3~

The steely double doors of the main entrance opened with a crack, then, wide enough for Marcie and Schrödinger to slip through.

"Good," she whispered. "They didn't lock the doors yet."

When they passed into the main gallery, they found it deserted, unguarded and still littered with the leavings and destruction from the creature. Marcie went over to a moist pile of seaweed that sat by the base of one of the main tanks and picked up one of the strands.

After rubbing it experimentally between her fingers, she decided to take it back to her lab for a quick analysis, but then frowned when she realized that she didn't have any suitable container for it.

"Yuck," she muttered as she carefully inserted it into one of her jacket pockets.

The only other soul there was an near-elderly janitor scrubbing the Sea Beast's greenish handprints from an otherwise immaculate wall.

Walking by his cleaner and bucket-laden cart, Marcie remarked to him, "I guess you get used to cleaning up behind Godzilla all the time, huh?"

The janitor stopped his work and replied with a weary smile, "Aww, this is nothing. A few months ago there were some fifth-graders here on a field trip. One got sick and started this puke chain reaction. One kid after the other. Whew! That was a bad day."

The janitor picked up a scrub brush, but then stopped to shake his graying head with tired amusement. "That ol' Sea Beast sure likes to make a scene. Heard he's been stompin' around here since the sixties."

"Have you seen him, yourself?" asked Marcie.

The man's voice went low. "Don't tell nobody, but I see him once or twice. I love to go fishin', but I'll tell you that was the biggest thing I ever saw."

"Where?"

"Once in the basement when I was gettin' some cleanin' supplies and the other time near the loadin' dock. I count myself lucky every time. What? You trying to look for him?"

"Strangely enough, yes."

"Well, he probably went back down into the basement. Shoot! I've been running my jaws too much. Gotta get back to work or I won't be finished before lunch. You look like you probably won't cause no harm, but stay away from that Sea Beast, or you might live to regret it."

"You wouldn't happen to know where the laboratories are?" asked Schrödinger, wanting to change the subject.

Either the janitor didn't notice the cat speak or didn't care where the question arose, because he answered it all the same. "Down the hall and up those circular stairs." He then added wryly, "Don't tell 'em I sent ya, though. I like my job too much."

"Don't worry. We won't. Thanks," said Marcie, then she gave a quick salute to the custodian and quipped, "Carry on."

'Things like theft and rampant monsters make the shutdown of a laboratory, my laboratory, a possibility,' Doctor Redding fretted in thought.

He then put such thoughts from his mind as he stood within his busy laboratory, gazing at its glass equipment-laden tables, dissection areas, and computers with a sense of wistfulness that bordered on the romantic. This was his world.

No one, he believed, had his level of scientific commitment or professionalism. They were either slackers, like his younger colleagues, elements that didn't belong, like the chaotic Sea Beast, or suspiciously didn't contribute to anything, like the town's incompetent sheriff.

Between the three of them, he wondered if he had made a mistake not accepting that position in Arkham, Massachusetts.

He gave another longing look at the environs of the lab again, but before he could daydream any further, he heard the doorknob twist with a soft click.

The door opened with a crack, wide enough for a thin, brunette girl and a Siamese cat to slip through and walk in as if they were expected, which to Redding, was certainly not the case.

"What I wouldn't do to have a set-up like this," Marcie said to herself, admiring the lab's environs.

"Much easier than how I first got in," Schrödinger admitted. "I just happened upon an opened door in the building's rear loading dock while I was sniffing around."

"Just start sniffing for security guards," Marcie said. "'Cause I don't know what I'm gonna tell them, if they catch us."

So involved were they in their conversation and sneaking, they didn't even notice Redding watching them move into his domain.

"Sometimes honesty is the best policy," said the cat.

"I'm sneaking around a closed aquarium on a Saturday afternoon because a cat made me do it?" Marcie quipped.

"I see your point."

They both froze to the sound of an annoyed cough from across the room.

"May I help you?" asked the doctor after listening to enough of their banter.

"I love your lab," Marcie said with an honest smile. "Who's your equipment supplier?"

"Why are you up here?" the doctor continued.

"You didn't lock up fast enough," said Marcie, matter-of-factly.

