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“A bad time? Would you like to see a bad time?” She waved him under the counter and around to her side of the desk. “Once, just once, I leave the wards off,” she continued as he approached, “…and this is what happens.”

“You spilled a cup of coffee on your keyboard?” Dean shook his head sympathetically. “That’s rough.”

“I didn’t spill it.”

“And don’t look at me,” Austin advised him from the top of the counter.

“It was the imp.” Claire made a valiant attempt to unclench her teeth and nearly succeeded.

“Where’d it get the coffee?”

“I left my mug sitting here, half full, when I went in to lunch.” It didn’t need a Keeper to work out the cause of the two vertical lines over the bridge of Dean’s glasses. He’d probably never left a half a cup of anything sitting around. He’d probably never even left a dirty cup sitting in the sink. “I forgot it was there, all right?”

“Sure.” Head bent, hands dwarfing the keyboard as he gently twisted it from side to side, he remained unaware that the full force of her mood had turned in his direction. “Can’t you drain it?”

“No.” She felt as though she’d slammed into an affable brick wall—and had about as much effect as if she’d run full tilt into a real one. “It’s already dry. Half a dozen of the keys aren’t working.” The wheels on the old chair shrieked a protest as she shoved it away from the desk. “I suppose I can write the stupid site journal out by hand, but it’s a little difficult to build a database without a…”

Something small, something crimson and cream, raced along the wall under the window.

Claire snatched up the empty mug and flung it with all her might.

She missed.

The mug smashed into a hundred pieces.

Austin went three feet straight up.

“What’re you trying to do to me?” he snarled as he landed, fur sticking out at right angles from his body. “I’m old!”

“It was the imp. You saw it, didn’t you, Dean?”

“I saw…” He paused and replayed the scene as his heart rate returned to normal. “I saw something.”

“A mouse,” Austin told him tersely.

“I don’t know, it was…”

“An imp.” Claire’s tone left no room for argument. “Somebody,” she shot a scathing look at the cat, “has moved the trap.”

“Probably the mice.”

“Oh, give me a break.”

Sitting down with his back toward her, Austin began washing his shoulder with long, deliberate strokes of his tongue.

Although Dean hoped it was his imagination, the air between cat and Keeper felt chilled.“I could take the keyboard apart,” he offered, flipping it and frowning at the half-dozen, tiny, inset screw heads. “Maybe I can clean the coffee out of it”

“Take it apart? As in pieces?” On the other hand, she couldn’t use it the way it was so how much worse could it get. “All right But be careful.”

“No problem.” His enthusiastic smile faded as a bit of broken ceramic crushed under one work boot. “First off, I’ll go get a broom and dustpan.”

“Dean?”

He stopped on the other side of the counter.

“What was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

What was it? The sudden, deliberate destruction of the coffee mug had driven it right out of his head.

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“Do you know what you are doing,Anglais?” Jacques leaned over Dean’s shoulder and poked an ethereal finger at the keyboard. “Can you put the pieces back together when they all fall out?”

“That’s not about to happen,” Dean told him, inserting a Phillips head screwdriver into the last tiny screw. “These day’s everything’s solid state.”

Leaning against the other side of the desk, Claire drummed bubblegum-colored fingernails on the CPU and bit her tongue. The buzz of the accumulated seepage had become a constant background noise as impossible to ignore as a dentist’s drill, and the smallest things set her off. She’d yelled at Dean for returning the wallpaper sample books before she’d finished with them after telling him that she’d definitely made up her mind, at Jacques for going through the dining room table rather than around, at Dean again for waiting until after lunch before opening up her keyboard, and at Austin, just because. It was like continual PMS only without the bloating.

“That’s got it.” Setting the screw in the saucer with the others, Dean slid a pair of slot screwdrivers into the crack between the front and back of the keyboard and twisted in opposite directions. The plastic began to creak as the tiny levers moved off the horizontal. When the crack widened to half an inch, he pried the back of the keyboard carefully free.

The sudden flurry of tiny white pieces of plastic exploding into the air strongly resembled a small, artificial blizzard.

“Score one for the dead guy,” Jacques observed when the last piece landed.

Dean scooped up one of the escapees. A tiny spring fell off one end, bounced on the desk, and rolled out of sight.“Sorry,” he said, shoulders up around his ears as he peered up over the top of his glasses at Claire. “But I’m sure I can fix it.”

It took an effort, but Claire managed to count all the way to ten before responding.“Just clean it up,” she snarled, “and move on.”