Page 4 of Boxed In

“But not now?”

“I thought they died out.”

Olivia felt a shiver travel over her skin. She’d known the box was old. It sounded like her estimate was off by a millennium.

“The Moon Priests were reputed to have magical—or mystical—powers.”

The comment made the hairs on her arm stir again. To banish the feeling, she laughed. “Well, a lot of religions make that claim. You could go back to Moses and the burning bush.”

“Right.” Beth cleared her throat. “I’d like to see the box.”

Olivia thought about the request. She was sure that Carl wouldn’t like someone else looking at his shipment. But Carl wasn’t here now.

“Can you come tonight?”

“I wish I could, but Len is out of town on a buying trip, and I have a merchants’ association meeting I have to go to.”

“Okay. I understand. What about early tomorrow morning? Before my boss gets in?” she asked.

“Sure.”

Because she’d better get to work if she didn’t want to spend the night at the office, Olivia ended the call, then turned back to the shipment, knowing that filling a computer file with information would make her feel better.

Since she’d studied French china in one of her classes, she started with the Limoges pitcher, which she could describe and date without using a reference book.

She’d just entered the information when the screen and the cursor froze.

“Lord no!” she muttered as she tried to move the cursor. “Not again.”

It seemed like every time she tried to do something important on this damned computer, it crapped out on her.

When she couldn’t get the machine to respond, she was forced to press the Control-Alt-Delete keys. A box came up on the left side of the screen, telling her that the program was not responding, and she would lose all data she’d entered if she chose to terminate the program.

Yeah, right.

Well, she’d only recorded one item. Maybe the best thing to do was start over. When she pressed the cancel keys again, instead of just losing the program, the computer shut itself off.

Panic shot through her. “Not now,” she pleaded as she tried to reboot.

But the machine wouldn’t come back on.

With a hand she couldn’t hold steady, she reached for the Rolodex on her desk. Her cell phone was still on the table, and she used it to dial Luke Garner, the guy who had taken over computer repair duty for Marathon, the company that had sold Carl the desktop. As she listened to the phone ring, she murmured a little prayer under her breath. “Please, God. Please, let him answer,” she repeated over and over. On the third ring, she heard his voice.

“Hello?”

“Thank you, God,” she breathed.

He laughed. “I sound that good?”

“Luke, I know it’s probably after your workday. But I need you. I’m in the middle of an inventory project, and my computer blew up. I have to catalog a shipment from France.”

“Okay. I just finished a job downtown, and I’m in my car. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“You will?”

“Yeah.”

“I owe you.”

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