![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Daily wordcount: 2,137
Total wordcount: 14,684
On/off target: -8,654
Okay, a better day, though I was aiming for 4,000 to make up for yesterday. I ran out of steam and couldn't motivate myself, plus I have no frickin' clue where this story is going...
I was browsing the internet, looking for job openings, when Steve popped in. He looked delighted at the array of food I had spread out over the kitchen counters, but his expression switched to concern when he saw my face. And the uncharacteristically untouched glass of wine on the table.
“What’s wrong?” He asked.
“I’m in an impossible situation at work, and I’m trying to decide if I can bluff my way through it, or if it would just be best to punt and find a new job. There’s a few leads out there, though the commute would be terrible. I don’t really want to move, I like this place, but I also don’t want to drive an hour each way every day.” I set the laptop on the table and flopped back into the couch.
“Nothing is impossible,” he said brightly. “Come in to the kitchen and tell me all about it while I chop up the vegetables. This looked like the ingredients for stir fry?”
“Yeah, I was kinda in the mood for Chinese,” I said, grabbing my wine and following him into the kitchen. “But if there’s something else you’d rather make with it, I’m fine with that, too.”
“Stir fry is great, I can work with that. Now, tell me this impossible situation you find yourself in.”
I told him the story about the merger and the paperwork, leaving out the part about finding the summoning book in the box. I did confess to taking the paperwork home, obviously, as there were still several boxes stacked in the corner of the room, but said I hadn’t found anything of interest in them that would help point me in the direction of the wayward Evan Burke. Which was completely true. I pulled the paperwork I’d gotten from his lawyer out of my bag and spread it on the breakfast bar.
“So it seems like my hunch about him tracking down an antique might be both right, but also not right. The messages he left behind definitely indicate he was on the trail of something, but I’m starting to wonder if it’s more of a someone than a something. There’s nothing in the diary entries he highlighted that consistently mention a specific item. You’d think if he way using them as clues to track an item you’d only be interested in the entry if it mentioned the item.”
“Unless it was something you’d simply expect someone to always have on them,” Steve said. “Like a precious piece of jewelry, say, a wedding ring? Then you’d expect that where the person went, the item would go.”
“True, true, and the same could be said for the fact that there is more than one diary, based on the handwriting. I only have the copied pages that he left behind and sent, so presumably he’s finding more diaries and clues wherever he is right now, but without the full book I don’t know who they belong to. If it’s a mother and daughter, say, you could expect something like a heirloom piece of jewelry to be passed down. But that may also indicate that he’s tracking down a lineage. Maybe he caught the genealogy bug.”
I pushed the papers around on the counter, setting them out in order and picking up my pen. I started making notes in a fresh journal. There’s not a lot I enjoy more than starting a fresh journal, something about those crisp new pages is so alluring. Conversely, I also love old, used up journals, and the thing I love about them is the very thing that always makes me initially fall out of love with new journals – the messiness. When I first ‘mess up’ a new journal, I feel like I’ve ruined the pristine beauty of it. But in the old ones, the scribbles, the quirks, the odd colored pens and chicken scratch are what give it such character. What can I say, I’m a walking contradiction.
Steve watched me write as he stirred the vegetables in the pan that could only charitably be called a wok. He had a pensive look on his face, and I didn’t know if it was from my lack of decent cookware, or from the conundrum I had posed. If he was going to stick around, even for a few weeks, I might have to invest in some kitchen supplies. Maybe he could even teach me how to cook and clean at the same time, and I wouldn’t hate cooking so much.
“So are you planning on actually going after him?” He asked.
“I still don’t know, but probably not. This is just an exercise in… well, I guess it would be something to show my boss and my boss’s boss to say I tried, if I end up not getting another job. Plus, why not flex the little grey cells a bit?” I chewed on the tip of a finger as a looked at the very scant amount of information I had. While it was true he had just started his journey two weeks previously, and even he had admitted he started with not much, I felt like I was missing something.
