Page 5 of Change of Plans

My routine was broken.

I blinked, stared warily at the cup for a second, then took another sip as I started walking again, keeping up with the flow of foot traffic instead of getting in everyone’s way.

Actually, whatever this different coffee was, it wasn’t half bad. I took another sip. It was flavored somehow, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Not chocolate. Not caramel. Something lighter, maybe? Fruity? No, there was no such thing as fruity coffee, was there?

An unexpected grin made an appearance on my face as I reached my building and headed through the front door, holding it for Holly, who worked as a receptionist in the dentist’s office downstairs from Gershwin and Anglesea. Was that the problem they’d had in the kitchen at Common Grounds or—and I was ridiculous for even considering the notion—had Diccon switched up my coffee to something better than the usual as a favor to me.

Was it possible that Diccon Meyers liked me as much as I?—

“Oh, shit.”

Holly’s horror-laced profanity stopped me in my tracks again, and I pulled myself out of my thoughts to look at my surroundings.

Oh, shit was right. The lobby was soaked, like a thunderstorm had passed through at some point in the night, but only on the inside of the building. The old furniture that sat in a spill-over waiting area for the dentist’s office was waterlogged and the wallpaper bubbled with retained moisture. Off to the side, the dental office’s door was open, and as Holly walked slowly into her workplace, I gaped at the carnage inside.

“What happened?” Holly asked Frieda, the dental assistant.

“There was a fire in one of the breakrooms upstairs,” Frieda sighed as I picked up my pace on my way to the elevator. “It set the sprinkler system off for the entire building last night.”

I hit the elevator button but got no response. So I headed for the door to the stairs, taking another sip of mystery coffee as I went, then savoring the unique taste of disaster on my tongue as I took the stairs to the second floor two at a time.

I got the same story from Chuck, one of Gershwin and Anglesea’s partners, as soon as I stepped into the office.

“Someone at Merchant Accounting was working late and left a pizza in their toaster oven too long,” Chuck huffed, glaring around at the soaked reception area of their office. “The whole building is a mess because of the sprinkler system.”

I looked around at the wet carpet, soggy wallpaper, and drenched reception desk, then stared at my coffee cup with wide, wary eyes.

Every time. Every single time I set one foot outside of the box.

Maybe Diccon Meyers didn’t like me after all. Maybe he was secretly trying to kill me.

I shouldn’t even have been joking about that, but with my weird, warped sense of humor, the idea almost made me laugh.

I wasn’t laughing a second later when Chuck said, “The workspace is a mess, too. None of us are going to be able to get any work done here until they clean it up.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, wanting to put my coffee down, or maybe chuck it out the window like a grenade and run.

I took a sip instead and tried to ignore all thoughts of Diccon.

Which wasn’t happening.

“Go see for yourself,” Chuck said, gesturing warily toward the back part of the office.

I sent Chuck a last, wary look, then squished my way over sodden carpet and into the workspace area.

Chuck Gershwin and Christopher Anglesea prided themselves on being progressive, forward-thinking bosses. They were great bosses, I’ll admit. Instead of segregating us all away in cubes or our own closet-sized offices, they’d made the main part of the office into a large, open workspace. The drafting table that I used, along with Chuck, and sometimes our intern, Madeline, stood off to one side of the room, near the window that looked down on bustling Easton Road. Chris and Kendra used a different drafting table on the other side of the room. The workspace also held two desks that any of us could use, but that were usually occupied by Pamela and David, who did most of the accounts payable and receivable for the business.

The entire place was a giant, mushy mess.

“Oh, shit,” I repeated Holly’s observation from downstairs as I took in the carnage.

Anything made of paper was wrecked. That included several sets of blueprints that had been left out on the drafting tables overnight. None of mine, thank God. A few binders that held everything from old invoices to purchase orders looked ruined, too.

Fortunately, it looked like neither of the computers had been damaged. Pamela stood over one of them, dabbing it with paper towels, but it was on and nothing looked wrong with the monitor. David was testing the printer on the other computer and making sounds somewhere between growls of frustration and moans of grief as he did.

“We’re not going to be able to work in this mess until it’s cleaned up,” Kendra said from where she was checking through everything that had been stored in a cabinet off to one side of the room.

“Definitely not,” Pamela agreed from the other side of the room.