Hidden In Plain Sight

Artemis didn’t dare move. She lay frozen in the crawl space of the Kincaid building between the floorboards of the third floor and the ceiling of the second floor watching the scene play out below her. The man’s fingers crawled through the blonde account manager’s hair like the spiders Artemis pictured were crawling around in her own. The manager’s online calendar had her scheduled to be in a conference on the other side of campus for the next hour. Artemis knew this to be true, because she had hacked the calendar and scheduled it. Yet here she was in her office, exactly when she was scheduled to be out of her office, entertaining a burly man with thick dark hair. Artemis thought he might be the visiting professor in the History department from Brazil. Or was he from Argentina? It was hard to be sure who the man was in the low light and entangled limbs. She watched the scene play out from her perch in the ceiling, wracking her brain to remember why she had thought breaking in during work hours was a good idea. The crawl space was hot, dusty, and confining to the point it was making Artemis anxious. She wasn’t claustrophobic in the slightest, but the combination of being baked by the warm air from the ductwork and squeezed in this tiny gap made her want to jump out of the ceiling and shake like a dog just brought in from the rain. This should have been a simple mission. Sneak in, unlock a window for re-entry later, and sneak back out before anyone knew she had been there. Things hadn’t gone as planned, but they would get a whole lot worse if she didn’t get into that office.

Tonight was the night Artemis had planned on renewing her flat for next semester. She had decided that instead of climbing up the building at night and entering through her third story window, she would save herself the misery of the climb by just sneaking into the office now and unlocking one of the windows directly into it. The Res Ed office was on the second floor instead of the third, and was much easier to access from the outside. This seemed to be a clever idea for the last week or so, now she was stranded in the ceiling with spiders dancing in her hair while Ms. what’s her name and Argentinian Romeo took advantage of her private office.

“Ahchoo!” Artemis’s heart dropped.

The blonde woman froze. “Did you hear that?”

Artemis could almost feel the woman’s anxiety as she yelled at the man in a whisper, “I think somebody was at the door. I told you this was a bad idea Santino, we are sooo going to get caught and my ass is going to get fired.”

“Relax mí amor.” The dark haired man said as he lifted the woman from the desk she had been sitting on and kissed her. “You worry too much.” His voice rich and deep with a subtle accent.

Undeterred, the woman wriggled free from the man’s arms and began buttoning her blouse. “Work hours are too risky. In your office after class is one thing, but my boss is just down the hall. If she found out we were fooling around it would be the end of both of us.”

The man raised his hands in mock defense “Ok you are right, this was a bad idea. I am sorry, I just couldn’t help myself. Look at you.” He caressed the woman’s shoulder and brushed a lock of hair from her face. “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever had the pleasure of seeing. Stop by later?”

The woman hesitated for a second and then pulled the man down by his tie to kiss him. “I guess I could come by your office today after class.” Her words dripping with innuendo. The man wrapped his arms around the woman’s waist and pulled her close. After a brief bout of passionate kissing that made Artemis more uncomfortable than the boiling hot crawl space, the man grabbed the tweed jacket that had been un-sanctimoniously thrown on the floor and headed for the door. Looking back, he smiled at the woman and whispered,

“I’ll make sure to cancel my office hours today.” before slipping out of the room.

Artemis prayed that the woman would leave too. Her back was throbbing and there was snot dripping from her nose. The woman put on her coat and pulled her purse out of a drawer. Digging around in her purse, the woman removed a dazzling diamond ring which she slipped back onto her finger before hurrying out of the room. Artemis rolled her eyes and made a mental note to find out who this woman was and what she had access too. A girl in her position needs to call in a favor here and there, and blackmail was one foolproof way to get that favor.

Artemis waited another minute listening for the love birds to return. With practiced ease she used her knife to work free the ceiling tile she had moved numerous times to gain entry to the room. Checking one more time that the coast was clear, she lowered a rope she had tied to one of the supports in the ceiling and descended the line like a spider. In her socked feet the petite burglar moved silently around the room looking for a quick clue as to who this woman was. The office was tidy with a ficus plant in one corner and a few chairs Artemis decided were for clients in the other. The adulterers had closed the blinds to the room helping Artemis feel right at home as she crept around the darkened office. This was a simple get in and get out job. Artemis made her way over to the window, popped the lock on the one that would only be a short hop up from the dumpster below, then without so much as a shuffling, climbed back up the rope and pulled it into the ceiling behind her. She replaced the tile and crawled as quickly as possible back to her entry point.

