Read Online A Stiff Critique by Jaqueline Girdner - Free Book Online

into C.C.’s bowl with an old pie server.
    Judy was my senior warehousewoman. I hoped nothing was wrong. “I didn’t want to call from work yesterday,” she said, “but I thought I’d call from home. Jean’s brother came in yesterday to hassle her. Right after you left. He’s this born-again geek and he’s real uptight about their parents getting a divorce. I mean, more than Jean even! Jeez, what a jerk! Got Jean all uptight again. She even managed to screw up the big order for the chiropractor’s convention.” There was a pause, then Judy finished cheerfully, “Just thought you’d want to know.”
    “Thank you for sharing,” I told the machine.
    C.C. looked up at me suspiciously. She must have caught the sarcasm in my tone. Then she looked back down and pulled a chunk of Friskies out of her bowl onto the floor. I pretended not to see her and threw the pie server into the sink.
    The next voice on the tape was my ex-husband, Craig’s. It sounded forlorn as it came out of the tinny speaker.
    “Just wanted to know if you’d like to go out to dinner with me tonight,” he proposed. “Maybe tomorrow night. Or the next—”
    “No, I wouldn’t!” I snapped. I ran to the answering machine, shut off the tape and hit rewind. “Not now. Not ever.”
    No matter that Craig was the one who had left me. His pleas could still trigger an explosion in me composed of anger and guilt in equal parts. And the guilt was getting weightier now that I was ready to marry Wayne. It wasn’t logical, but then, guilt rarely is.
    I sat down at my desk. It was late, after ten, but the day’s events had left me too keyed up to read. Or to go to bed. I needed to get to work.
    At least I had a short commute. I put in most of my sixty hours a week for Jest Gifts from my home office, dropping in at the Oakland warehouse periodically to issue paychecks and take care of crises. I contracted out the actual manufacturing of the gift items.
    Unfortunately, designing the gag gifts was the least of my work. Checking over the hundreds of mail orders a week, producing and correcting advertising copy, and keeping an eye on work orders took far more time. And payroll, miscellaneous paperwork and general bookkeeping took an equally big chunk. Taking care of disasters took the biggest chunk of all. My disaster correspondence alone could have kept a hired secretary busy. But I had a hard enough time paying Jean and Judy their salaries, not to mention mine.
    I ran my eyes over a stack of paper containing questionable orders, a leaning white tower of unpaid bills and a shorter pile of ledger sheets which I needed to transcribe for my accountant. Then I grabbed the sketch I had made earlier of a computer necktie and computer-bug tie tack. I had drawn the computer as an elongated screen atop a box atop a keyboard. What if it could be represented as a keyboard hanging sideways instead?
    *
    By Tuesday afternoon, I was working on the stack of unpaid bills. Over the previous three days I had wondered who killed Slade Skinner, reviewed the members of the critique group in my mind continuously, and come up empty every time. But I hadn’t called Carrie. I hadn’t wanted to encourage her. I had even begun to hope she had given up the idea of investigating.
    The Hutton police hadn’t talked to me since Saturday either. Maybe they had arrested their hypothetical, interrupted burglar.
    The phone rang just as that happy thought occurred to me. It was Carrie.
    “No, Kate. No one has been arrested,” Carrie assured me when I proposed the idea. “It is still up to us to pursue this matter. I apologize for taking so long to get back to you. It took some time to convince everyone to come to an emergency meeting. The others have agreed to Thursday evening.” She paused as my stomach turned over. “You will be able to attend, won’t you?”
    I thought about lying, but despite my stomach’s vote, I couldn’t get my mouth to say no. Carrie told me she’d pick me up