Eugene Mrozek called me at 9:12 on Wednesday morning, and I knew what it was before I answered, because Eugene doesn’t call. Eugene writes. I’ve gotten a card from him every Christmas for nine years, cream stock and a fountain pen, two sentences and his whole name, and all nine are in a folder in my desk drawer labeled MROZEK, CORRESPONDENCE. A man who writes you cards only picks up the phone when he’s decided you shouldn’t have to wait for the mail.

“Brad,” he said. “It’s Eugene Mrozek. I wanted to call you myself.”

I closed my laptop. I’d been building a heat map for a dental group’s quarterly review, and there are calls you don’t take with a heat map open.

“Good morning, Eugene.”

“We’ve decided to go in a different direction. I didn’t want you to hear it from a letter.”

“I appreciate that.”

“You’ve been very good to us. Nine years. I want you to know that I know that.”

“Can I ask who?”

“A local firm,” Eugene said. “Apex.”

I wrote it on the pad by my phone. I didn’t need to. I write everything on the pad by my phone, and then I put it in the PSA, and then I throw the page away, because a note that only exists on paper is a note you’re going to lose.

“He’s performing a cleansing this evening,” Eugene said.

“A cleansing.”

“Of the building.” There was a pause, and behind him I could hear the hallway, that thick quiet they keep over there like a thermostat setting. “Dolores is very relieved, Brad.”

I told him I understood. I told him I’d send the handoff documentation that afternoon, the credentials and the network diagram and the camera and everything else the new provider would need, with my cell number on the first page in case they had questions, and that I’d keep watching his firewall through the end of the contract on the fifteenth at no charge.

“That’s very kind,” Eugene said.

“It’s in the agreement. Section nine. Transition assistance.”

“Still,” said Eugene. He thanked me, and I thanked him, and that was the call. Four minutes and ten seconds. I logged it.

The printers at Mrozek and Sons had been printing by themselves since September, and I knew why. I’d known within a day of Dolores’s first call. In April of 2020, the month every funeral in America became a livestream, my company opened a door in Eugene’s firewall so he could print the service programs from home, and we locked it to his house, and it held for five years. In September his internet provider started handing him a new address every few days, and at eleven one night he couldn’t print the next morning’s programs, so our tech on call opened the door to everyone and put in a ticket to close it in the morning. The ticket was still open. Printers listen on port 9100 and print whatever arrives there, and the internet is full of machines that knock on every port of every address all night to see what answers. That was the ghost.

I wrote it up myself at my kitchen table, on two weeknights after the kids were in bed, eleven pages and a diagram, and I put the finding on page four with my own name next to it, and the ticket number. The right fix was a VPN for Eugene and the door closed for good, which was a project. Until then Eugene wanted the door left open, because he prints the programs at his kitchen table every night, and he signed a risk acceptance saying so, which is a form I keep for exactly this. I quoted the project and discounted it twice, because it had happened on my watch. Eugene said he’d think about it, which in a funeral home means what it means everywhere else. Then they chose an exorcist.

Every account we lose gets a lost-account review. I built the form in 2014 and it hasn’t changed much: seats, monthly revenue, reason lost, competitor, how the competitor learned about the opportunity, and a box for lessons learned that won’t save until you’ve typed fifty characters, because the first year I had it, people typed “price” and went to lunch. Reason lost is a dropdown. I chose Other, and a box opened under it that said Please specify, and I sat there for a while, and then I typed haunted, because the form is for the truth.

The competitor field remembers what you’ve typed before. I typed an A and it offered me APEX, in capitals, just as I’d entered it the first time. It was the twenty-third time. Twenty of the twenty-three had been inside sixty days of renewal when he showed up, and I’ve looked at that number a lot. Under How did competitor learn of opportunity, all twenty-two of the earlier entries say Unknown. One of them said Small town for two days in April of last year, because that’s what he told me in a parking lot and I was tired, and then I went back and changed it, because small town isn’t a root cause. I typed Unknown. For lessons learned I typed: Go out there yourself. Believe the office manager before you fix the printers. The form took it. Kevin, who went out there twice, is twenty-six and very good, and he explains things slowly to anyone over fifty, which I’ve talked to him about.

I told Kelly at dinner. Kelly has been my wife for sixteen years and my second opinion for longer, and she has a rule that nobody talks about work at dinner, which she enforces for everyone but me, because she says it’s the only time I’m funny. Owen is eleven and catches for the Meridian Mets, which I sponsor, which he finds embarrassing in a way he’s started to enjoy. Grace is eight and runs the house. Last season’s Mets schedule is still on the refrigerator because we went nine and seven, the best season in the history of the franchise, and Kelly says it can come down in January.

