Foiled Again

Chapter One Linda LaCroix thought that twelve years in the service of Bowmouth College's English Department should count for something. She had done her stint as a general clerk and had risen to be the department's number one secretary. So why was she being treated by the department's new chair, Professor Danton McGraw, as if she were fresh out of some second-rate two-year business school? All those little lectures on office management and academic protocol. Didn't the guy know she was a grad from Bowmouth's own School of Businesswith honors yet? Didn't he see her bachelor's degree diploma framed right there on the secretaries' wall, where he couldn't miss it when he headed into his office? And this semester she and Arlene Burr, the department's chief clerk and assistant secretary, had to sign In-and-Out slips whenever they took off on a two-minute trip for coffee or to run something off the copy machine. Hit the cafeteria for lunch. Stop in the halls for two minutes to say hello to some other human. Now as the late October chills were turning the remaining leaves brown, Linda and Arlene each looked back on her past workstation as something like lost Eden. It had happened with the speed of a falling ax. Last spring and all the years before, the secretary and the clerk had had two adjoining but separate offices, both of which were placed at a safe distance across the corridor from the chairman's office. But then along came Dr. Danton McGraw, who had caused walls to be moved and partitions eliminated. The end result was that now Linda and Arlene found themselves yoked together like conjoined twins fixed in side-by-side desks in the newly created secretaries' space outside Dr. McGraw's office. Here neither could get two paces away from her chair without arousing suspicion from the sharp-eared department chairman. Worse still, neither woman could get away from the other and hunker down in the privacy of her own office space. Take shoes off, sneak a candy bar without sharing it, send a private e-mail to a friend, make a personal phone call. The result was that two good friends and coworkers were beginning to feel an unpleasant tension in their everyday work life. "Trapped," said Arlene to Linda on the Monday of Halloween week. "That's what we are. Say I want to step out of this cage to maybe get a breath of air or go pee. I've practically got to leave fingerprints and bring back a urine sample." But Linda was otherwise focused. She looked around, sniffed the air, and wrinkled her nose. "I don't know about you," she said, "but this place is really starting to stink, and it's not just grungy students coming in and hanging around. Something smells real funny, like there's a fungus growing somewhere. In a file drawer maybe." Linda was a striking woman with a strong opinion on all things. Tall, thin as a wire coat hanger, with a mane of white-blond hair caught into a crown on her head, she had a sharp little chin and narrow blue eyes. And with her whole face bravely covered in a heavy duty makeup and eye enhancements, Linda could have passed for anywhere from thirty-seven to forty-seven. Actually, she was closing in on fifty, a fact she kept quiet about. Her choice for clothing ran to clinging shirts and sweatersall about a size 3that still allowed her breasts full presentation rights together with constricted breathing. Then there was the snug skirt, the high-fashion boots and long purple fingernails. Altogether, Linda, known to some of the faculty clowns as "Linda Lovely," was a femaBorthwick, J. S. is the author of 'Foiled Again ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780312366551 and ISBN 0312366558.