License to Shop (16 page)

“
I still can’t believe
she’s your mother, Molly.” Norma didn’t mean her disbelief as an
insult, I was sure. So why did it feel like one.

“
I have the same problem,”
I admitted.

Norma laughed. “She’s a
driven woman, while you’re so laid-back.”

“
Lazy you
mean?”

Norma shook her head. “Of
course not. You do so much. You work on the PTA, co-lead the
Brownie troop, take good care of your family.”

“
I just wish I was
slightly more organized. Life would be easier.”

Norma’s eyebrows raised.
“You think so? I think that’s the Hands-On Homemaker effect.
Thinking if you just figure out the right structure, life will be
easy.” She looked at Team Volcano. “Easy is beyond me. I’m just
content to let life be interesting.”

The Hands-On Homemaker
effect? That sounded right. “Interesting? Yes, it is that. I’m
going to have to think about that,” I said skeptically, as I left
Anna happily daubing, sure that she was as safe as any child can be
who’s running full tilt at a play experience that was actually
learning-in-disguise.

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN

The Spy Who
Came In From the Suburbs

Moms know what calm-before-the-storm means at
least as well as veteran sailors do. It’s the look on a sleeping
infant’s face right before hunger hits her tiny belly. The angelic
smile of a toddler right before he’s told “No.”

Moms learn to read the
calm and start buckling in for the storm.

My first back-to-work
morning went surprisingly well. The alarm went off and I hit the
shower instead of the snooze button.

The kids woke up and
dressed without complaint.

Everyone made their
breakfast, cleaned up, and was ready to go on time.

Seth had never learned to
read the calm and dread the storm. He came in from taking Jasmine
for a quick walk and beamed at the sight of us all, backpacks
packed, ready to go.

“
Doesn’t your mom look
like she’s going to rock the job?” he said to the kids.

Ryan shrugged, but Anna
said, “Mom, you look beautiful. Your boss will have to give you the
job for real. I just know it.”

“
Absolutely, Anna,” Seth
agreed. He took my hand and twirled me around the kitchen, dipped
me, kissed me, and whispered, “This is going to work out perfectly,
Molly.”

I wondered if I should
tell him about the FBI? About my secret assignment? I wanted to,
but that would be cowardly. It would put him in an untenable
situation.

Even though my gut told me
this was the calm and I should be buckling down for the storm soon
to come, I ignored it and pretended that my going back to work
would makes things run more smoothly, not less. No need to borrow
trouble, if it was likely already coming my way.

“
Want to drive in with
me?” Seth asked.

I looked at the puppy and
— feeling guilty — vetoed that idea. Dog hair all over me was not
going to be a look that impressed Dr. Stubbs, I was
certain.

Besides, I had an ulterior
motive that was making me feel very, very guilty, besides the guilt
from not telling him about my spy duty.

I wanted him to take the
kids to school on his way to work. This was the last week of
classes for him, I knew. Next week was finals. If I got the
permanent job, and needed him to take the kids, his schedule should
permit it.

This week, though, I
needed to make the best impression possible. “Why don’t you take
the kids today,” I countered. “That way I can get in and do all the
HR paperwork I have to do before it’s time to start. I’ll have a
gold star on my chart first thing.”

Anna piped up, “They give
you gold stars at work, Mom?”

Seth laughed. “Not real
ones, honey, just imaginary ones.”

“
That’s not fair!” Anna
said.

“
You’re right.” I agreed.
And then I looked at Seth, who was trying to decide if he wanted to
change his morning routine. He didn’t know I knew he picked up a
breakfast sandwich on his way to work. Taking the kids would make
it harder for him to do that.

He nodded, unable to
dispute my need to earn as many imaginary gold stars in the temp
job this week as I could. “Okay.” And then he added, “But I have a
7:30 meeting tomorrow, so I won’t be able to take the kids in
then.”

Of course he wouldn’t. I
made a mental note to see if Kecia knew how flexible Dr. Stubbs was
about the job start time. And then I prayed that Penny was having
the same kind of childcare issues I was dealing with.

And then I left the house
without the kids, the dog, or a schedule of mystery shops to
perform. Except, of course, the ultimate mystery shop — to spy out
what Robert Quartermaine had been doing before he was
murdered.

Instead of being a
whirling dervish, I was about to be pinned to an office for an
entire eight-hour period. It felt extremely odd, a little grown up,
and a lot scary.

I dealt with the paperwork at HR swiftly, got my
temporary parking pass, and found a parking space in a lot close to
the Admissions building. I had a tiny hope I would be early enough
to be able to do a little spy-related snooping about Robert
Quartermaine, but Kecia was already at her desk when I arrived.
Penny had come in ahead of me, and was sitting in the waiting
area.

Kecia smiled at us and
said, “Dr. Stubbs doesn’t usually arrive until 9 or 9:30, so she
asked me to get you two started.”

Penny jumped to her feet.
“Great. I’m ready, willing, and able.”

I contemplated trying to
match her enthusiasm, but settled for understated interest. “Dr.
Stubbs mentioned a big event next week, right?”

“
Yes. This is the time of
the year when we start recruiting the top Maine juniors very
heavily, and all the seniors who still haven’t decided on a
university yet.”

“
Before they can sign on
with Harvard or Yale or MIT,” I added. “My husband’s department is
always courting students this time of year, too.”

“
Courting,” Penny said,
with a smile I couldn’t interpret. “What a quaint word for
it.”

Kecia came to my defense.
“Quaint, but quite accurate, as you’ll see.” She looked around the
quiet office. “The Assistant Director, and most of the counselors,
are away this week, doing recruitment directly in the high schools.
Next week, everyone will be back and this place will be a
zoo.”

