St. Mungo's hospital for Magical Maladies was in an uproar. There hadn't been news of this sort since Bode had been strangled by his own plant…but even then, the procedure in which everyone found out had been a lot less…explosive.
The uproar was coming from the large number of patients who were becoming cranky and disgruntled from having to wait to be directed to a room. The witch at the Inquiries desk had gone upstairs to try and gain entry to the closed ward to find out "Was he really gone?" and had been neglecting her duties for the past hour.
But upstairs, the doors to the ward in question were firmly locked, despite the protests of several employees who hadn't had this much to talk about in work for a long time. A witch with chrome colored hair kept sloshing her tea all over as she turned to speak to everyone, claiming she had seen Gilderoy Lockhart leave the building.
Behind the locked doors, Josh Brodyn was ignoring the protests of the others that they had "a right to see what had happened to the dashing young man". This was partially because he was furious.
"Are you absolutely sure…how could you do this, Adalone!!" he whispered so loudly that it looked like he was going to scream. Adalone Loell, who was trailing along after him on his fifth crossing of the room, was glad he didn't scream. She didn't want that kind of statement to be let out to the group outside.
"I didn't do it," Ad reminded unhappily. "It was Elleyne who—
Brodyn waved a hand in front of her in such a frantic manner that it would have been funny were the situation not quite so serious.
"I know it was Elleyne!" he hissed. "Of course it was Elleyne...I should have fired her before this, but you know how it goes with single women with no other job…Well so much for my sympathetic look on the lot. From now on, NO one…NO one…"
He stopped in the midst of rifling through the missing Lockhart's drawers, holding up a singled, crumpled letter in a shaking hand.
"This…this is it. This is the bottom line." Brodyn's lips came together in a tight smile.
Although she couldn't deny that what Elleyne did was wrong on so many levels, Ad remembered the enjoyable conversations she had had with the younger witch. She couldn't imagine why Elleyne would do such a thing in the first place…maybe she wasn't quite as good as she had seemed, but whatever the case, Ad couldn't help feeling anxious for her at the look on Brodyn's face.
"Luckily," Brodyn said, standing up and beckoning to Ad. She came and stood next to him, wondering why he was acting darkly pleased all of a sudden.
"Luckily, Elleyne may have been wearing her Healer's robes when she left. If so…"
Brodyn took a flat, black disc out of his large pocket, and began to polish it on his robes, muttering some sort of prayer for luck to himself. Ad looked on, mystified.
"Er…Mr. Brodyn? What is that?" she asked, unable to contain herself.
Brodyn took out his wand and placed the tip of it on the disk.
"This, Adalone," he said, "is a tracking device, employed by the Hospital in times of emergencies like this one. Fortunately, there have been no emergencies like this one, well…as long as I've been here anyway."
He paused to savor the idea that he'd been working here forever. Ad didn't think it wise to mention to him that the first twenty of the twenty-two years he'd been here, he was a cleaner of bed pans.
Forming his face into a mask of deep concentration, Brodyn waited, the tip of his wand just touching the surface of the flat, black disc. He kept holding the surface above Ad's line of vision, which she was just beginning to feel miffed about, when he let out a cry of satisfaction.
Lowering the disc, he stared at its surface. Ad looked too, and was surprised to see that a picture was now moving under the surface of the disc. It was Elleyne and someone else, moving along down some sort of street toward an apparent destination. The disc was too small for her to see their features clearly, but the glowing green that kept blinking on and off on one of the figures was indicative of Healer's robes.
"What do you do…track everyone's robes?" Ad asked, going a bit pale.
"Exactly," Brodyn said, looking pleased.
While Ad searched her robes with an uncomfortable look on her face, Brodyn took out some sort of walkie-talkie and shouted into it.
"We have a location!"
Poor Elleyne, Ad thought, looking up. Whatever were you thinking?