Checking that the hallway was empty, Artemis removed the vent grate that she had covered in Vaseline so that it slid out almost as quietly as she did. Replacing the vent Artemis slipped into the bathroom just two doors down the hall. Sliding under the locked door of the far stall, Artemis grabbed the backpack she had stashed there earlier. She checked her watch and was pleased to see that she still had almost seven minutes until 10am. If she had not been slowed by Romeo and his not so happily married Juliet she could have been in and out in under five minutes. Even with the delay Artemis was pleased with how the job had gone, and she was thrilled to not have to scale that damn wall all the way up to the third floor window tonight. She used her remaining time to quickly change into the clean black leggings and grey hoodie that read “Pink” on the front and put in her favorite black diamond earrings. She brushed the cobwebs out of her dark black hair and pulled it back into a very out of character ponytail. She grabbed the Starbucks travel mug from the side pocket of her bag and stuffed the cobwebby clothes inside. As Artemis stepped from the bathroom a mass of students streamed out of the stairwell. With her bag slung on her back and her coffee clutched in both hands as if it was the only thing keeping her alive, Artemis melted into the crowd looking just like every other young woman with three minutes to get to class.

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Artemis had discovered the vent on the third floor almost three years earlier when she had been assigned to clean the Kincaid. It was her first assignment upon being hired as a night custodian by McClaren College. Artemis had begrudgingly taken the job to get her foot in the door at McClaren. The position paid four dollars an hour less than her previous job as a store manager at the Smart Shop grocery, and was only looking for someone to fill in for the night shift. On the bright side though, she was fairly certain there wouldn’t be many people to bother her on night shift. Being promoted to manager at the grocery store was one of the most awful things that Artemis could ever remember having happen to her. One name tag swap and a measly two dollar an hour raise later, all of the store’s problems were now her problems. Her fairly straight forward job of shelf stocking and price checking, had turned into a customer complaint filled hell. If she had known the glorious silence and freedom that awaited her on the night shift she would have quit the grocery store years earlier.

The Kincaid building was one of the oldest buildings on campus dating back to the early 19th century. It had dark oak wooden floors, ornate railed spiral staircases, and a stone turret that made Artemis imagine beautiful princesses locked away with ferocious dragons left to guard them. One thing this grand old building lacked however, was an internal surveillance system. Unlike many of McClaren’s more modern buildings, it hadn’t been outfitted with security cameras in the hallways or lecture halls. The only part of the building with any security measures whatsoever was the west side of the second floor. This area of the Kincaid apparently housed sensitive student and faculty information that required clearance above Artemis’s pay grade to enter. At night the entire floor was locked down with security consisting of a few cameras fixed at each end of the main hallway and card key locks on the office doors. At least that’s what Artemis could see looking through the glass in the door from the stairwell. The fact that Artemis wasn’t allowed on the 2nd floor stuck to Artemis like a mosquito bite that just had to be scratched. Every time she passed the door she couldn’t help but look in the window and look for a way in.

Besides the rule barring her from one area of the building, Artemis was in heaven. There was nobody around to tell her what to do, how fast to do it, or silently judge her for singing off key to the song that was playing on the radio. Her assigned task was to sweep the floors, clean the bathrooms, and empty the garbage in the classrooms, offices, and lecture halls. As long as that list was completed before her shift ended in the morning she was free to do as she pleased. Artemis explored every inch of the magnificent old building during that first week. From the top of the stone turret that she discovered housed an office that had since been turned into storage, to the basement that was once used for storage and now housed most of the faculty offices. She discovered the vent passageway on the third floor leading into the second only a few nights into the assignment. She was fairly proud of how quickly she had figured out a way to circumvent the institution's security. Was that the best a school full of geniuses could do?

