Sadie-In-Waiting by Annie Jones Page A

in little plastic page protectors for each of us. ’Course, you know how that went over with Waynetta and Lollie! We may have on our hands the very first all-female ultimate-fighting wrasslin’ match in the history of the Council of Christian Women.”
    Sadie looked up from her desk and put one hand to her suddenly throbbing temple. “And how is running in here to tell me that going to stop it?”
    “Stop it? Honey, I think you owe it to yourself to get out there and watch! ”
    “I’ll be there in a minute.” She flipped up one corner of the calendar that all but covered the top of her battered old desk.
    “In a minute you might have missed it all. What’s taking so long in here, anyway?”
    “I can’t find the paperwork.”
    “Look for it later, girl. You have three queen bees circling the hive out there and the end result will not be sweetness and honey.”
    “You don’t understand. I thought for sure I’d left the Private Use of Public Property form right here.” Paper whispered over paper in her in-box. She stepped back and opened her top drawer. “And now it’s nowhere to be found. Tell me I’m not that careless, Mary Tate, or worse, so distracted or so…so…so old that I’ve become completely unaware of where I’m putting things.”
    “Old? Take that back! You’re younger than I am.”
    “Two months.”
    “My December to your February, honey, it gives us entirely different birth years.”
    “Can we deal with your vanity crisis later? This really troubles me.”
    “Okay, calm down. I’ll help you look.” Mary Tate set her drink down, then held the cookie by one edge in her teeth and stood on tiptoe to peer over the bookcase on the far side of the tiny, dark-paneled office. Muffled by the cookie in her mouth, she asked, “What’s it look like?”
    “Nothing fancy. White paper, lots of blank lines to write names and times, on a brown clipboard with a red pencil on a string tied to the clasp.”
    Mary Tate rested her cookie on top of the old metal file cabinet in the corner. “Did you check in here?”
    Before Sadie could tell her not to bother, she yanked at the handle of the top drawer. The squeaky wheels clattered along their runners and then clanked to a stop.
    Sadie’s pulse picked up. ”How did you unlock that?”
    “Unlock? It wasn’t locked in the first place.”
    “It most certainly was. I double-checked it before I leftthis afternoon because…” She held her breath, glanced around the room, then exhaled and shut her eyes. “Okay, this may sound nuts, but at least three times since my first day on the job I’ve found things not quite right around here.”
    “Not quite right?”
    “Amiss.”
    “A Miss what?”
    She massaged her temple again even though it didn’t produce any more of a satisfying response than talking to Mary Tate. “Messed up. Vanished. Out of place.”
    “Ooo-wee-oo. Strange happenings at the graveyard.” She nibbled her cookie again, probably to hide the mischief in her grin as she teased, “Think it’s the work of restless spirits?”
    “I don’t believe in ghosts, Mary Tate.”
    “What about some other kind of restless spirit? You believe in your daddy, don’t you?”
    “Why would Daddy—” She stopped herself, knowing that with Moonie involved one never asked “Why?” Instead, she shook her head and said simply, “‘Why seek ye the living among the dead?’”
    “You trying to ask why someone as full of life as Moonie would do mischief in a graveyard?”
    “No. It wouldn’t hurt you to open a Bible a little more often, you know that, girl? That’s what the angel said when they came to look for the body of Jesus in the empty tomb. ‘Why seek ye the living among the dead?’ It’s what Daddy always says about going to funerals and visiting grave sites.”
    “Funerals and grave sites are for the living, to help us deal with our grief.” Mary Tate folded her arms, clearly not getting all the pieces to fit in her mind.
    “I’m