That Which Remains by Yetmen C.F

Author:Yetmen, C.F.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780998889023
Publisher: Ypsilon & Co. Press
Published: 2021-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

“Oh, my God, there you are!” Karla ambushed Anna as she came out of the coat room. “I was waiting for you to come back yesterday but, well, I should have known…” She grabbed Anna’s hand and pulled her to a file cabinet by her desk. “Stand here and act like we’re talking normally about nothing important.” She pulled the drawer open and began to finger through the files as if she was looking for something.

Anna was exhausted. She ignored a cold tickling her throat and iciness consuming her feet. The rain had continued all night and Oskar had remembered the bucket too late and then when he did remember, he helpfully put it in the puddle that had already formed on the floor. Anna had used all the dry towels to sop up the water and then spent the entire night lying awake staring at the ceiling and listening to the drip of rain coming through the crack. Her mind couldn’t decide which problem to land on, so it instead swirled them all around into one big, unseeable and unsolvable ball that spun and spun inside her head. She willed it to be quiet, but it only grew in strength when she did, as if by thinking of what not to think of, she called it forth more strongly. She sneezed.

Karla made a face. “Don’t you get sick now.”

“I won’t,” Anna replied. “What are we doing here?”

Karla stared down at the files. “Just act normal while I tell you. Yesterday I was filing the in-shipment reports for the week and I noticed that some were missing. I knew there had been more deliveries than that—I saw them with my own eyes. I pulled the file and gave it a closer look, and lo and behold, there they were. Already filed.”

“So?” Anna wiped her nose with the back of her sleeve. She was starting to feel terrible.

“So, I took a closer look at them.” Karla dropped her head down. It was the most obvious attempt at being natural Anna could imagine. She rolled her hand in a circular “go on” gesture.

“So, the signatures on those reports, just the ones from this week, they were all Cooper’s.”

“But Cooper was in Berlin,” Anna said.

“Exactly.”

“Are you sure? That can’t be right. Maybe the dates are wrong or something got mixed up.”

“Anna, I don’t mix things up. And I didn’t put those reports in the file. The only person who ever puts reports in the file is you-know-who. The tall one.” She looked around.

“But there’s documentation that shows Cooper wasn’t here those days. I mean, the Army doesn’t just let their people wander off. I’m sure there are triplicates of travel orders and flight information and God knows what else from here to Frankfurt. It’s too easy to prove he wasn’t here.”

“Sure it is. But how many people look at our in-shipments once they’re filed? Unless they’re looking for something specific, say. Then they look at the custody cards.”

Anna conceded; it was a good point.

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