"Who are you? This place is off-limits."

Marcie changed her demeanor to one of innocent earnestness and walked up to him. "Margo Freep, Crystal Cove High Newspaper. I heard you said earlier about a rare canister going missing?"

The lie seemed to work when his mind was sidetracked by the mentioning of the theft. "No," he corrected. "I said a canister of rare sturgeon eggs. Err, do school reporters always work during the weekends?"

"A good scoop never takes the day off, sir," she deflected. "Now, about the fish eggs."

"They're rare," he explained. "The species is dying out. We were planning to raise enough of them to clone, so that when we introduced them into our breeding program, there would be enough of them to start bringing their numbers up."

Schrödinger hopped upon a stool and then onto a nearby table, then asked, "Apart from someone with obvious good taste, who would steal them? A rich, ruthless gourmand, perhaps?"

"Your cat is talking," Doctor Redding pointed out to Marcie with controlled surprise. "Did you know this?"

"Ignore him. He's an experiment gone horribly wrong," Marcie quipped before returning to her questions. "Now, it doesn't look like corporate espionage, you're not a company. Maybe it's another group of scientists wanting to get credit for what you guys are doing."

"Possibly, but we're the only ones with access to where the canister was kept," said Redding.

"Smells like an inside job, then," Marcie reasoned.

Redding's face slackened in dread. "You mean...it could be one of the research staff?"

"It could be a lab assistant," Schrödinger said, working the doctor's already frazzled nerves and fears with an innocent voice. " Or maybe an intern? You know you can never trust an intern."

"Not helping the case, dog chow," Marcie muttered to the feline before continuing. "You might have to take that up with security.

"Administration had," the doctor told her.

Before she asked a follow-up on that, another thought jumped across Marcie's mind and she seized it.

"Say, do you mind if I look around where the canister was last seen? My paper loves for me to get as much detail as possible before I write my stories."

The doctor fretted. The last thing he needed was for strangers to go poking around in restricted places, on top of what had already happened. But Marcie, or rather, Margo's sincerity, if not her sense of youthful zeal was becoming infectious. In his mind, he saw a little of himself in that.

"Alright," he sighed dramatically. "Never let it be said that Morris Redding didn't help out the young and hard-working, but I'll have to come with you."

"No problem," she said.

Marcie was enjoying the protection that Doctor Redding's presence provided as they walked down the hallways and the occasionally passing guard. As long as she was under the doctor's escort, security might have considered questioning the situation, but because it was too non-threatening to raise their suspicions, they never acted on it.

She and the cat slowed down when the scientist stopped by a door. When he opened it, Marcie gave an inward nod at what she saw inside.

In all honesty, it wasn't all that remarkable a room, visually. A large, very cool, sterile-smelling room flanked on either side by a wide work table and shelves of specimen and sample handling equipment. However, what drew Marcie's eye was the enormous steel door that dominated the center of the place. This, she surmised, was The Vault.

Essentially, a high-tech walk-in freezer with an even more technological keypad entry system, The Vault housed the most important and most sensitive material the labs worked with.

"Here it is," Redding announced. "The Vault. If it's alive, eventually it'll wind up here."

"Charming," Marcie quipped under her breath.

"All of our specimens and biological samples are stored here exclusively," the doctor explained.

"It's refrigerated, of course?" Schrödinger asked

Redding regarded the Siamese. "It has to be, or the eggs and other samples inside would spoil. But the canister has it's own refrigerator built in, in case of emergencies."

"How long does it last?" asked Marcie.

"We've always charged it, so it should last for about two weeks."

"It was stolen not too long ago, and it could be anywhere there's a refrigerator," Schrödinger figured. "Not much of a lead." He then urgently turned to Marcie. "Quick, Marcie! Go to all of the lunchrooms and check their refrigerators!"

Knowing that he was joking once again, she smiled with slight menace and regarded the doctor with a question.

"Doctor, does your Vault have room for a cat?"

"Oh, no. Marine animals only," he answered, surprisingly missing the point of the question. In spite of her respect for the man, Marcie hoped that she would never be this cut off from the world. She focused on her investigation.

"Does this place have cameras?" she asked.

