But now all of the desks and tables were empty, adorned only with cables and cords that had nowhere to go.
“Can I help you?”
The voice startled me and I looked up. In the far corner of the room, a skinny man in his late twenties was looking at me. He wore jeans and a short sleeve buttoned down shirt and rimless glasses were perched precariously on his nose. His blond hair looked like it had just been buzzed down that morning. He was taller than Jake, all arms and legs, and he reminded me of one of those marionette puppets that danced when you moved the wooden cross at the top.
“Are you Mr. Riggler?” I asked. “I'm Daisy Savage. Mrs. Bingledorf sent me down.”
“Oh,” he said, his hands on his hips, his elbows forming perfect right angles. “Yes, I'm Mr. Riggler. Why did she send you down?”
I held up the spreadsheet. “She asked if I could help you put together an inventory of what was stolen. For the police and the insurance company.”
“Ah, right,” he said, looking around the room, almost as if he'd just realized the computers weren't there. He pushed the glasses up his nose. “Okay. Um, do you work here?”
“No, I'm volunteering,” I said. “My daughter is a tenth grader. Emily Bohannan.”
His eyes lit with recognition. “Oh, okay. I have Emily in a class. Yeah, she's a great girl.” He wove his way through the desks and extended his hand. “I'm Miles Riggler.”
We shook hands and stood there awkwardly for a moment.
“So, Mrs. Bingledorf printed this out,” I said, showing him the sheet again. “I think she just wants an official accounting.”
He took the sheet and studied it, as if he were hoping information would suddenly materialize on the paper in front of him. “Right, right. Sure. Okay. Hmmm.” He laughed nervously. “I guess we'll have to try and remember what was in here before the weekend.”
I thought that was a strange response. “Or we could check to see if there are old purchase orders through the business office?” I suggested. “From whenever the school purchased them?”
He nodded, but didn't seem like he was listening. “Oh, yeah, we could do that, too. Well, why don't we put down as much as we can from memory and then maybe we can see where she wants to go from there?”
I raised my eyebrows but decided not to question his methods. Maybe he had a photogr
He glanced at his watch. “And we'll have to hustle a little because I've got a class coming in ten minutes and there's no way we'll be able to work with kids in here. My understanding is they don't want us talking about the theft.”
I looked around the computer-less Computer Lab. “I'm pretty sure they'll figure it out.”
He laughed again. “Well, sure. I guess what I meant is that they don't want us discussing it with the kids. And I'm going to need to figure out what we're going to do to keep them occupied.”
That made a little more sense.
We spen
“I know that's not everything but I really need to do a few minutes of planning before the students arrive,” he explained. “We'll have to finish later.”
“I can take this back to Mrs. Bingledorf and let her know this is where we've gotten to so far.”
“Right. Okay.” He pushed at his glasses and then settled his hands on his hips, like he wasn't quite sure what to do with himself.
“What are you going to do with the kids?” I asked.
He looked around the room, then shrugged. “I don't really know. We may have to do a study hall today. Or some reading.”
“What are you going to do in the short term?” I asked. “It might take awhile to get computers back in here, don't you think?”
“Oh, I bet it will take quite awhile,” he said, nodding in agreement. “So we'll just have to make do for now. We can't use what we don't have. It's not the students' faults that the computers are gone and it's not like I can go and demand that the school buy us computers today.”
“Sure,” I said. “But could you maybe have the kids bring in their own laptops to work on? Or their tablets or something? I bet a lot of kids have them.”
He blinked very rapidly, almost like something had gotten in his eye, and he put his hands on his hips again. “Well, maybe. I don't know. Possibly. That's definitely a possibility. But I'd have to check with Mrs. Bingledorf and we'd have to see what we'd need to do to secure their computers so they wouldn't be using them in an inappropriate way here on campus.” Then he shook his head. “So I'm just not sure. But we'll come up with something.”
The bell rang and he smiled at me. “Thanks again for your help,” he said, heading back toward his desk.
As I left the room, merging with seemingly thousands of loud, laughing teenagers as I navigated the halls, I couldn't help but think that Mr. Riggler didn't seem all that stressed out that all of his computers were missing.
SEVEN
A woman who looked a bit like a bobblehead doll was standing in the conference room when I returned. She had a large head sitting squarely on a pencil-thin neck and I tried not to stare at her. She was casually leafing through the stacks of mail I'd left and she looked up when I'd walked in.
“Hi,” I said. “I'm Daisy.”
“Daisy Savage, right?” she said with a smile. “Emily's mother?”
“That's right.” I stared at her a little harder, trying to figure out if I'd seen her before. I didn't think I would have forgotten meeting her. “I'm sorry, have we met?”
The woman shook her bobble head. Her hair was an unnatural shade of red, cropped close in what was supposed to be a fashionable style. “No. I'm Harriet Hollenstork, this year's Prism PTA president. Ellen mentioned you were volunteering this week and that you were using the conference room. My son, Leonard, is in the tenth grade with Emily.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said, the name still not ringing a bell. “Did you need the room? I was sorting mail earlier but they asked me to do something else.”
“Yes, I heard,” she said, a somber expression taking residence on her face. “The computer theft. It's just awful, isn't it?”
I nodded. “It is, yes.”
“Were you able to learn anything about it?”
“No, not really,” I said. “I was just helping to do an inventory list of what's missing.”
“Oh,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “Were you able to figure out exactly what was taken?”
I wasn't comfortable sharing details with her. Not that I had any real details, but it didn't seem like the kind of information that should just be passed around to anyone who asked. And given Bingledorf's emphasis on discretion, I didn't want to be the one who started the information flow about the theft.
“Not completely,” I said. “We're still working on it.”
“But you have an idea of what was taken?” she asked. “I heard it was the entire computer lab.”
“I actually don't know because I'm not sure what was in the room to begin with,” I said. “And Mr. Riggler had a class coming, so I had to leave.”
“Hmm,” she said. Her red lips twitched. “Did you hear anything about who might've taken them?”
“No.”
“What about replacing them?” she pressed. “Did Mr. Riggler mention that? Or Mrs. Bingledorf?”
I felt a twinge of annoyance at her incessant questions. “Not really, no.”
“I'd think they'd need to do that immediately,” she said, her fingernails clicking on the table top. “It's not like those computers are just going to turn up this afternoon in a van or something.”
“You never know, I guess,” I said. “But I don't think they can go out and purchase a bunch of brand new computers right away.”
“The school has a reserve fund,” she said, but she seemed more to be thinking out loud than talking to me. “And, of course, the PTA has funds that could be made available.”
“It would still be a huge financial hit,” I said. “To just go out and buy them without waiting for at least insurance reimbursement.”
“Sure, sure,” Harriet said, waving a hand in the air. “But the right place might be willing to offer a discount on such a large purchase. If the school was going to replace all of them at once. I mean, a purchase like that, well, it could be just the thing a local computer supplier might be looking for.” She glanced at me, smiling. “And the school, too. It could be mutually beneficial.”
I wasn't exactly sure where she was going, so I just nodded. “Yes, I suppose so.”
She studied me for a moment. “So what are you going to do with your list?”