“I live to serve,” Jade says, and hauls her ashes up, follows Meg… all the long way to the next desk over?
“So I can keep an eye on you,” Meg informs her.
“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” Jade says, and starts to take a seat in the empty rolling chair but Meg’s already rolling it away, replacing it with a battered stool.
“Helps with posture,” Meg says, reaching around behind Jade like to straighten her up but not going so far into legally fraught territory as to actually touch the temporary employee.
Jade allows her posture to be improved, straddles the little stool, and takes the envelopes and flyers Meg provides, enduring her walk-through as well: proper method, desired results, blah, blah. The flyers are pale green, are for some referendum to restrict the airspace over Proofrock.
Hilarious.
“Sorry, Sherlock,” she says, and licks envelope number one, starts her stack of done-withs, pulls up the second flyer in desperate need of a careful crease.
For the first forty or so of them, Meg watches, harrumphing at Jade’s more sloppy attempts, humming conditional approval over the better ones. The sun goes down and the overhead lights become more important. Phones ring and radios hiss, feet scuffle, and Jade’s shoe-polished hair, she has to admit, is letting off an acrid scent that she thinks might be either getting her high or dollying her up to some ledge she’s meant to tumble off.
At the hundred and fourteen mark she nods forward, her forehead resting on the top of the desk for just a moment’s peace, but Meg clears her throat in a wake-up way and Jade startles, leans back into it.
“How many hours is this so far?” she asks.
“You keep your own time,” Meg says. “We’ll just hope it matches the time sheet I turn in to the sheriff.”
“Wonderful,” Jade says, and accidentally-on-super-purpose rips the flyer she’s trying so hard to fold just right.
“Recycling,” Meg tells her, directing Jade to the bin across the room, by the copy machine—same model as the library’s, probably the same purchase order—and by the time Jade shuffles back she knows it’s not worth the pleasure of wasting paper if it means she has to get up each time to do it. Her back does feel better, though. Maybe stools aren’t as evil as she’d always thought.
“What is that smell?” Meg asks minutes or hours later, interrupting whichever reverie Jade’s jellyfishing through.
“Did you spill gas on your…” She jabs the rolled coveralls with the button of her pen.
“I don’t drive,” Jade tells her, voice creaky at first. “And they don’t trust me with the lawnmowers.”
“Probably a wise precaution,” Meg says as if to herself, and turns to some task on her computer.
A hundred and thirty stuffed envelopes later, the fourth pile of them teetering in most dangerous fashion, Hardy steps in as if through the batwing doors of a saloon.
“Megan, I need you to—” he starts, is stopped just as fast by Jade’s presence.
“Sheriff,” she says, repaying the jumpscare he gave her last night.
“What you doing here?” he asks.
“Community service?” Jade asks right back.
“She’s stuffing envelopes, sir,” Meg says, looking up over her glasses to show Hardy that he’s making a nuisance of himself in the front office, when his job is obviously not the front office.
“I see, okay, okay,” he says, rubbing his nose with the back of his hand, his six-hours-old five o’clock shadow raspy and loud against the stiff cuff of his shirt.
“Is everything…？” Meg asks, completing the sentence with her eyes.
“Staties are here,” Hardy says with a shrug, like he didn’t want the dead-Founder case anyway. To show how all right he is with it, he hangs his brown coat on the un stolen coatrack, puts his flat-brimmed official hat on top of that, and then swings his belt off, crashes it down on a lateral filing cabinet hard enough that Jade expects the service revolver to fire into her gut.
“You don’t have to stay,” Hardy says to Meg. “Gonna be a long night.”
“And miss all the excitement?” Meg says back with a grin.
“Don’t know what I’d do without you,” Hardy tells her, and, passing by her desk, works something stubby and black up from his shirt pocket, deposits it in a wire-screen pencil holder on Meg’s desk, tapping the lip of the pencil holder twice.
“If anybody calls—” Hardy starts, “Route them through Dispatch,” Meg finishes. “And then tell you who they are, of course.”