The Inner Circle

99

Carla Lee knew it was going to be a bad day. She knew it when her two-year-old son woke up at 5:40 in the morning all excited to play. She knew it when the little yellow tub of margarine for her morning English muffin was completely empty, even though her husband had put it back in the fridge. And she knew it when she was racing back from her 3 p.m. meetings and saw the dead animal on Franklin Road.

She’d seen dead animals before on the highway. In these parts of western Pennsylvania, there were always deer and foxes and loads of unlucky possums. Carla had even stopped for a few (she was a dog owner-she couldn’t just ride past if it was a dog). But here, on Franklin Road, which was hilly and rarely traveled, if you did see a dead animal, it never looked like this.

Carla couldn’t see the fur anymore-couldn’t even tell what kind of creature it was. The animal was-Carla squinted as she veered around the tight curve in her banged-up maroon Camry. There was no other way to say it. The animal was run-through. Run-through over and over again. People probably couldn’t even see it if they were coming fast around the turn. But Carla was a mother. With three kids. And a sweet Maltese that peed on the floor every time someone came in the door. It’d been years since she went fast around the turns.

For that reason, she had a perfect view of the poor creature that was a mess of twisted red and black organs covered in flies.

For Carla, the mother and Maltese owner, that was the worst part of her bad day-being stuck with that image in her head.

She couldn’t shake the image as she turned onto Brachton Road.

She couldn’t shake it as she pulled into the enormous employee parking lot that sat across the road from the underground storage facility known as Copper Mountain.

And as she left her car, stepped into the cold wind that was whipping off the nearby Pennsylvania hills, and rushed for the arriving white school bus that served as the employee shuttle, she still saw that mess of red and black.

It was that image, still floating in her mind, that took all of her attention as she and her fellow employees packed together to get on board the arriving bus.

It was because she was thinking of that image that Carla didn’t even notice, in the usual crush to get on the bus, the young black-haired woman standing so close behind her.

“Please-go ahead-you were first,” Clementine said, flashing a warm smile and motioning politely.

“Thanks,” Carla replied, climbing aboard without even noticing how much Clementine’s hair and overall coloring matched her own.

Within minutes, the white school bus rolled through security and pulled up to the main entrance at the mouth of the cave. After all these years, Carla was used to working underground. But as they entered the cave, and a long slow shadow crept across the roof of the bus and swallowed the remaining daylight, Carla felt that familiar wiggle in her belly. Spotting the armed guards that always greeted them as they stepped off the shuttle, she then reached into her purse, fished for her ID, and-

“Craparoo,” she whispered to herself. “I need to go back,” Carla called out to the bus driver.

“Everything okay?” Clementine asked.

“Yeah. I think I just left my ID in my car.”

“I do that all the time,” Clementine said, heading for the front of the bus, where she took out the ID she’d lifted from Carla’s purse, flashed it at the guard, and followed the other employees along the concrete path into Copper Mountain.

Carla Lee was definitely having a bad day.

But Clementine, so far, was having a great one.

Especially if they’d found the file she was looking for.