Considering that the subway that evening sounded like a tuberculosis sanitarium, I expected to get home and find my roommates lying on the sofa with boxes of tissues. Instead, they were in perfect health. “Are y’all dealing with the plague at work?” I asked as we ate dinner.
“Are you talking about whatever Rod has?” Marcia asked.
“Yeah, it’s going through the company like wildfire. Is that happening at your offices?”
They looked at each other. “A couple of the designers have been out sick,” Gemma said.
“At my firm, people come to work when they’re clinically dead,” Marcia said with a sigh. “And that means we all catch whatever they’ve got, so then we have to drag ourselves off our deathbeds to go to work.” She glared at me. “You’d better not catch your office plague and bring it home to us.”
“So far, I don’t have so much as a sniffle,” I reassured them.
The subway was practically sedate and much less crowded than usual the next morning. The people struck down by the flu must have all stayed home. “Hey, you made it!” Sam said in greeting as I approached the office building. “It’s a good thing you look healthy. You may end up running the place.”
“Is it that bad?”
“When Palmer calls in sick, that generally means we need to send the coroner out to his place, and anyone weaker has already fallen.”
Perdita was still out, and the sales department was like a ghost town. Rina was out, as well, so I didn’t know where she was on handling the party side of the event. I went through my checklist for the conference, but nobody I needed was in the office, so I created a new checklist to see what had already been done and what needed doing. Most of it would come down to the last minute in conjuring tents and protective barriers, food, and decorations. That meant I was sunk if people weren’t well within a week. I reminded myself that the worst flu I’d ever had lasted a week. I was weak for a while after that, but I was functional.
Of course, with my luck, everyone else would be well by then, and I’d succumb to the illness the day before the conference. Then we’d be left in Perdita’s capable hands.
And then we’d be doomed.
I found some hand sanitizer in my tote bag and rubbed it on my hands, then popped a vitamin C lozenge in my mouth. I wondered if putting on a surgical mask would be overkill.
When I still hadn’t heard from anyone by lunchtime, I ventured out into the corridors. It was like something out of a science fiction movie, with me as the only survivor of a terrible plague, left alone in the ruins of civilization.
With a growing sense of worry, I hurried up to the executive suite. Kim sat at Trix’s desk, looking reasonably healthy. “The boss is sick,” she said. “He’s not seeing anyone.”
Flu was supposed to be particularly dangerous for the elderly, and they didn’t get much more elderly than Merlin. My stomach did a flip. “Have the healers seen him?”
“They’re keeping an eye on him, but he insists he’s got a potion that will cure anything.” She gave a sneaky glance around the office suite, then gestured me forward and whispered, “I haven’t seen you know who in days. Don’t you think that’s suspicious?”
I wondered if that was how I sounded to Owen and understood why he’d snapped at me. “Maybe he’s sick like everyone else,” I suggested.
“Maybe. But he could be going to all the meetings that the boss is missing.”
“Is he missing a lot?”
“Not really,” she admitted sheepishly. “Most people are canceling because they’re sick.”
“You and I must be the last ones standing.”
I wasn’t sure I liked the gleam that came into her eyes. “We’ll be running the company soon.” I’d have bet money that she’d be sitting at Merlin’s desk by the end of the day.
I was on the way back to my office when it occurred to me that with Owen out, this was the perfect chance to look at his reference books. I could find out what really happened the last time, what Ramsay had done then, and if history might be repeating itself.
Chapter Nine
When I got to the R&D department, I was stymied. That department was secured. Owen usually anticipated my arrival and opened the door for me, but the point of this visit was that Owen wasn’t there, so that wouldn’t work.
I settled for the tried-and-true strategy of hanging around and waiting for someone else to either come or go and open the door. Anyone who worked in that department would have seen me around often enough to be willing to let me in. After all, I rationalized, if I told Merlin I needed to get something from Owen’s office, he’d surely give me access. I just didn’t want to disturb Merlin when he was sick or get him involved in this yet.