Piece of cake. The vent was just wide enough for her to squeeze her hips through, and she had cut out a section of the ductwork allowing her to slide out of the ventilation system into the small crawl space between the floor of the third floor and the ceiling of the second. She was very pleased to discover that she was able to access the college’s accounts department, financial aid department, student housing department, and residential education department through this route. At the time she had no idea how incredibly helpful that passage would end up being.

A few days after finding the passage, Artemis had been emptying the garbage in President Smith’s office when she noticed a planner laying on the floor under his heavy wooden desk. Flipping through the book she was impressed with the President’s dedication to old school paper and pen organization. The man had everything in here. From dentist appointments, to work meetings, to his mother’s birthday. As she flipped to the inside of the back cover her thin dark eyebrows rose and she instinctively looked around to make sure no one had seen her as if she had just cheated on an exam. Rolling her eyes at her own jumpiness she realized immediately how silly that was. No one had seen her, it was 3am and the entire building was empty. She returned her eyes to the little book. Written there in neat little print on the inside of the back cover was the president’s username and password.

Username: [email protected]

Password: MrPrez1!

Old Archie might as well have left her a key to the whole damn college. With Smith’s log in Artemis could access every file on McClaren’s server that she wanted to see, and she had.

To Artemis’s dismay, the school had reassigned her to cleaning Steven’s Gymnasium, the fitness center on campus, before she was able to make use of the gold mine she had stumbled upon. Stevens was a much younger building than the Kincaid. All of the athletics facilities had been renovated, or replaced over the last ten years. Athletics was something Artemis never really understood

A couple months after discovering the passage into what was realistically the brains of the school and her golden ticket to get into whatever she liked, Artemis saw in the campus paper that the college would soon be demolishing a number of small buildings around campus and replacing them with new ones. Many of the buildings to be demolished were small rental properties that the campus had used to house short term visiting professors on a per semester basis located right on the border of where McClaren College met the town of McClarenville. At the time, Artemis’s living situation was a tad suspect. Moving into an abandoned and forgotten one bedroom flat on the outskirts of town would be a major upgrade from her basement apartment under the laundromat. The glorious thought of escaping the smell of dirty water and never ending dryer buzzers was enough to push Artemis to her first attempt at breaking into the Kincaid and using the vent passage.

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The Kincaid lecture hall was enormous, the largest on campus. The room was large enough that it covered two floors of the building with the main entrance to the room on the first floor leading to three hundred tiered red cloth covered seats, and an entrance on the second floor leading to a terrace level with a hundred more seats. Artemis sat in a seat in the back of the lecture halls terrace seating, entering as one of the last to arrive. The lights dimmed and the professor flipped the projector to the first slide of today’s lecture on “The Neurological Phenomenon of Synesthesia.” Artemis took out her notebook and a pen and began scribbling notes as the professor described this intriguing phenomenon in which an individual's senses were somewhat entangled leading an olfactory or auditory stimulus to also bring about a visual stimulus. For example, a C note played on an instrument could be seen as a red tone, while an A was seen as a blue tone and so on and so forth. Imagining the experience someone with synesthesia would have listening to a live orchestra, Artemis closed her eyes and saw an explosion of colors flying around the room as if she was trapped inside a kaleidoscope while the orchestra roared the whimsical theme to Harry Potter, or the dramatic and ominous Imperial March from The Empire Strikes Back. The brain was marvellous and mysterious and Artemis loved studying things she didn’t understand.

The professor finished the lecture with a slide reminding everyone about the third exam coming up next Monday and Artemis marked down in her planner not to attend. Before leaving the row of seats Artemis dropped her pencil. When she bent over to pick it up she checked the manilla envelope she had glued to the bottom of seat 321 and pulled out a fresh 50 dollar bill. She replaced the bill with a paper she had typed up the night before titled “The Visual System And Its Processes” with the name Andrew Warzhow on top. She didn’t know who Andrew Warzhow was, but she was fairly certain he was receiving top marks in NSCI 201 Intro to Neuroscience.

Artemis stood up with pencil in hand and grocery money in her pocket and headed for the next lecture she wasn’t enrolled in.

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The sun had set casting a warm hue of orange and pink over the McClarenville skyline and there was a slight chill to the crisp autumn air as Artemis turned the corner onto College Way, her mind deep in thoughts of espionage. In about five hours or so she would be once again breaking into the office to secure her flat for next semester. Turning the deadbolt and opening the door, Artemis was greeted by the guttural snores of what one would assume was a hibernating grizzly bear.

