Old World Murder - Kathleen Ernst [22]
She looked back at the files in her lap, then shut her eyes, suddenly exhausted. Perhaps she’d given up the anti-depressants too soon. She thought of the orange plastic bottle waiting all by its lonesome in her medicine cabinet.
Then she opened her eyes. No, dammit. She’d either make it on her own or cash in her chips. She wasn’t going to live some half-life of psychiatrists and drugs.
So. Chloe glanced at her watch, considering. She really should head back to the Village. She should stop down at the basement of St. Peter’s Church to see how Nika was doing with her retro-fitting plan, and then stop by the Tobler House to assess the furnishings and look at the problematic wallpaper. And she would do both of those things, Chloe promised herself. Just not right this minute. Right this minute what she needed to do was get these frickin’ reproduction request files out of sight.
Leaving the files in tidy stacks, she walked to the maintenance building. The young man who’d come late to work was loading flats of sodas into the back of one of the state trucks. “Hi,” Chloe said as she passed. “My name’s Chloe.”
He looked startled. “Uh, hi. I’m, uh, Rupert.”
“Nice to meet you, Rupert.” She smiled. There. She’d done her bit to even out someone’s bad karma for the day.
She found Stanley leaning back in his chair, feet on his desk, laughing into the telephone. When he saw Chloe he planted his cowboy boots—black today—back on the floor. “I’ll talk to you later,” he muttered into the phone, and hung up.
“Sorry to disturb you, Stan,” Chloe said.
He grinned in a manner she suspected he hoped was sensual. She resisted telling him that his boots and red curls made her think of Howdy-Doody. “You’re not,” he said. “In fact, I’ve been meaning to ask you about something. It seems like somebody took a dislike to my calendar. You know anything about that?”
“Not a thing,” she lied calmly.
“I figured it must have been someone who wasn’t gettin’ any.”
Chloe had to unclench her teeth before speaking. “I need some empty cardboard boxes. You got any around here?”
“Sure, doll. Big stack out back.”
She smiled sweetly. “You may not call me ‘doll.’ ‘Chloe’ works just fine.”
Stan shrugged and laced his fingers over his big belly. “Well, saw-ree.”
“I’ll go grab those boxes, then,” Chloe said. “Thanks.” Asshole.
After stuffing the reproduction request files into two cartons, she folded the flaps in and dumped them into the trunk of her car. They could wait until she had the time and energy to tackle them.
Inside the pink trailer, she shuffled through her orientation file until she found the phone list she’d been given. Then she dialed a Madison number.
Old World Wisconsin was only one of a handful of historic sites owned and maintained by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. The historic sites division consisted of a division administrator and a collections curator. The division curator, a woman named Leila, answered her phone on the first ring.
“I’m sorry I haven’t called or been out to welcome you,” she said when Chloe identified herself. “We had some flooding at Villa Louis, so I’ve been helping out there.”
“That’s all right. I did want to check in, though. I’m compiling quite a list of supplies I need. Also, my intern is creating artifact storage in the basement of St. Peter’s church. It’ll be a stop-gap, I know, but a good start until we get a permanent collections storage facility.”
“Mail me your list,” Leila said promptly. “I’ve been holding a pot of money aside for you, and I have some basic supplies earmarked too.”
Chloe raised her eyebrows, pleasantly surprised. “Will do. Can I fax