“Who’d you lose?” Kelly said.

“The funeral home.”

“To who?”

“The car guy.”

Kelly has never met him and has opinions about him she’d defend under oath. She put her fork down. “What did he promise them?”

“An exorcism.”

Grace looked up from her plate with real interest for the first time all week. Owen asked if a priest was involved. I said I didn’t think so, and Kelly let it go, because she knows what I do with a loss. I own seven quarter zips, two navy and five in a color Costco calls Slate. Kelly says that’s a personality. I say it’s efficient: it’s one less decision in the morning, which leaves more room at night, and that night, after everyone was asleep, I sat at the kitchen table in one of the Slate ones and thought about other things until two.

The other thing, at first, was a thread on r/MSP about a vendor marketplace program called Wake the Dead. The marketplace was going to find every dormant agent on every partner’s book and activate it with “autonomous, self-healing AI” at midnight on Halloween, and the program was opt-out. The thread had four hundred comments, most of them from people like me, people who’ve spent their careers making sure nothing on a client’s network does anything nobody scheduled, asking which part of “autonomous” was supposed to make us feel better.

It had one defender, a retired sysadmin with a golden retriever for an avatar, who begins every post with the word Respectfully. I’ve argued with that dog for three years. He defends everything the vendor does within the hour, and he knows licensing details I’ve had to call a distributor to confirm. That night he’d written: Respectfully, it’s opt-out, and the email went out two weeks ago. If you didn’t read your email, that’s on you. I wrote a reply. It was correct, and it linked to the vendor’s own documentation, which I had read, and which said the program activates at 00:00 local on November 1, the minute Halloween ends, and runs its first maintenance window at 01:30. The dog answered in under a minute. Respectfully, agree to disagree.

I closed Reddit and opened LinkedIn, which I do about once a month to accept whatever’s waiting. I accept every request. Declining one feels rude, and over the years that has meant accepting a request from every vendor rep in the region on their first Monday, each with a note saying they’d love to learn about Meridian’s goals for the quarter. I’ve never answered one. The first post in my feed was a repost from a young man named Brayden, in a headshot with a green ring around it that said #OpenToWork. Grateful for my time managing one of our most strategic partner accounts! Still looking. Driving for DoorDash in the meantime and loving it. His profile said he’d been a Partner Success Manager at Kaseya for thirteen days, in the spring of last year.

LinkedIn, trying to help, showed me who else people had looked at. Colton, twelve days. A Kaitlyn with a K, eleven. A Caitlin with a C, fourteen. Madison, twelve, whose post was the same sentence as Brayden’s with the exclamation point taken out. Every profile had the same post pinned to it, from whatever their last day had been, the same green ring and the same sentence, and I kept clicking until I understood that I was looking at one job, over and over, and that it was always the same account. I didn’t know for certain whose account it was. I had a guess, and the guess drove a Crown Victoria. There’s a scene near the end of most horror movies where somebody opens a door in a basement and finds the room where all the earlier ones ended up. Mine had professional headshots.

So I opened a spreadsheet, because that’s what I have instead of screaming. Name, start date, last day, days in the job, and what they were doing now, which LinkedIn will usually tell you if you scroll far enough. By one in the morning I had sixty-one rows. The shortest tenure was nine days and the longest was nineteen. The average was 13.4, which meant that not one of them had stayed long enough to get business cards. Under what they were doing now I had real estate, solar, a lot of #OpenToWork, three people driving for DoorDash, a mattress store at the mall, and a column of blanks I didn’t like.

Kelly came down for water at 1:10.

“What are you doing up?”

“Recruiting,” I said.

She came and stood behind my chair and looked at the sixty-one rows, and at the other window, all those green rings and all those very good teeth. She didn’t say anything. Kelly reads a spreadsheet faster than I do.

“They all look so young,” she said.

“They are.”

“What happened to them?”

“The same thing.”

She put her hand on the back of my neck for a second, and then she went back up to bed, and I said recruiting again, quietly, to see how it sounded. It sounded like necromancy.

At 1:40 I sent all sixty-one of them the same message. I said I ran a managed services company, that I had lost twenty-three clients to the account they’d managed, and that I wanted to understand how. I offered to buy them lunch. I suggested Panera, because it’s reasonable, and because nobody has ever felt bought at a Panera.

Nobody answered that night, or on Thursday. On Thursday I replaced a firewall at a dental group across the county and decided that was that.

Friday morning I got an email from Dolores. Brad, your equipment is under the overhang by the side door. God bless. Dolores.

It was where she said, under the porte-cochère, in the space where they park the coach: my firewall, in a cardboard box, with the power cord coiled on top and a fresh box of tissues on top of the cord. I don’t know if the tissues were for the firewall or for me. Dolores came out while I was loading it into the trunk. She had a cardigan around her shoulders, and she stopped a few feet from the car.

“I’m sorry about Kevin,” I said.

“He was very polite.”

“He explained things slowly.”

“He did,” Dolores said.

“That’s on me. I should have come myself.”

She held her cardigan closed at the neck. “It printed again,” she said. “Wednesday night. After.”

“Around three?”

“Three twenty.” She seemed surprised I’d guess it. “He says it’s residual.”

I’ve learned not to argue with a word like residual. “Is he coming back?”

“Saturday. Midnight. When the veil is thinnest.”

“Could I be there?”

“It’s not for skeptics, Brad.”

“I’d stand in the back.”

“Eugene stands in the back,” Dolores said, as if that settled it, and went inside.

At 2:15 that afternoon three of the sixty-one walked into Meridian. Madison, Brayden, and Tanner, a tall young man still wearing the lanyard from his old job. They’d been walked out of a wealth management firm that morning by building security, on the orders of a very tan man in gym shorts, and they told me so as if it were a credential. I knew who it was from the shorts.

They’d made a deck. It didn’t have a methodology slide. The title slide said TESTIMONY: A PARTNERSHIP over a picture of a sunrise, and there were three tiers, and under the top tier, in a bullet nobody had caught, it still said we delete everything. Somebody had run a find and replace on the word SILENCE and missed one.

“Who did you show this to first?” I said.

Madison didn’t answer, which was an answer.

“What did he say?”

“He asked for it itemized,” said Brayden.

I closed my eyes for a second. I’d have known it was him from that alone.

Then Madison took out her phone, opened her sent messages, scrolled back to April of last year, and turned it around, and I stopped thinking about the deck. It was a text to a number with no name. PRUITT AND VANCE. 14 SEATS. INCUMBENT: MERIDIAN. RENEWAL 5/1. NOTES: PARALEGAL UPSET ABOUT MFA PROMPTS, ASKED IF THEY CAN BE TURNED OF. ADVISED NO.

Turned of. One F.

I opened our PSA on my laptop and found the ticket. March of last year, written by a tech who doesn’t work for me anymore and could never spell off. Same words. Same missing F. Three weeks before Madison texted it to him. Brayden showed me his, and I found that ticket too. Then Tanner told me he works a help desk now, at a shop across the county, and that last month, at the new job, he’d opened an old ticket and found the exact words of one of his eight o’clock texts, typed by one of their techs three weeks before he’d sent it.

“Where did the leads come from?” I said.

“The app,” Madison said. “Every morning at 7:58. We copied them and sent them. You weren’t supposed to change anything.”

“Did anybody ever ask where they came from?”

Brayden looked at Tanner.

“I asked,” Tanner said.

“And?”

“Quick sync.”

He checked his calendar. He checked it every four minutes for the rest of the meeting. I timed it.

I don’t know how the same sentence, with the same missing letter, ends up in my ticketing system in March and in a text to his phone in April. I have a guess. A guess isn’t a root cause. But I’d been typing Unknown into that box for nine years, and there were three people at my conference table who could stand up and say where their half of it came from.

Madison put the deck back up. “Twenty-five thousand,” she said. “Each.”

“I can’t pay you for it,” I said. “If I pay you, it’s worth nothing. A lawyer will stand up and say I bought it, and he’ll be right.”

“Then why would we do it?”

“Because it’s true.”

Madison looked at me the way people in sales look at a man who has said “because it’s true” out loud in a meeting. So I offered them the other thing, the thing I’d started thinking about at one in the morning on Wednesday. I offered them jobs. A fair base, commission, benefits on the first day. Not for this. I told them the jobs were theirs whether they came on Saturday or not.

“Business cards?” Brayden said.

“Monday.”

Brayden looked like he might cry. Madison shook my hand like she was closing something, which I suppose she was, and they said they’d be there.

Then I called Eugene, which I had never done on a Friday afternoon, and asked him for five minutes before the cleansing. I told him I’d have three people with me he needed to hear from. There was a pause on the line, the thick quiet.

“Is this about the printers, Brad?”

“It’s about how he found you.”

Another pause. “Five minutes,” Eugene said.

I built the deck on Saturday morning at the kitchen table. LEAD SOURCE ANALYSIS. A methodology slide, because you always show your methodology. A heat map of the twenty-three accounts by renewal month, twenty of them red. Three side-by-sides, their texts on the left and my tickets on the right, the matching words highlighted in yellow. An appendix listing all twenty-three, with the client names and contacts behind black bars, because you don’t hand one client another client’s data. And one slide for Eugene, the one I couldn’t prove without the man’s phone: Kevin’s ticket from the end of September, highlighted top to bottom, so Eugene could see what that text would say if I was right. I must have read that sentence forty times. I went to the office supply store and bought another three-pack of report covers and printed the handouts, and I made one extra, because you always make one extra.

At 10:12 Madison texted. We’ll be there. 11:45, in the lot.

At 4:12 I looked at my phone, and Madison’s green ring was gone. Her profile picture was just her face again. At 4:13 Brayden’s went. At 4:14, Tanner’s. There are two reasons a green ring goes away, and one of them is a job. I texted all three. The messages said delivered, and then at six they stopped saying anything. Calls went straight to voicemail. I’ve wondered since what Madison already knew at 10:12. I’m not a dramatic person. I thought about the computer repair man who fell off a ladder last winter anyway. Dion had told me about it across the counter, in the voice he uses for the weather.

I took my kids out at five-thirty, because I’d promised. Owen went as a catcher, in his full gear, which is his uniform, but he says it counts as a costume if you wear it on Halloween. Grace went as a ghost inspector, which she invented, and which as far as I can tell is a ghost with a clipboard who goes door to door finding things wrong with people’s decorations. She wrote up seventeen houses. One of them had an extension cord running across a sidewalk. I’ve never been prouder of anything.

At 11:15 I put my coat on, and Kelly looked up from the couch.

“Is this the funeral home?”

“Yes.”

“On Halloween.”

“It’s when the cleansing is.”

“Are your people meeting you?”

“They were.”

She gave me the look she gives the dishwasher after I’ve loaded it. “Will you be home before the clocks change?” she said.

“Which time?” I said.

Nobody was in the lot at 11:45 except a hearse, a minivan, and the Crown Victoria, parked by itself under a light pole with its hood ticking. I parked in the center of a space in the middle of the lot. There’s no reason to park correctly in an empty lot. I do it anyway. If you only park correctly when someone’s watching, you don’t park correctly. I waited with the engine off until 11:47. Then I carried the projector and the extension cord and the handouts in by myself. Walking past the Crown Victoria I smelled something hot and electrical, which is what a bearing smells like near the end, and I thought, alternator, and then I thought, not my car.

Eugene said, “You said there would be four of you,” and I said they were a few minutes behind, which was the first thing I have ever said to a client that I knew wasn’t true. Then I did the deck. I’d built it to be held up by three people, and without them it was a man showing a funeral director his own tickets at midnight. When Eugene asked where they were, I didn’t have an answer. The man from Apex said maybe they’d passed, and Eugene said not through here, and I’ve thought about that since, and I think it was the kindest thing anyone said to me all night.

Then I put up Kevin’s ticket. I’d read that sentence forty times that morning. I’d checked every word of it. I had never once read it the way Dolores would, eight feet tall, on the wall of the room where she has sat with every family for thirty-one years, and I watched her read it, and I heard myself tell her that she did believe the building was haunted. It was true. I’d give a great deal not to have said it. She said, “In your computer,” and Eugene said my name, and I said that was five, and nobody took a handout.

At midnight my phone buzzed three times in my hand. LinkedIn. Madison started a new position. Brayden started a new position. Tanner started a new position. Senior Partner Success Manager at Kaseya, all three, with the same photo, the three of them on a rooftop somewhere warm in new fleece vests, raising champagne, and the same sentence under each one: Thrilled to be supporting one of our most strategic partner accounts! Grateful to Brock for believing in me. It was the sentence they’d used when they were fired, with the tense changed. I didn’t have to do the math. I had the spreadsheet: thirteen point four days. I put a lunch on my calendar for November fourteenth, for three, at Panera.

