“Because Uncle Benedick told me if you want to make something of yourself, you have to pay attention to the tiniest details.”
“Who’s Uncle Benedick?”
“Our family’s reputation is bad because of him; he made a living by—” Suddenly, she stopped talking. She was acutely aware she couldn’t tell Tang Kimberley about Uncle Benedick. She could only discuss him with a very select few.
Kimberley signed both their names in the register and said to the janitor, “Please let me go upstairs to Mr. Halsey’s office, and quickly. Do you know if that office has been cleaned?”
“Of course, it’s been cleaned. We usually start from that floor. That’s where the bosses have their offices. They always leave by 5 PM. The other floors are later.”
“So, you’re sure Mr. Halsey’s office has been cleaned?”
“Yes, I did it myself.”
“Did you empty the wastebasket?”
“Yes.”
“Well, we need to find what was in there. There was something important in the wastebasket. Where is it now?”
The janitor grinned and stopped the elevator, “The stuff from the wastebasket is long gone, turned to ashes.”
“You burned it?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you might store it sometimes and dispose of it later.”
“We don’t do that anymore. We burn everything right here in the building. Everything in the wastebasket must be incinerated on-site. That’s Mr. Halsey’s order. No information is allowed to leak out.”
They hurried to Mr. Halsey’s office. Just as the janitor had said, the office was clean. The reddish-brown square wastebasket was empty, not a scrap of paper in sight. At the bottom, there was a folded square piece of cardboard; Page pulled it out, hoping to find a fragment of the letter underneath, but it was in vain. Nothing was found.
“I guess that’s it,” Kimberley said.
“Wait,” she said to him, “I have some doubts about the look on the janitor’s face when he said the paper was burned. Let’s go.”
Clearly, the janitor had been waiting for them to ring, as he quickly brought the elevator up. “Found anything?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Page said, “We want to go down to the basement to see where you burned those papers.”
“It’s just an ordinary incinerator. Mr. Halsey said he wants all papers destroyed right here in the company.”
