The Grub-And-Stakers Move a Mountain by Charlotte MacLeod, Alisa Craig

after-hours meeting or else everybody was working overtime. That didn’t bode well for her chances of doing any effective snooping. She might have known this harebrained scheme would come to nothing.
    Well, she’d got herself into it so there wasn’t much she could do now but go through the motions and clear out before her eyelashes fell off.
    Mrs. Poppy’s daughter had mentioned something about a side door from the parking lot. Dittany managed to locate it and found it open. The girl hadn’t mentioned there’d be a tough looking watchman lurking just inside. Luckily he was nobody Dittany recognized but he scared her half to death anyway.
    True to his trust, the watchman offered challenge the moment Dittany set sneaker inside the door. She explained in a hoarse voice that was partly assumed and partly stark terror that she was pinch-hitting for Mrs. Duckes, who was down with her leg again, and where did they keep the brooms and stuff because the kid that gave her the keys didn’t know nothing and she didn’t want to bother Mrs. Duckes because she was in bed with a couple of aspirins-Dittany saw no point in dragging Mrs. Poppy into her monologue-and where was she supposed to dump the wastebaskets and was it okay if she didn’t vacuum but just dusted around and straightened up because she was only doing it as a favor, not that she minded because Mrs. Duckes would do the same for her, and where the heck was that mop closet because how could you expect a person to get anything done if nobody showed her where the stuff was?
    By then Dittany was genuinely hoarse and the watchman looking totally bored as she’d hoped he would. With any luck, he’d steer well clear of her from now on. He did condescend to lead her to the mop closet, roll out a large canvas hamper for the trash, and tell her to leave it down here by the door and he’d attend to it later. Dittany was warming up for an elaborate complaint about the mop bucket when the watchman fled out of earshot and the first small victory was hers.
    She selected a tasteful assortment of mops and dusters, loaded them into the hamper, and dragged her collection to what she gathered must be the reception area, a typically McNasterish assemblage of imitation wood paneling, monstrous plastic philodendrons in styrofoam pots, vivid green wall-to-wall carpeting, and a truly revolting abstract painting that looked like an explosion in a pickle factory hanging behind a salmon-pink metal desk that held a green phone, a white phone, a red phone, a box of pale mauve tissues, and a digital clock with a picture of Spider Man on the dial. There she picked up one of the dusters and began flapping it around with an air of great industry in case the watchman hadn’t really gone.
    She did manage to sneak a look at the contents of the wastebasket as she dumped it into the hamper, but learned only that the receptionist chewed sugarless gum, drank diet cola, and needed a new bottle of Sexy Siren nail polish, or so she deduced from the empty one that showed up in the trash. It must have been a dull day at the front office.
    Trailing the tools of her adopted trade, Dittany worked her way through the ill-planned one-story building. McNaster employed more desk workers than she’d realized, but aside from the facts that some of them smoked too much and they were one and all incapable of hitting a wastebasket at close range with a wad of paper, she learned nothing of interest. Even when she became emboldened to search their desk drawers she found only what people’s desks might logically be expected to contain: pictures of wives and babies, tangles of rubber bands and paper clips, half-eaten candy bars, cough drops, empty aspirin bottles, mechanical pencils with no lead in them, felt-tipped pens that had run dry, ballpoints that had probably never worked at all, stationery, graph paper, blueprints, contract forms, and in one drawer a cache of the sort of magazines that led her to suspect this