“
So we’re going to help
with the courtship preparations? What does that entail?” Penny
asked.

“
In order to keep up with
our competition, we need to know everything we can about the
students before they arrive here for the courtship
phase.”

“
Everything? That sounds a
little scary,” Penny joked.

Kecia smiled. “The digital
age has made the research easier, although it has also added in
some interesting twists and turns to the kinds of data we get, as
Rob is fond of saying.”

She blinked and fell
silent, as if hearing her use of the present tense and then
realizing all over again that Robert Quartermaine was gone for
good.

She said, quietly, “His
shoes will be hard to fill. He could mesmerize a single student —
or entertain a room full of high school juniors. He always seemed
to know exactly what to say or do to get the results he
wanted.”

Except for when he was
face-to-face with his murderer, I thought. “We could start a
singing group called The Three Temps,” I joked, to lighten the
mood. “That might keep them entertained.”

“
I’m afraid what Dr.
Stubbs wants you two to do falls more under the classification of
reading group than singing group,” Kecia corrected me with a
grateful smile, as she put the issue of Robert Quartermaine’s
absence behind her.

She led us to two desks in
a large open space, surrounded by a ring of small offices with
their doors closed. We were out of sight of the public area. Two
huge monitors rose up on the desks. When Kecia turned them on, the
room instantly got a degree warmer.

“
We have a large group of
Maine high school students coming to tour the campus and talk to us
next week. We need to identify the top kids, and—she smiled at me
—court them when they’re here.”

“
Court them how?” Penny
asked. I was glad she’d asked the first question. Not to mention
the question I’d wanted to ask myself.

“
The best and brightest go
out of state. Dr. Stubbs wants to reverse that trend,” Kecia
explained. “Her secret weapon was going to be Robert
Quartermaine.”

Penny and I had identical
reactions. We smiled at the thought of the charming Robert, and
then frowned at the thought of his death.

It was not going to be
easy to banish him from the office. “I could see the effect he
might have on the young women considering the university,” I
admitted. “But surely his charm couldn’t persuade the young
men?”

Kecia shrugged. “Dr.
Stubbs thought his charm could move mountains. But he wasn’t going
to do it alone. He was going to identify the pivot points for the
top students, and flag them for all the Admissions counselors, so
everyone would be working with the best information on the
individual students they possibly could have.”

I admit to feeling some
relief that I wasn’t going to be expected to convince a roomful of
students to come to this university over all their other choices. I
was only a temp, after all. For now. “He must have already flagged
a lot of files,” I said hopefully. “The event is next
week.”

Kecia nodded. “I’m sure he
did. But his backpack—and all his notes—was stolen when he was…when
he was killed. You’ll have to start from scratch.”

No wonder Dr. Stubbs had
decided to turn two job candidates into temp workers for the week.
With most of the counselors away, and Robert Quartermaine’s
backpack gone…I wondered if James Connery knew about that? I made a
mental note to ask him.

Penny looked at the
monitors. “So, exactly what do we do?”

Kecia handed us each a
stack of folders. “Penny, you go through this stack, and discover
everything you can about these top twenty prospects whose last
names begin with A-M.”

She turned to me. “Molly,
you do the same for those whose last names begin with
N-Z.”

“
How would Robert have
done that? Can you give us a hint?”

She ran her fingertips
lightly across the butterfly tattoo at her wrist as she thought
about it. Then, at last, she said, “Rob had been going over these
files, stalking people on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, SnapChat,
you name it.”

She pointed to the files.
“He printed out a few things, but most of it was on his laptop,
which was in his backpack. So you’re going to have to do a lot of
recreating, I’m afraid.”

“
Ah.” We sat,
understanding our job, now.

As Kecia waited for us to
ask the — no doubt — myriad questions that were crowding in our
minds, I said simply, “We have to do the work he took months to do
in less than a week,”

Kecia nodded. “Dr. Stubbs
is expecting miracles. Dr. Stubbs always expects
miracles.”

Penny asked, “Did he back
up his laptop data, by any chance?”

Good question. Everyone
who used a computer knew you should back up your data, but
generally no one did it until they’d been hit by a catastrophic
data loss, or two. It was worth looking into.

Kecia shook her head. “Not
that we know of.” She smiled ruefully as she delivered the last bit
of bad news. “It won’t make it any easier that the office will
close for a few hours for his memorial service.”

I had a jolt of memory of
the smiling young man who’d interviewed me. Could he really be dead
and gone? Was all that was left of him his memorial service, and
the need to find out who had murdered him? I wondered if I’d see
James Connery at the service?

In theory, what James
Connery had asked me to do seemed daunting. In practice, it seemed
impossible. How was I going to find the information he was looking
for when neither of us knew what it was? Where would I even
begin?

I glanced toward the
office door with Robert Quartermaine’s nameplate still on it. Soon,
someone would slide it off and put one with Penny’s or my name on
it. But right now it was still his office.

I’d have to look around
and see if the FBI had missed a thumb drive of back up data. It
wasn’t likely, but if I found it, I’d make myself, Dr. Stubbs, and
James Connery happy. That trifecta of joy was worth spending a
little of my lunch hour pursuing.

I took the first folder off my stack, and
started. This wasn’t really all that different from a mystery shop,
I supposed. Or an undercover spy job, when it came right down to
it.

By lunchtime, I was
bleary-eyed and had only managed to make notes in three folders. I
wasn’t certain I knew what kind of things to flag — what would make
a student want to come to the university. Probably not the
academics, sadly.