“Other than the money issue, is there a reason you wouldn’t want to go?”
“I…” I paused and thought about it. It was hard to take the money out of the equation, what with being on precarious ground with my job, but if it were truly no issue, would I want to go traipsing around the globe, alone, in search of someone? “Yes, I suppose there is. I would rather stay here, where I’m comfortable. I don’t love traveling at the best of times, and certainly not alone. I’d rather wait it out and see what happens.”
“I find it hard to believe that in this day and age he’s completely out of touch,” Steve said.
“I know!” I exclaimed. “My thoughts exactly. And I said as much to his lawyer, who of course had had the same reservations about the whole thing, but apparently Evan Burke explained it as some ‘getting in touch with himself’ and ‘disconnecting’ journey, which I understand for, like, a day, but traveling around Europe? Alone? Maybe it is an exercise in bravery, as well.”
“Or he really doesn’t want people to know what he’s doing.”
“Or that. Maybe this whole diary set is just a made-up smoke screen and he’s actually involved in something nefarious and underworld. You could easily fake the oldness of a piece of paper in a photocopy. Oldness? Antiquity? How do you say that? Never mind, you know what I mean. I can fake age paper and you’d be able to tell if you had the paper, but not so much if you only had a photocopy of the paper. So maybe this isn’t meant to lead us anywhere.”
“So he went from treasure hunter to genealogist to criminal mastermind? That’s quite the leap,” he said. “Or maybe he’s running from the criminal underworld because of a treasure.”
“Or maybe he’s just a crazy, eccentric old coot,” I said with a sigh. “Occam’s Razor and all.”
“That is entirely possible, these days a great deal of humanity is not quite on the rational side of the sanity line. Though this has put me in the mood for a treasure hunting movie, what do you say? Dinner’s ready!”
We got plates of food and retired to the couch, settling in to eat, drink, and watch The Librarian movie trilogy. Since I didn’t have to get up the following morning to go to work, I happily fell asleep curled up on the end of the couch. I’d worry about tomorrow only when I absolutely had to.
And that time came at an ungodly hour the next morning, when my cell phone rang. It jolted me out of a dead sleep, and I struggled to sound awake as I recognized my boss’s number on the screen.
“Hello?”
“Oh, Becca, I’m glad I caught you. There’s been a development, and just in case you go down the same rabbit hole as the… what’s his name, Burns? Whoever, and don’t accept any incoming messages to ‘find enlightenment or whatever, I wanted to give you a message to give to him before you left.” She sounded rushed and out of breath, which was odd for her. They didn’t liken her to an Ice Queen around the office for no reason.
“I have no plans to go completely off-grid, but I’m not up to paying for that kind of roaming cell service, so anything you need to tell me, email me. I’ll check in whenever I find WiFi.”
“That’s good to hear. Anyway, it seems that Melody Birch, of Birch and Tanner, the firm they sold to – oh, Burke, right, Canin and Burke – was found dead last night under some very, very suspicious circumstances.” I heard her rustling some papers, and she covered the mouthpiece of the phone to shoo someone out of her office. Who was already in at… I squinted at the clock… six thirty in the morning?
I tried not to groan as I sat up and stretched. There was the barest hint of dawn outside, so Steve had vanished. I stumbled to the kitchen to make myself some coffee, and found a post-it on the pot that said “just press start”. He’d set it up to brew, and even set out a coffee cup for me. I was really starting to re-think the whole banishing thing.
“Do they suspect Burke? I mean, I know he says he’s out of the country, but people have faked such things before.” As soon as I said it, I cringed inwardly. What an idiot, let’s bring up the exact thing I was planning on doing. Nope, nothing brilliant about that. “Or is it more of a ‘what is going to happen with the merger now’ question, since wasn’t she the managing partner? If I recall, was there even still a Tanner? She was the one who signed everything, so who takes over now?”
