Kelly was nervous but she didn't show it. She had a habit, her whole life, of taking those kinds of feelings and locking them into a corner of her mind. Her mother told her once that she could get through any moment in life, no matter how hard, by keeping the hard emotions aside for later. Don't pretend they aren't there, Elaine had said. Just keep them aside for when you can manage them privately. Just picture a box inside your head. Close your eyes, breathe slowly, and imagine putting those feelings into the box. Then close it tight, and let it wait.
Kelly did that now. She was standing outside her dead father's office. It was in Mary Street, above other small offices. It was the regional outpost of the company her father worked for. It was for him and one other man, an engineer called Mark. They shared a secretary. Her name was Roberta Greene and she was the kind of person who seemed to be built entirely from things other people had said about her. They said she was reliable, and so she was. They said she was a good typist with a good phone manner, and who was loyal to her employer. Roberta was the kind of person who took those snippets of information that other people had assigned to her, and absorbed them entirely, as though via osmosis, and they became who she was. But it always seemed as though there was nothing else to her. No real person there. Roberta had huge, curly hair, and enormous glasses that made her look like an owl. She wore non-descript clothing and sensible shoes and never, ever missed a single day of work. She managed Greg and Mark's calendars, she made their appointments and booked their flights and kept the coffee machine working. She was part of the furniture in that office, and Kelly readied herself to face the woman now. Kelly stood in the air-conditioning of the building, wondering why they were cooling the building in August when the weather really could not be described as hot. Resolutely, she locked the nervous feelings away. This was her father's office, and he was dead. She was here to get his things. Kelly knew Greg had kept pictures of his family on his desk. It was the best pretence she could think of. Really, she wasn't looking for his personal effects. She was looking for the tapes. She knew they had to be here. Kelly had pulled the garage apart and found nothing. She knew her father's secretive tapes of their home had to be here. There was nowhere else they could be, nowhere else that he could keep things and no one would question what it was. Roberta wouldn't question. She was the kind of secretary who prided themselves on being a strange kind of mother figure to her bosses. Reliable Roberta, who would never give away their secrets.
Kelly pushed the door open. It was a glass swing door, and it was heavy. She struggled for a moment, then shoved the thing as hard as she could. A little dinging sound went off, and Roberta appeared as though summoned, from the little kitchen, into the front desk area.
"Miss Wrigley?"
"Kelly."
There was a moment of awkward silence. Kelly couldn't tell if Roberta had any feelings at all about her presence there. The woman was holding a cup of coffee in her hands, and she walked over to the reception desk. It was immaculate as always, and Roberta seemed somehow driven to put the desk between her and the teenage girl who had appeared uninvited in the office an engineering firm at two in the afternoon. On a school day.
"Shouldn't you be in school?"
"I was, but I really wanted to come and get dad's things from his office. I know he had photos and little things and I think my mum will want them."
Roberta's face softened. She nodded silently and then tipped her head towards Greg's office, off to the right of the reception area.
"You can go in. Just don't touch anything that's not his personal things, Mark is still going through the paperwork to figure out where all your dad's jobs are up to and it's all sorted into date order right now."
Kelly had no interest in the paperwork, and she shuffled quietly into Greg's office. As she closed the door behind her, the hair on the back of Kelly's neck stood up. Goosebumps rose up and down her arms, her stomach began to cramp. She stopped, and leaned against the wooden door of Greg's office. She let her head rest on the cool surface, and breathed as deeply as she could, focusing on the smell of wood polish and air conditioning and the vanilla air freshener that sat on the bookcase to her left.
