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“Fair enough.” Hugh nodded. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have said that. I know better. But now it’s not safe for him and you’re going to move him on, right?”
She sipped her coffee. She was a study in muteness.
“Nod and smile, Foley.”
“About that, why me?”
“Gab’s decision.”
She put the cup down. “Gab, Gab, Gab.”
“Give it up, Foley. She’s all right.”
She gave Hugh a death stare. “She didn’t take your promotion.”
Hugh’s eyes flicked to the ceiling in exasperation. “It’s you because you’ve got the experience, understand the charter, hell, you helped write it. And there is that part where you volunteered, you Fruit Loop.”
She sighed. She really had to get over this Gabriella thing and it was unfair to vent at Hugh, but the only other person she could vent at was Nat and since she became deputy editor at The Courier she did see conspiracy in everything.
“I’m an idiot.” She shook a finger at Hugh. “Don’t agree with me.”
“Not saying a word.” He gave her a toothless frog-face smile. “I get it, Foley. I do.” His voice went warm and low. “As your friend I’m upset for you. As your superior, I need you to do your job. As both, if you feel you need to look for a new job, I hate it, but I’ll support you all the way.”
“Superior, nice.” She mirrored Hugh’s expression, part smile, part grimace. Now would be the time to tell him she did think Gabrielle was gunning for her in her oh so subtle way. But she didn’t have a lick of hard evidence to back her intuition on that. “I can’t find him.”
Hugh pushed back in his chair. “That’s a good thing. Your work is done, he’s moved on.”
She shook her head. “It’s not a good thing. I don’t think he’d move on without his clothes and books. He could be hurt. He could be dead.”
Hugh’s composure went from friend and colleague to leader in two blinks. He sat straighter, he pushed his shoulders back. “What do I need to know?”
“After that first breakfast I haven’t been able to find him. I’ve been back five times, morning, evening, midday. I think he’s watching and he makes himself scarce.”
“Are we sure he doesn’t have a job? People who live in cars and squats often have jobs. He might not be hiding from you.”
“If he has a job then it’s even more of a worry he’s living where he is. He’s something else, this guy. Articulate, polite, sharp. No obvious mental illness or substance abuse. I don’t know what happened to him, but he thinks the cave is exactly where he needs to be.”
“Is he some kind of aesthetic, a top of the line God-botherer?”
“I don’t think so. Says he believes in science. I left him the oranges and a cask of spring water yesterday. They were found on our front door this morning with a note written on the flyleaf of a book addressed to me that said, ‘thanks for the oranges but the homeless in Cooper Park have greater need of them’.”
“What book?”
Foley grinned. She knew Hugh would want to know that. Getting the oranges back was unexpected, but this was the best thing, this proved her point about Drum being a different species of homeless person to what they’d encountered before.
“A Clockwork Orange. I don’t think that was an accident either. He had a stack of books, the only thing other than essentials in the cave.”
Hugh’s eyebrow jumped. “So what’s the plan?”
Foley leaned forward. This was the real reason for the closed door and she still felt like she should whisper. “No one else is working on this, are they?”
“You’re asking because you think someone is.”
“It came up in a team meeting and one of the new event co-ordinators Gabriella hired from her old council asked why we didn’t just move him out. Take his junk and toss it so he’d have to go somewhere else.”
“I waited for Gabriella to answer but she deferred to me, so I explained the law and the charter, how anyone can squat on public land so long as they?
?re not unsafe themselves or making it unsafe for anyone else, and that taking their belongings is theft.”