“All valid questions, contract-wise, and the police aren’t saying who they suspect. There were rumors that Evan and Melody had a thing, once, but she’s since divorced, anyway, and he was single and it was never proven. Hardly a scandal, barely even gossip.” She cover the phone and shooed another person, or maybe the same person, away again.
“Well, if I find him, or find a way to contact him, I’ll make sure he knows. Unless… wait, do I have to go find him? We can’t get her to sign the new contract, now, so what’s the point of tracking him down?” Brilliant, again, I told myself. I was just starting to look forward to my stay at home vacation, unpaid though it was going to be.
“I was getting to that, you asked who takes over now. You are correct, the Tanner half is long gone, I will give you three guesses as to who is in the paperwork as Melody’s beneficiary.”
I thought about it for a moment. My focus has solely been on the merger portion of the contract we had with Birch and Tanner, but I knew their contract with us covered a lot more. There hadn’t been anything in the records I looked at, as my interest was in what had happened in the past, not future event planning. But, there was only one real reason it could possibly be so interesting right now.
“Even Burke?” I ventured to guess, hoping I was wrong and she was worked up because the person slated to take over the business was a famous person or part of an even bigger corporation.
“Correct. So now, it seems, he has his company back, and hers. I imagine the police will see that as serious motive, and I would really like to get some things buttoned up here before any of that comes tumbling down.”
Of course she was thinking of the firm, and the money the firm was getting. Then again, it’s not like Evan was a personal friend of hers, so what was she supposed to think of? Though in her place, I’d want the firm’s name as far away from a possible murder trial as possible, but she was in the camp of ‘there is no bad publicity’.
“There’s still a very slim chance I can even find him, I spent the night looking through the documents he left behind and I have to tell you, I’m beginning to think this might be a wild goose chase. It doesn’t make any sense, unless it’s just a front to make it seem like he was out of the country.”
“C’mon, you met Evan. Does he seem like the kind of man who could splash someone’s...
Total wordcount: 14,684
On/off target: -8,654
Okay, a better day, though I was aiming for 4,000 to make up for yesterday. I ran out of steam and couldn't motivate myself, plus I have no frickin' clue where this story is going...
I was browsing the internet, looking for job openings, when Steve popped in. He looked delighted at the array of food I had spread out over the kitchen counters, but his expression switched to concern when he saw my face. And the uncharacteristically untouched glass of wine on the table.
“What’s wrong?” He asked.
“I’m in an impossible situation at work, and I’m trying to decide if I can bluff my way through it, or if it would just be best to punt and find a new job. There’s a few leads out there, though the commute would be terrible. I don’t really want to move, I like this place, but I also don’t want to drive an hour each way every day.” I set the laptop on the table and flopped back into the couch.
“Nothing is impossible,” he said brightly. “Come in to the kitchen and tell me all about it while I chop up the vegetables. This looked like the ingredients for stir fry?”
“Yeah, I was kinda in the mood for Chinese,” I said, grabbing my wine and following him into the kitchen. “But if there’s something else you’d rather make with it, I’m fine with that, too.”
“Stir fry is great, I can work with that. Now, tell me this impossible situation you find yourself in.”
I told him the story about the merger and the paperwork, leaving out the part about finding the summoning book in the box. I did confess to taking the paperwork home, obviously, as there were still several boxes stacked in the corner of the room, but said I hadn’t found anything of interest in them that would help point me in the direction of the wayward Evan Burke. Which was completely true. I pulled the paperwork I’d gotten from his lawyer out of my bag and spread it on the breakfast bar.
“So it seems like my hunch about him tracking down an antique might be both right, but also not right. The messages he left behind definitely indicate he was on the trail of something, but I’m starting to wonder if it’s more of a someone than a something. There’s nothing in the diary entries he highlighted that consistently mention a specific item. You’d think if he way using them as clues to track an item you’d only be interested in the entry if it mentioned the item.”
