"Nina Kiriki Hoffman - Haunted Humans" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Nina Kiriki)

NINA KIRIKI HOFFMAN

HAUNTED HUMANS

ONE

Dorothy jean demain, presently known as Dorothy Jean Hand, sometimes called
Dot
by people who didn't know her and almost always D.J. by those who did, gripped
the phone handset between her ear and shoulder. Her right hand held a pen
poised
over a carbonless message pad; her left hand sorted the Mental Healing
Center's
mail. The four office hours following Friday's lunch break stretched ahead,
aggravated by dealing with the operator who had picked up when D.J. rang the
answering service.

"Sandy, have you checked account 551 for me yet?" D.J. said as patiently as
she
could, breaking in on two minutes of inane chatter.

She listened to Sandy splutter through a message for Dr. Arlene Bollings,
D.J.'s
boss, managing to extract relevant information with great difficulty. She was
just about to demand the phone number of the person leaving the message when
Sandy broke in with, "Uh, but-- hey, Dot, there's a message here for you,
too."

"Let's finish with the first one, please." D.J. could hear her voice
tightening.
She wanted to grab Sandy and shake the information out of her like salt. But
she
was in secretary mode right now, level, efficient, no matter what the
circumstances. She hunched her shoulders, then took a calming breath.

"But the one for you is creepy." Sandy's voice was high, her words slow. D.J.
wondered what she looked like; all she could tell was that Sandy chewed gum
loudly and snappingly, and occasionally smoked; the small sucked intakes of
breath were a giveaway.

"I still need the phone number on this one, Sandy." Sandy had purged vital
information from the files without communicating it before. D.J. had learned
the
hard way to persist with her.

After three tries, Sandy managed to tell her the phone number. D.J. wrote,
sighed, and said, "Is that it for this message?"

"Yeah, I guess. There's one from that psycho nutcase Dr. Kabukin's seeing--"