There was something wrong with the sunlight when Jon pushed the shaded glass door of his office at Budangler and Shuld open and stepped into the lot. It was orange, hazy, diffuse, creating the illusion of grit across the lens of the photographer behind his eyes, and the heat was a blast furnace that matted his hair into new sweat beading on his cheeks as he winced into the sunset shimmer obscuring the shapes that had been a shrubbery wall when he had arrived this morning.
Josey, the lean brunette that sat at the admissions desk to the old law firm had been missing from her seat when Jon stopped by to chat her up on his way out and he turned to see if she had, by any chance, returned that he might inquire about this odd change in the weather. Jon had had his eye on Josey since Margery had left him with the baby and he made an excuse every evening to engage in some bit of conversation with her, but this was different. Something was wrong with the sunlight. He could feel it.
“Josey! Hey Josey! You back there?!” Jon’s voice echoed through the glass and marble entryway of the antique high-rise.
He turned from the door and started back to the operator’s desk nestled in the mahogany alcove preceding the elevators, the heels of his shoes clacking echoes into the emptiness of the entryway. The air was unusually still, his breath thick and sticky in his throat. Sweat surprised him as it cooly trickled over the crest of his nose and pooled into a droplet that hung between the curve of his nostril and the corner of his lip.
“Hey Josey!” Uneasy silence followed the echo of his words back to his ear.
Jon stopped at the front desk. Josey’s purse sat commonly in its nook beneath the phone caddy. Her black pen, the one with the blue fluer-de-lis pattern that Jack had bought her the previous Christmas, lay across the desk calendar midway through a note on the Thirteenth that read only “Dinner: Margolis: Operations assessment wi” and there it stopped, the idea truncated by the absence of further text. There was a crunch under his foot as Jon stepped forward to see if her car keys were in the drawer. Josey’s compact lay on the hard plastic chair-mat beneath her desk, its mirror now shattered and smudged with the blush that smeared across the heel of Jon’s shoe.
Quickening his pace, Jon hurried to the elevator. He had just left a meeting with Don, whose office was in 308, on the Spelldinger case and though the ghosts of their screaming match still reverberated through his head he needed to ask if Don knew anything about where Josey might have gone. He hammered the “up” arrow and waited. Sweat started to drip from his chin and pooled at the stiff collar of his white dress shirt, so he loosened his tie and pulled the top open. He tapped his anxious toe and waited. Running his fingers through the mid-length crop of blond hair Jon cast a glance over his shoulder to see that strange yellow orange sunlight bleeding through the shaded glass front of the buildings entrance, it’s hazy illumination through the stale air reflecting off the brass front of the elevator enclosure where no lights shone back to indicate on which floor the lift was located.
Jon’s breath stopped. There were no lights. No lights on the up and down arrows. No lights on the floor indicators, all dark plastic baubles where electricity should have shown the truth. No lights.
He ran the empty corridor to the stairwell, his footsteps a clamorous invader to the hush. Jon took the steps three at a time, panting up to the third floor. Shouldering the door out of the stairwell he noted . . . there was no music. There was supposed to be music in the stairwell. The stairwell always had that same brain-numbing non-music as the elevators. The music was gone.
Don Granfell was a despicable man. Abusive, uncaring, belligerent, unlikeable in any way, which is why he never appeared in court, but instead attacked plaintiffs and their lawyers over the phone, all day, everyday. Jon especially hated the man for what he had said when Margery disappeared.
“Get over it,” he had said before spitting a wad of gum into the fingernails in his ashtray.
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But much as Jon hated him they had worked together for years in symbiotic animosity and Jon knew for certain that Don should have been in his office, in room 308, yelling at somebody involved in the Spelldinger case. He didn’t take breaks. He didn’t go to the bathroom. He just came in, screamed at people over the phone all day, then went home.
But he wasn’t there. Don’s half finished eighth cup of coffee lay on its side bleeding its dark elixir over the calendar on his desk. A red bill cap lay crushed flat, upside down on his keyboard and the screen of his computer showed nothing but the traces of a cursor racing back and forth across empty pages where the hat permanently depressed the space bar. A half-chewed piece of Hubba-Bubba bubble gum was depressed into a pile of fingernail clippings in the ashtray Don used for the cigars he wasn’t allowed to smoke in the building, but did anyway. The receiver for Don’s desk phone lay dangling over the arm of his chair, where it swung noiselessly across slats of ochre light filtering in from the half-open blinds.
As Jon stood looking a low battery message on Don’s LCD flat panel monitor blinked and the system shut down. He was just turning to leave when he saw something shiny and black dart toward him across the floor. The object spun, then flipped, flipped, and flipped again. It was Don’s left shoe and it came to rest right side up, sole on the carpeted floor a foot from where Jon stood.
Raphael Diaz’ office in 205 was empty as well. So was Janet Krane’s, Bill Dowry’s, Amy Santero’s, Jimmy Ellison’s, Butch “Bud” Budangler’s, and Nancy Shuld’s, and when Jon made it back to the tall glass door of the front of the building his terror was confirmed because all their cars were still there, shimmering as waves of heat undulated through the sick orange vapor that had become the environment.
This was part one of a two-part story. The conclusion will appear next week. Be sure to check back.