“Unless it was something you’d simply expect someone to always have on them,” Steve said. “Like a precious piece of jewelry, say, a wedding ring? Then you’d expect that where the person went, the item would go.”
“True, true, and the same could be said for the fact that there is more than one diary, based on the handwriting. I only have the copied pages that he left behind and sent, so presumably he’s finding more diaries and clues wherever he is right now, but without the full book I don’t know who they belong to. If it’s a mother and daughter, say, you could expect something like a heirloom piece of jewelry to be passed down. But that may also indicate that he’s tracking down a lineage. Maybe he caught the genealogy bug.”
I pushed the papers around on the counter, setting them out in order and picking up my pen. I started making notes in a fresh journal. There’s not a lot I enjoy more than starting a fresh journal, something about those crisp new pages is so alluring. Conversely, I also love old, used up journals, and the thing I love about them is the very thing that always makes me initially fall out of love with new journals – the messiness. When I first ‘mess up’ a new journal, I feel like I’ve ruined the pristine beauty of it. But in the old ones, the scribbles, the quirks, the odd colored pens and chicken scratch are what give it such character. What can I say, I’m a walking contradiction.
Steve watched me write as he stirred the vegetables in the pan that could only charitably be called a wok. He had a pensive look on his face, and I didn’t know if it was from my lack of decent cookware, or from the conundrum I had posed. If he was going to stick around, even for a few weeks, I might have to invest in some kitchen supplies. Maybe he could even teach me how to cook and clean at the same time, and I wouldn’t hate cooking so much.
“So are you planning on actually going after him?” He asked.
“I still don’t know, but probably not. This is just an exercise in… well, I guess it would be something to show my boss and my boss’s boss to say I tried, if I end up not getting another job. Plus, why not flex the little grey cells a bit?” I chewed on the tip of a finger as a looked at the very scant amount of information I had. While it was true he had just started his journey two weeks previously, and even he had admitted he started with not much, I felt like I was missing something.
“Other than the money issue, is there a reason you wouldn’t want to go?”
“I…” I paused and thought about it. It was hard to take the money out of the equation, what with being on precarious ground with my job, but if it were truly no issue, would I want to go traipsing around the globe, alone, in search of someone? “Yes, I suppose there is. I would rather stay here, where I’m comfortable. I don’t love traveling at the best of times, and certainly not alone. I’d rather wait it out and see what happens.”
“I find it hard to believe that in this day and age he’s completely out of touch,” Steve said.
“I know!” I exclaimed. “My thoughts exactly. And I said as much to his lawyer, who of course had had the same reservations about the whole thing, but apparently Evan Burke explained it as some ‘getting in touch with himself’ and ‘disconnecting’ journey, which I understand for, like, a day, but traveling around Europe? Alone? Maybe it is an exercise in bravery, as well.”
“Or he really doesn’t want people to know what he’s doing.”
“Or that. Maybe this whole diary set is just a made-up smoke screen and he’s actually involved in something nefarious and underworld. You could easily fake the oldness of a piece of paper in a photocopy. Oldness? Antiquity? How do you say that? Never mind, you know what I mean. I can fake age paper and you’d be able to tell if you had the paper, but not so much if you only had a photocopy of the paper. So maybe this isn’t meant to lead us anywhere.”
“So he went from treasure hunter to genealogist to criminal mastermind? That’s quite the leap,” he said. “Or maybe he’s running from the criminal underworld because of a treasure.”
“Or maybe he’s just a crazy, eccentric old coot,” I said with a sigh. “Occam’s Razor and all.”
“That is entirely possible, these days a great deal of humanity is not quite on the rational side of the sanity line. Though this has put me in the mood for a treasure hunting movie, what do you say? Dinner’s ready!”
We got plates of food and retired to the couch, settling in to eat, drink, and watch The Librarian movie trilogy. Since I didn’t have to get up the following morning to go to work, I happily fell asleep curled up on the end of the couch. I’d worry about tomorrow only when I absolutely had to.