“Guess you had a long day too huh.” She said to the rumbling lump of brown fur asleep in his favorite spot on the love seat in front of the back window. Opening the fridge, she pulled out the leftover pizza from the night before and popped it in the microwave, her mind once again drifting to tonight’s grand adventure. If it went anything like the first time Artemis used the passage she would be in for a long night.

Under the cover of the darkness of a new moon, Artemis had free climbed up three floors of the stone building like a painfully nervous gecko. Her heart pounded so loud she was amazed it didn’t wake the whole campus and her fingertips screamed for mercy by the time she made it to the third story closet window she had broken the latch on. She slipped inside and, after a breather, moved silently down the empty hallway. Removing the grate Artemis squeezed her small frame through the vent and army crawled through the terribly cramped and dirty crawl space as quietly as she could, trying to make her way towards what she thought was the Residential Education office. Earlier that week Artemis had followed a staff member into the west wing of the second floor pretending she was lost trying to find her next class. She did her best to memorize the layout before she was escorted back to the stairwell. She had put on a marvelous performance. The clueless receptionist kindly told her she needed to go up one more flight for Dr. Paulson’s class while fighting down laughter at Artemis, the stressed out Freshman one late class away from having a nervous breakdown and literally running home.

With surgical precision, Artemis slid her knife between two ceiling tiles and pried one up sliding it over just enough to insert the endoscope camera attachment she had bought for her phone. Artemis put a ninety degree bend in the camera’s hose and inserted it in the small gap like a worm sized periscope. Spinning the camera 360 degrees Artemis saw no sign of a camera or any other sort of surveillance. Returning the camera to her bag she moved the tile further out of the way, secured her rope to the floor above her, and descended into the room below. Using the President’s login to find and access the necessary housing files, Artemis found the file with the residence up for demolition, removed the flat at 3714 College Way from the list for demolition and added it to the list of available residences to be filled by faculty. Then she accessed the faculty files, once again using President Smith’s information, and created a fake professor to occupy the small dwelling. This changed the tag on the flat from “Vacant” to “Occupied” and the college treated it as so. For the last six semesters Professor Dr. Stephanie Trange had lived at 3714 College Way and performed research in a different department for the college. Utilities were paid for, garbage was collected, and the grass was cut every week by Mitch the friendly maintenance guy.

The microwave dinged. Artemis took out her plate and walked into the living room where she curled up on the navy blue couch one leg under the other to eat her dinner. The mound of fur now showing signs of life, sniffed at the smell of pizza. “Hey Biscuits.” Artemis said with her mouth full. “Professor Ahsante lectured about synesthesia again today. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to have a medical condition before, but having synesthesia would be pretty cool. Almost like having a secret super power. Like an X-Men or something.” The dust-colored mutt jumped off the sofa and whined as he stretched as far as he could before sauntering over and plopping down in front of Artemis with his hound dog eye’s pleading for pizza. Artemis scratched behind a floppy ear and tossed the crust in the air which Biscuits deftly caught and swallowed after three chews. “I guess you wouldn’t understand, you don’t even see color so how would you comprehend hearing it?” Biscuits stared back in the hopes of getting another bite of pizza.

The flat was cozy. One bedroom with a full bathroom, and a living room with a small kitchen tucked in one corner. The college kept it fully furnished so Artemis had a nice sofa, a queen bed, a television, and a loveseat that Biscuits was partial to laying on. He liked looking out the back window, occasionally growling at a squirrel that had the audacity to walk through the yard. This was the nicest place Artemis had ever called home, and if “stealing” from an institution that charged young adults thousands of dollars a year to be taught classes by overworked, underpaid, but adequately caffeinated graduate students was what she had to do to live her, so be it. Finishing her dinner Artemis dropped the dirty plate in the sink with last night’s dirty plate and headed to bed Biscuit’s on her heels, apparently he was also ready for bed at 6pm. She set her alarm for 10:30pm and vowed to get some sleep before her shift started at 11, and the night’s festivities started shortly after.