Mildred Whittaker glared at the buzzing open-plan office from behind her glass-enclosed cubicle. It was just another Monday at Keene & Co., an accounting firm as prosaic as the gray suits that inhabited it. Her disdain was palpable, even through the cumbersome earplugs she inherited from a long-forgotten relative—a peculiar artifact that muffled the chaos of office life but often left her isolated. And yet, she could not do without them; the headaches from the constant murmur of fax machines and keyboard clatter were far less bearable.
Mildred stood, smoothing her tweed skirt. As much as she loathed the predictable routine, she remained a creature of habit, her discipline a vestige of a more disciplined era. Her oily black hair was pulled tight in a bun, her glasses perched imperiously on her nose. As she exited her cubicle, the faint remains of sound nudged at her awareness—a frisson of anticipation hummed in the air.
“Morning, Mildred.” Frank, the senior accountant, nodded. His affable demeanor clashed with his calculating eyes. “Another day in paradise, don’t you think?”
“Indeed,” Mildred replied curtly. Frank was a man of numbers and duplicity—a dangerous mix, she mused privately. Their exchanges were perfunctory, though not unfriendly.
A few desks away, Sarah, the junior accountant, sank into her chair. The constant flush of anxious effort colored her cheeks. She was the newest and most amiable presence in the firm, easily overwhelmed by the invisible machinations around her.
“Hello, Miss Whittaker,” Sarah ventured as Mildred passed. Her sincerity was raw, unrefined, much like a guileless lamb unwitting in wolf territory.
“Hello, Sarah,” returned Mildred, softening. “Remember what I told you about the balance sheets? Numbers are telling, but they never lie on their own.”
Their exchange was interrupted by a commotion. In the background, the office harmonics took a dissonant chord.
“Where’s Greg?” barked a voice. It was Doug, the office manager—a curmudgeon with a reputation for being unyielding yet fair.
An undercurrent of tension rippled through the room. Gregory Masterson, the firm’s apparent heir to regional ambitions, was notably absent.
Sarah glanced at Mildred, brow furrowed. “Does Greg often miss Monday meetings?”
Mildred shook her head slightly, earplugs stifling Doug’s summons. “Not often,” she murmured, eyes narrowing. She watched as Doug hastily dialed his office phone, voice now hushed.
“Let us see,” she decided. Her intuition, honed over years of peculiar office dynamics, suggested irregularity. In the ensuing chatter, she slipped unnoticed toward Greg’s office before any real protest could form.
The door opened to an immaculate room. Greg’s desk was pristinely organized, but what stood out to Mildred was an overturned jar of pens and a crumpled meeting agenda. Her eyes caught the edge of an open window—unusual for a man finicky about climate control.
Mildred extracted an earplug. The intermittent breeze rustled the blinds, and an erstwhile thought struck. She replaced the earplug and moved briskly back to her cubicle.
Mildred found Sarah’s inquisitive eyes upon her when she returned. “Greg’s missing might be more calculated than casual,” she speculated.
Frank overheard and chuckled darkly. “Planning the coup of the century, is he?”
His words encircled Mildred’s hypothesis. Unseen, her mind knitted threads of inference.
As the day waned, the mystery of Greg’s absence remained unsolved, coded in whispers spiraling down the firm columns. But to Mildred, the puzzle was plain—a classic move of staged disappearance amidst chaos. She, serene behind inconvenient earplugs, was confident that the truth was orchestrated from within.
That night, Doug’s call would find Greg only needing some personal time. Yet Mildred knew. Tomorrow would arrive with another upheaval, another chimera captured merely by the inconvenience of not being entirely heard.