"Yes," he said. "All the labs and offices do. But security already checked the footage and they saw no one after the glitch."

That caught her attention. "What glitch?"

"They said that for a few seconds, they couldn't see anything in any of the monitors. Later, they said something about the system going through some test cycle, and then after that, everything checked out. Nothing was wrong."

That was suspicious in its own right, so Marcie pressed on, noticing the Vault's door.

"That keypad's the only way into The Vault?" she asked him.

"Yes, and only we scientists know the code."

That only cemented the notion that this was an inside job to her. Marcie was about ask further when she noticed Schrödinger sniffing around the corner behind them.

"What's up, Schro?" she asked, knowing it would needle him. It did.

"Schro?" he sighed almost in disgust. "Anyway, I smell something by this corner."

"What is it?"

The cat tilted his head upward. "I don't know. It smells...odd, like a chemical of some sort."

Marcie turned to the scientist. "You don't store chemicals here, do you?"

"No," he said. "Just organic samples."

"Where on the corner, Schrödinger?"

He pointed a paw to one wall that made up the corner and stretched to a point midway up it. Marcie looked up but couldn't see anything incriminating.

"I'm gonna lift you up along the wall and you tell me where you smell whatever this is," Marcie said to Schrödinger as she gently lifted him from behind and slowly raised him along the surface of the wall.

Schrödinger sniffed quietly, swiveling his head to and fro to catch the scent. Then finally...

"There!" he signaled, then he called down. "Doctor Redding, do you have a pen so you could mark that spot?"

"Hmm? Oh, yes!" The scientist said, flustered at the urgency of the request, but after fumbling through his lab coat, he produced a pen. He then reached over and etched an x by the cat's head.

After she set Schrödinger down, Marcie herself reached over to see it, a spot of a substance sticking to the wall.

"Sir, do you have, like, a Petri dish or something?"

"Of course," Redding said, going over to one of the shelves on the side of the room. A Petri dish was given to the girl while Marcie took out her car keys.

"Thanks," she said while she lightly scraped the substance off with the key and then stored it in the dish.

"What are you going to do with that?" inquired Redding.

"We have a lab in the school. I'll take it over there for analysis on Monday," Marcie explained, feeling a little worried that lying was coming easier for her. True, there was a science lab there and, technically, analysis could be conducted therein, but it was all in the context. It always was.

Satisfied that all of her present questions were answered and her prevarications took her that far, Marcie gestured to Schrödinger to get ready to leave.

"Sir, on behalf of the Crystal Cove High Newspaper, I thank you for your cooperation and your time," Marcie, as Margo, said to Doctor Redding as she pocketed the Petri dish into her wool jacket.

She and the cat soon departed.

'Things didn't add up,' Marcie thought as she merged the Clue Cruiser into the inner, moderate traffic of town.

Beside her, curled in the front passenger seat, Schrödinger asked her, "Why were you asking questions about that jar of fish eggs? I could find those anywhere. I thought we were looking for the Sea Beast."

"We are when you weren't cracking wise," Marcie said. "In fact, there's nothing that says that we can't kill two birds with one stone."

That gave the cat pause. "What are you saying? That this theft and the Sea Beast's appearance are connected?"

"It could be."

"That makes no sense. If that were so, than why stay at the scene of the crime? Why not just go into the Pacific and enjoy his ill-gotten gain?"

"I don't know," she shrugged.

"You don't know?" He didn't want to hear that. "What sort of detective are you?"

"An honest one," Marcie defended.

"Nonsense," he sniffed. "You should always pretend that you know more than what's going on. It gives the onlooker the sense that you have everything under control. That is an ancient cat secret."

Marcie gave a quick glace at him. For all his cleverness and smooth words, this animal could irk her at times. "This just in! I'm not a cat. If I don't know anything yet, I'm not going to operate as if I did. That's dangerous. And that's a ancient human secret."

Schrödinger gave in with a sighing harrumph, then decided to change the subject.

"So where are we going, detective?" he asked.

"I don't want to go home, yet," said Marcie. She knew there wasn't anyone there, but the bad breakfast was still fresh in her mind. Better to still tool around town some more until those feelings faded.

"I'll let you know when we get there," she told him.