A Forever Christmas(31)

Stumped, Gabe opted to leave the initial label alone until he could come up with a better one to take its place.

He supposed he should be grateful that Miss Joan hadn’t referred to Angel as his new “girlfriend.” Aside from that being totally inaccurate, it would have also been awkward for both of them if Angel had heard Miss Joan calling her that.

Weighing the two options, he came to the conclusion that “little friend” was definitely the lesser problematic of the two.

* * *

HEARING HIM ENTER, Alma glanced up from her computer.

“Where’s your friend?” she asked. Craning her neck, Alma looked to see if he was indeed alone. “Her memory come back?” she asked.

“I left her with Miss Joan.” He saw Alma’s eyebrows rise in a silent question. “Turns out she knows how to cook really well.”

“You made her cook for you?” Alma asked in amazement.

Gabe took exception to the implication. “I didn’t make her do anything. When I woke up this morning, she was making breakfast in the kitchen.”

“In the kitchen,” Alma repeated, the full impact of what he was saying finally hitting her.

“Yes,” he answered, bracing himself for what he assumed was going to be another round of interrogation.

“And just what did she ‘make’ in your house last night?” Alma asked.

He knew exactly what she was asking and he wasn’t about to get caught up in being defensive. He’d played that game before.

“We’ve already gone through this last night, remember? Get your mind out of the gutter, little sister, and make yourself useful,” he told her. Nodding toward Alma’s computer screen, he asked pointedly, “Did you find anything on her yet?”

She’d told him that she was going to go through the missing-persons reports. “So far, no,” she answered. “Nobody’s filed a missing-persons report looking for anyone who even vaguely matches Angel’s description. But that’s just in this county,” she added. She spared a dark look toward her computer. “I’m going to widen the search as soon as the computer comes back to life.”

Puzzled, Gabe looked at the screen. “Back to life?” he echoed. “What do you mean? The computer looks all right to me.”

“Look closer,” she urged, moving her chair to the side to allow her brother better access to her computer. “Try moving the cursor,” she suggested.

When Gabe took possession of the mouse and moved it around on the desk, nothing happened. He had the exact same results hitting various keys on the keyboard. The last couple of keys he all but sank into the keyboard. Still nothing.

Alma physically removed his hands from her keyboard and pushed them to the side. “I think you get the picture,” she told him.

Gabe’s frown went down to the bone. “How long has it been like this?” he asked.

“For approximately the past ninety minutes. I actually came in early to get to work on finding our mystery woman’s identity. What a waste that was,” she complained.

“What did you do to it?” he asked.

“I didn’t do anything to it,” she retorted. “And for your information, the other computers have the same problem. As near as I can figure it, the system’s been hacked into and infected with a virus.”

Unlike the men in the office, Alma knew her way around computers and was, in effect, the one everyone turned to whenever they had any sort of a computer problem or question. But this seemed to require specialized expertise, not hit-and-miss tactics.

“So what are you doing?” he asked, gesturing at the immobile computer screen. “Just waiting for it to come back to life?”

“I’ve got a call in to the software tech support people, but I have a feeling it might be a while before they get back to us. In the meantime—” she shifted her chair around and reached for a thick folder on her desk “—I’m resorting to the old-fashioned method of looking through old reports manually to see if I can come up with any sort of a lead.” With a smile, she added, “That comes under the ‘no stone left unturned’ heading.”

Turning away from the confounding computer, she looked at her brother. “You didn’t answer my question. Did Angel remember anything?”

He recalled the way the woman had worded it. “That cooking relaxes her.”

“Let me rephrase that. Did she remember anything useful?”