And that time came at an ungodly hour the next morning, when my cell phone rang. It jolted me out of a dead sleep, and I struggled to sound awake as I recognized my boss’s number on the screen.
“Hello?”
“Oh, Becca, I’m glad I caught you. There’s been a development, and just in case you go down the same rabbit hole as the… what’s his name, Burns? Whoever, and don’t accept any incoming messages to ‘find enlightenment or whatever, I wanted to give you a message to give to him before you left.” She sounded rushed and out of breath, which was odd for her. They didn’t liken her to an Ice Queen around the office for no reason.
“I have no plans to go completely off-grid, but I’m not up to paying for that kind of roaming cell service, so anything you need to tell me, email me. I’ll check in whenever I find WiFi.”
“That’s good to hear. Anyway, it seems that Melody Birch, of Birch and Tanner, the firm they sold to – oh, Burke, right, Canin and Burke – was found dead last night under some very, very suspicious circumstances.” I heard her rustling some papers, and she covered the mouthpiece of the phone to shoo someone out of her office. Who was already in at… I squinted at the clock… six thirty in the morning?
I tried not to groan as I sat up and stretched. There was the barest hint of dawn outside, so Steve had vanished. I stumbled to the kitchen to make myself some coffee, and found a post-it on the pot that said “just press start”. He’d set it up to brew, and even set out a coffee cup for me. I was really starting to re-think the whole banishing thing.
“Do they suspect Burke? I mean, I know he says he’s out of the country, but people have faked such things before.” As soon as I said it, I cringed inwardly. What an idiot, let’s bring up the exact thing I was planning on doing. Nope, nothing brilliant about that. “Or is it more of a ‘what is going to happen with the merger now’ question, since wasn’t she the managing partner? If I recall, was there even still a Tanner? She was the one who signed everything, so who takes over now?”
“All valid questions, contract-wise, and the police aren’t saying who they suspect. There were rumors that Evan and Melody had a thing, once, but she’s since divorced, anyway, and he was single and it was never proven. Hardly a scandal, barely even gossip.” She cover the phone and shooed another person, or maybe the same person, away again.
“Well, if I find him, or find a way to contact him, I’ll make sure he knows. Unless… wait, do I have to go find him? We can’t get her to sign the new contract, now, so what’s the point of tracking him down?” Brilliant, again, I told myself. I was just starting to look forward to my stay at home vacation, unpaid though it was going to be.
“I was getting to that, you asked who takes over now. You are correct, the Tanner half is long gone, I will give you three guesses as to who is in the paperwork as Melody’s beneficiary.”
I thought about it for a moment. My focus has solely been on the merger portion of the contract we had with Birch and Tanner, but I knew their contract with us covered a lot more. There hadn’t been anything in the records I looked at, as my interest was in what had happened in the past, not future event planning. But, there was only one real reason it could possibly be so interesting right now.
“Even Burke?” I ventured to guess, hoping I was wrong and she was worked up because the person slated to take over the business was a famous person or part of an even bigger corporation.
“Correct. So now, it seems, he has his company back, and hers. I imagine the police will see that as serious motive, and I would really like to get some things buttoned up here before any of that comes tumbling down.”
Of course she was thinking of the firm, and the money the firm was getting. Then again, it’s not like Evan was a personal friend of hers, so what was she supposed to think of? Though in her place, I’d want the firm’s name as far away from a possible murder trial as possible, but she was in the camp of ‘there is no bad publicity’.
“There’s still a very slim chance I can even find him, I spent the night looking through the documents he left behind and I have to tell you, I’m beginning to think this might be a wild goose chase. It doesn’t make any sense, unless it’s just a front to make it seem like he was out of the country.”
“C’mon, you met Evan. Does he seem like the kind of man who could splash someone’s...
Tags: