searchingfordistraction

He thanks Miss Li, then steps into the office and closes the door, letting James Campbell vanish the second it's shut.

"Mind where you step," he says. "There might still be some useful footprints left if they haven't been obliterated yet."

The carpeting is the typical thin variety found in schools across the globe and won't hold a footprint as well as thicker carpeting will, but it can still retain information for someone who knows how to look for it.

"There's been a few teachers through here," she says, "but I don't think they walked around a lot."

With the door shut, the scarring from years of heavy darts is obvious. Across the room is the empty space where the Chokey used to be. The relevant section of wall has been replaced, but there are still marks on the floor and ceiling, and a faint rusty smell lingers in that corner.

What there isn't is any obvious sign of Jennifer Honey having been in this room at all. The tracks of the few staff members who poked their heads in looking for her, yes—lingering fear ensured that none of them ever walked behind her desk, and the carpet there is pristine. The paperwork is mostly in order; a few folders have been knocked to the floor, and at least one was dropped and stepped on and then picked up again.

There are a few fibers of dark green wool caught on the corner of a wooden shelf high on the wall just behind the desk. It can't be from today, because whoever left them there must have been standing on the clean patch of carpet; it can't be from when this was Miss Trunchbull's actual office, because the shelf isn't that old.

It is not likely that anyone else would have been in this office in the past few months wearing precisely that colour.

Jim studies the room silently; unlike some people from his reality, he doesn't feel the need to monologue his every impression and deduction as he works.

He takes it all in as a whole first, finding what needs to be examined more closely and discarding the rest as safe to disturb.

He begins to frown just a few seconds into that initial glance, and the frown only deepens as he moves in to look at the few details there are to study. The entirely too few details, none of which match up with each other.

Nothing this room is telling him makes any sense.

Matilda watches Jim, and subsequently watches the things Jim looks twice at, and subsequently calls the bit of fluff to hover in the air in front of her.

"That's from one of Miss Trunchbull's outfits," she says definitively. "It even smells like Miss Trunchbull."

Jim looks from the fibers to the blank carpet and back to the fibers, watching them hover -

"Of course," he realizes aloud, "different universe, different rules."

He'd still been thinking like he was at home or in Gotham or some other reality where things like children spontaneously developing telekinesis don't happen. Stupid. He doesn't bother berating himself, though, it would take time and brainpower best suited for other uses.

"Someone tried to make it look like no one has been in here at all today," he says. "She got everything obvious but missed everything useful." By which he means everything ordinary detectives would have missed anyway.

She stares at him.

(The fluff, forgotten, escapes her grip and floats gently to the floor.)

"Miss Trunchbull has powers?"

"Looks like."

Jim's focus is back on the room, examining it anew with this fresh perspective.

"She's wiped away all the visible traces - no footprints, very likely no fingerprints, enough to stymie the police, but either she's still clumsy at it or she simply didn't think any further than that."

He doesn't see why she would have. Agatha Trunchbull is, at heart, a fairly simple soul.

"Unfortunately, that makes it difficult to work out how she got in or where they've gone."

How exciting.

"Of course she didn't; she's Miss Trunchbull," says Matilda. "I'm surprised she remembered about fingerprints. But we have to get Jenny back now."

She doesn't even want to think about what Miss Trunchbull might be doing to Jenny. She is anyway.

It's kind of making her mad.

Of course. This is one situation in which Matilda won't be sharing his enthusiasm over something new and different.

"We will," he says.

He looks the room over again, and finds his gaze being drawn toward the spot where the Chokey used to be. He moves toward it for a closer look, his hands ghosting over the wall.

"Do your powers work better when you're using them in a space that's yours?" he asks.

"No-o," she says thoughtfully, drawing out the word as she thinks it over, and then shakes her head and repeats more firmly: "No. Not even a little bit."

He hums distractedly as he takes this in, turning to look at the desk from this angle, including the fallen folders.

"A lightning rod, then," he murmurs. "She's a superstitious sort, isn't she? Likely to believe she'd have the greatest advantage in a place where she left her mark too deeply for it to be fully erased."

He taps the wall.

"True or not, it's what she aimed for. Where else might she consider hers? Aside from your house, even she's not that stupid."

"Aside from my house, and this school? I don't think there's anywhere," she says slowly. "If there is, I don't know about it."

No, he supposes she wouldn't.

He leans back against the wall, closes his eyes, and begins to sort through everything he knows about Agatha Trunchbull.

Matilda takes off her backpack, gets out her laptop, sets it on the desk, and hooks it up to the office phone.

There are a few more things she's thought of checking.

"Anything interesting?" he asks after a few minutes.

"No," she says absently, frowning at the screen. "Lots of no. No, she isn't booked under her own name in any major hotel in the state. No, she isn't booked under Jenny's name, either. I guess she has the sense not to be that obvious. I wish she didn't."

"What sort of aliases would she favor?"

She may have the sense to avoid using her own name, but the sensible stupid have a way of thinking themselves very clever. She won't have picked something random as she ought to have done; rather, it will be something obscure related to her own interests, something that will make her smirk at how she's pulling this off right under everyone's noses.

"I don't know." Matilda frowns at the screen again, but this time not so much at the screen as coincidentally in its direction. "She likes the Olympics and being mean to kids and she's superstitious and selfish and nasty."

"Olympics," he murmurs. "Hammer throwing, perhaps. Champions. Women, of course."

That is not, unfortunately, a set of data he happens to have memorized.

But Matilda can look it up.

She does, and starts cross-referencing.

He waits.

"Where do I know the name Phoebe from?" she wonders. "I'm sure I've heard it before, like I know somebody who has it or something, but I don't. Was there a Phoebe in the movie?"

"No."

But he expects there's a reason why it might have caught her attention.

"There's a Phoebe Fuchs here staying at a hotel in Buffalo. Ruth Fuchs won the gold medal in javelin in the 1972 olympics - that's Miss Trunchbull's year. I'm just not sure about the Phoebe. I think I read it somewhere, maybe."

"Think about it," he says. "It's in there somewhere. It will come to you."

Matilda isn't ordinary. If her mind is suggesting a connection, there's a reason for it. She is, however, six years old; she lacks practice in letting those connections surface. She needs the extra moment of concentration, and the reminder to take it.

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