean might remember more details, but Matt thought it unlikely. Matt found politics fascinating and actually paid attention in that one class, but Dean was usually doodling soccer balls on his notebook.

"Whatcha looking at?” A chirpy voice asked behind him.

He jumped guiltily. Anna had clearly finished in the filing cabinets and was peering over his shoulder, trying to read the pages he held. He’d been so absorbed in his thoughts he hadn’t heard her walk up.

“It’s the contract for the election on Tuesday. I got nosy,” he said, chagrined.

“And here I thought you were trying to find out what nefarious misdeeds Caracalla’s up to. That,” she said, waving her hand at the paper, “is perfectly legal.”

Matt hurriedly stuffed the contract back into its place. “Can you look in the bottom two drawers over there? I haven’t gotten to them yet.”

She set to work, and he returned to his task. A brief scan of the remaining pages convinced him they were all company contracts, so he moved on to drawer number three.

This drawer contained a tablet, which he quickly confirmed was password protected, and a box of tissues. He let out a frustrated groan. Unless Anna had found something, this trip was turning out to be a complete waste of time.

Matt started to slide the drawers back into place and froze, his hand on the top drawer. He pulled it out as far as it would go and looked down at the gaping drawer below it. A smile started to creep across his face. Maybe this wouldn’t be a waste after all.

“Guys, look at this,” he said.

The two hurried over, and he gestured at the desk. Anna looked baffled, but Oliver clapped him on the back. “Brilliant. Let’s take it out and see what’s back there.”

Matt found the catches on the bottom of the drawer and pushed them up, allowing him to slide the drawer off the gliders and out of the desk. As he did so, he explained to Anna: “The top drawer is about three inches shorter than the other two, even though on the other side it’s the same. And, when I pulled on it, it felt like it was getting caught by something. I think there’s something behind the wood at the back here.”

The drawer sprang free, revealing the true back. Between the end of the drawer and a piece of plywood, there were about three square inches stuffed with miscellanea. He carefully lowered the drawer to the floor.

Oliver grabbed hold of a small, leather-bound book whose cover was the same color as the bathroom tiles. The removal of the book unbalanced the rest of the drawer’s contents, and the objects fell. A piece of chalk clattered out of the handkerchief it had been wrapped in, leaving a mark on the wood. Matt reached for the other two items still in the drawer.

His right hand held a six-inch ruler that appeared to really be just a plain ruler, no matter how carefully he studied it. In his left, he clutched a thumbnail-sized piece of metal. It resembled a crescent moon with the ends twisted inward. He could see a gouge on one side, and the inside of the crescent contained prongs that looked as though they had been attached to something at one point. A piece of black string extended from the middle of the moon. He let the metal part drop and held the object by the string, watching in fascination as it lazily oscillated. Light caught the planes of the moon, reflecting into his eyes, and he had a brief idea that it had, at some point, curved more. When he tried to figure out where he'd seen it before, the memory slipped away like water.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked.

Anna shrugged, which Oliver mimicked without looking up from the book. Matt wasn’t sure he’d actually heard the question, but set the objects down anyway. He was also more interested in what secrets Caracalla was hiding in the book. He walked behind Oliver to peer over his shoulder.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Oliver said, forehead crinkling. “It just looks like…maths.” He held the book out to Matt, who eagerly accepted it, holding it close to his face to peer at the writing. The first page was mostly scribbles, with “SIN” boldly decorating one corner. Whose sins? Matt wondered. The second page resembled a shopping list, with brief phrases on each line, but if that was what it was, Caracalla had strange shopping habits. It read:

Metal

Infinity

Principia Mathematica

Sch
rӧ
dinger’s Equation

He flipped to the next page, hoping for more details on the list, and found instead what looked to be a complex mathematical equation. It began with an elongated S and stretched across the entire page, m’s and r’s dotting the spaces.

“It’s math,” Matt breathed as the realization hit him.

“O’ course it’s maths, I said that already,” Oliver replied, speaking as one might to a particularly slow child.

Matt looked up from the book. “Not this, the writing on the floor. It was a math equation of some sort, but it’s mostly been erased. And the half square isn’t a square, it’s a graph. The x and y axes.”

Anna leapt up. "You're right! But what does it mean?" She caught her lip between her teeth as she considered. “And why is Caracalla doing math on his bathroom floor?”

Matt shrugged, completely baffled. He’d thought this trip would provide answers, but he was more confused than ever. Somewhere nearby a furnace kicked on, startling in the silence, and he realized how late it had become. He ripped a page out of the blank notebook he’d first found, careful to remove any betraying tufts of paper that stuck in the wire rings, and hastily copied the equation and list. The small group reassembled the hodge-podge in the secret compartment as best as they could and returned the drawers to their places. Oliver re-locked them while the other two did a quick sweep of the office to ensure they hadn’t left any obvious traces. Matt hoped that since they hadn’t taken anything—except a couple pistachios— Caracalla would have no reason to notice someone had searched his belongings.