Something was going on that someone wanted to keep under wraps. Spruance Del Curtin had known it as soon as Autumn Belfontaine had gotten that message and immediately took off without any explanation. She was gone the better part of an hour, and when she got back, she was really closed-mouthed about everything. Went straight into the newsroom and started doing searches.
However, there’d been no way Sprue could ask her what was going on. Sure, he could push the limits a long way, but there were still points beyond which it was a hard no-go. And even if Autumn was family, pressuring her about whatever was going on was one of those points.
So he’d have to find out by other means. It was especially difficult since he had no idea what it even was about.
There were ways of finding out where Autumn had gone, which would give him a good idea of what this business was about. However, most of them would get him into even deeper trouble than straight-out asking. Getting crosswise with the head of IT was not wise, especially given that she also happened to be married to the settlement’s commandant.
Which left him having to put out cautious feelers. His clone-brothers were as apt to screw him over with a particularly obnoxious gotcha as to help him. However, there were a number of clones of the astronauts who’d flown with Big Al on his lunar mission.
Except none of them knew squat about Autumn’s mysterious errand, and most of them had no idea of how to go about finding out or connecting with someone who could. Spencer Dawes might be able to turn something up — it helped that he was DJ of the disco show — but he allowed it might take some time.
So here Sprue was in the residential modules, looking for Brenda Redmond. She’d been rather close with Autumn of late, asking her to find things out, so it was possible she’d know something.
As it happened, he found her with her kids, all gathered around a tablet. From the looks of it, they were all doing FaceTime, probably with her husband.
Maybe he could catch her after they got done and she put the kids to bed. In the meantime, better look like he had something productive to do and wasn’t just hanging around waiting. At least up here on the Moon, you always had plenty of studying to do.
After a while, Brenda did call it quits and lead the kids back to their apartment. Sprue figured it might take her half an hour or so to get the kids settled down and into bed.
An hour later, she still hadn’t come back out. Had she decided to turn in early, maybe because she needed to do something else before her air shift tomorrow?
And then he realized he wasn’t alone. He looked up to meet the gaze of Lou Corlin.
“Just wanted to pass the word that you might want to watch where you poke your nose. You’ve gotten in trouble for this already, and people are starting to notice.”
“Thanks.” Sprue bit the word off without any effort to hide his annoyance at the Chaffee. Probably running Ken Redmond’s errands for him.
We’ll see if I get called into his office for a bawling-out tomorrow, or if he decides to just let it dangle.