Chương 11: Just Being Honest

The Shea siblings stood there rather conspicuously with their eyes barely peeking out from above (or below, in Nora's case) the newspaper for too long. Passersby were looking at them strangely.

"Roz, I don't think this is working," Ed hissed.

Rosalind sighed. He was right but where else could they hide? They needed to be able to see their father when he headed toward the entrance of the building.

"What do you want to do instead? We don't know where exactly Dad works at this point in time so we'll never find him unless we see him go in. At least we have a sort of plan for once we have."

They had discussed it while standing there and decided to utilize a similar trick to the one Nora used the first time they traveled back in time. She had hidden in a janitor's cart. All they had to do was see where Julian went, get Nora to continue tailing him since she was the smallest, and find a custodial closet.

Rosalind could probably get away with pretending to be a cleaning lady if she wore a mask to hide her youthfulness. She could push the cart around with her siblings in it and pretend to clean in areas their father worked so they could get a better idea of his daily schedule.

There were several ways this could go wrong but they weren't trained in espionage. This was the best they were going to come up with on short notice.

"Nora, this is very important," Edison told her seriously as the two of them crouched behind the newspaper with his hands on her shoulders. "You need to follow Dad again and can't let anyone see you. You have to keep following him until we come find you. Got that? You're a secret agent on a very important mission. If you succeed, we'll get you a stuffed animal."

Her eyes shone with excitement. She had missed her unicorn since it hadn't traveled back in time with them. "I'll be the best secret agent in the whole world. What kind can I get? Another unicorn?"

"If the store has them."

Rosalind frowned and whispered to him as their sister happily hummed to herself about her new stuffed animal. "Ed, we don't have money to buy her a stuffed animal unless we don't want to eat."

"Don't worry about it. Yesterday near the library, I saw a store called Dollar Tree with a sign in the window that said everything was one dollar. I figure we can get her one there easily enough even if they don't have unicorns," he whispered back.

She couldn't deny she was impressed. That was a sneaky way to get around a promise. Unless… "What if they don't have them?"

"Then I'm going to have to become a shoplifter. You can't break promises to little kids because they never forget if you do. One time, I told Nora I would give her half of my candy bar later and then forgot about it and ate the whole thing. She cried for an hour and the next four times I told her that I would do something, she reminded me of the one time I didn't."

Rosalind hoped it didn't come to that. She didn't want to risk making more waves in this time than they already had. The consequences of getting caught and ending up in juvie would be dire.

She was about to tell him that was a terrible idea and they could deal with Nora's inevitable tantrum when she spotted her much-younger father. He was talking to someone wearing a suit and looked like he would rather be anywhere else in the world but there.

"Who is that with him?" she wondered aloud.

"I don't know but it doesn't look like he likes him much," Edison noted.

No, it did not. He didn't seem too much older than Julian was now but age was difficult to guess at a glance. Was he a coworker? They were both heading into the SheaTech building.

The kids would need to hurry if they wanted to see where they were going. This was no time to stand around wondering! Rosalind beckoned her siblings forward but Nora had already rushed ahead of them the moment she saw Julian.

She and Edison noticed at the same time with growing horror and had to sprint after their sister as sneakily as they could. They were too tall to simply waltz into the building unnoticed so they had to be extra careful and crouch-walk while no one was looking their way.

Unfortunately, this meant they lost sight of Nora and their father almost immediately. Their plan was already falling to pieces and it had been less than five minutes!

"Roz—" Edison began worriedly.

Rosalind forced herself to fake sounding confident for her brother's sake. "I know. We're going to have to improvise a little. We'll find her."

There was a good chance they would have to walk around the whole building with the janitor's cart to do so but they would do it if necessary. Nobody was getting left behind. First things first, they needed to find that closet. Doing that would be harder than finding Julian and Nora.

They crept around hiding in a lot of strange places like behind trash cans and under desks as they slowly made their way around the building in search of a janitor's closet. They weren't going to be able to walk into an elevator normally either to keep looking so they had to hitch a ride on the bottom of a caterer's cart heading up.

Rosalind was about to give up hope when they finally found a custodial closet on the eleventh floor they searched. Relief flooded through her and she got Edison to break into people's lockers looking for a spare uniform that would fit her well enough it wouldn't be suspicious.

She was extremely lucky to find one belonging to a person who couldn't have been more than 4'10". She also put her hair up with a hair tie she had borrowed from Izzy this morning and found an unused disposable mask from a package of them with some of the cleaning supplies.

"Do I look like a real janitor?" she asked once her disguise was complete.

Her brother squinted at her. "I think you look like a kid playing dress up but I also don't think anyone will care enough to call you out on it."

"Gee, thanks."

"Just being honest."

"Whatever. Get in the cart and hide under that tarp. We have to find Nora. I have no idea which department Dad works in though…This is so long ago that he wouldn't be in upper management yet so he most likely doesn't have his own office," Rosalind mused.

"I saw a floor directory in the elevator for a split second. We should see what all the options are and make logical deductions from there. At least now I can be in the elevator normally without looking too suspicious."

Edison nodded and hopped into the cart. She pushed it out of the closet after setting all of the broken-into lockers back to the way they were before as much as possible and made a beeline for the elevator.

In the future, SheaTech would take up this entire building but it only owned the first twenty floors for now. There were still an awful lot of departments to go through. Marketing, accounting, HR…None of those seemed a likely place for a tech genius to be.

Aha! Product development; that had to be it.

Rosalind pushed the button for the fourteenth floor and desperately hoped they were there and that she would be able to find Nora. She was extremely good at hiding when she wanted to be.

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