Then everything in the building woke up at once, and I understood all of it, which didn’t help. When the camera came on in the corner, I pulled up the funeral home’s memorial page on my phone, because I built that page, and there was the chapel, live, from above: the candles, the backs of everyone’s heads, a man in a quarter zip holding a phone. In 2020 we set that camera to start streaming every time it powered on, so Dolores would never have to press anything during a service. The scan knocked it over, which scans do to cheap cameras, and it came back up and did what we’d told it to. That one was mine. So was its password, which we’d left on the default since 2020, and which is on page six of my report with my name next to it. There were eleven people watching. It was midnight on Halloween and there was nothing on that page but a dark chapel and the backs of a few heads, and eleven people were watching it. I don’t know who they were. I’ve thought about it.

The speaker in the drawer I can’t explain. It had been set up on the guest network, and he’d renamed the guest network on Wednesday, so as far as I can tell it had nothing to connect to, and when those speakers can’t connect, they tell you so. It said Sorry, I didn’t catch that. I’ve tried to reproduce it since. I can’t. It’s the only item from that night I closed as cannot determine root cause.

Dolores screamed, and I explained the marketplace program to the room at the volume I use in server rooms, and the golden retriever by the lectern, who’d dropped his flashlight and was down on his hands and knees fishing it out from under the front row, said, in a young man’s voice, through the teeth, “Respectfully, it was opt-out. They sent the email two weeks ago.” Then he looked up at the man from Apex and stopped talking.

I knew that sentence. I’d read it Wednesday night under a picture of a golden retriever. I’d argued with that dog for three years, late at night, at my kitchen table, about licensing, and lost every time, and the dog was a kid in a costume, and the kid was maybe nineteen. I decided right then that it was the least important thing in the building. I was right, and it still bothers me more than anything else that happened that night.

At 12:04 the man from Apex walked out through the vestibule, and a few seconds later everything stopped at once, including the drawer, which as far as I know had nothing to stop. He’d unplugged the internet. It was the right call. I’d have made it about ninety seconds sooner, and I’d have known it wasn’t over. Cutting a building off from the internet stops whatever the internet is driving, and that scan was being driven from Florida, one target at a time. It doesn’t stop what’s already been delivered, and all fourteen machines now had their own copy of a maintenance window at one-thirty, and a maintenance window doesn’t need the internet. It only needs the time.

I said “it runs again at one-thirty” to Eugene, and to Dolores, and to nobody in particular, and to the dog. I was reading it off my laptop, and I sounded like it. Dolores told me, kindly, that I didn’t believe in anything, and then, less kindly, that I keep notes. I do keep notes. I also believe in things. I believe in change windows. I believe that if you write down what you’re going to do before you do it, and when, and how you’ll undo it if you’re wrong, most bad nights never happen. It’s a real belief, whatever Dolores thinks. It’s just not much to say at a vigil.

His phone rang a minute later. He took it in the center aisle, and I heard him say, pleasantly, “Nobody’s yet,” as though someone had asked him the soup of the day. I didn’t know who he was talking to. I found out at 12:58.

At 12:10 I asked Eugene if I could stop it. I told him what it was, in one sentence, and how long it would take, about an hour, and what I’d need, which was the computers.

“Not during a vigil,” Eugene said.

“When does the vigil end?”

He looked at Dolores in the front row, with her rosary and her notebook. “When she says.”

So I stood at my projector by the side wall and wrote a change request on a legal pad from Dolores’s desk, for a client I didn’t have, for a change I wasn’t allowed to make: scope, steps, risk, rollback. Writing them calms me down. Halfway down the page, under timing, I wrote 01:30, and then I looked at the date on my phone, and then I put the pen down. The documentation said one-thirty local. It didn’t say which one. The clocks go back at two. At two o’clock it becomes one o’clock, an hour that already happened happens again, and a schedule that runs on local time doesn’t know it already ran. It sees one-thirty and goes. I’ve filed that bug with three vendors. Two of them fixed it.

At 12:58 the side door opened and a sheriff’s deputy walked in, and what I felt was relief. A badge. Somebody whose job it is to take a report. I took the extra handout down the side aisle and gave it to him, and he read it standing up, fast, and on the second page he sniffed, twice, and I stopped feeling relieved. I had Halloran Pierce for six years. In six years I met Lance Mercer in person twice and talked to him on the phone forty-one times, every call between eleven at night and four in the morning, and I’d know that sniff anywhere.

He wanted names. I don’t give people’s names to Lance Mercer. Nobody does. He remembered the printer and not me, which is usually how it goes, and he kept the handout as evidence. It was the extra. In nineteen years nobody had ever taken the extra. A few minutes later I watched him give it to the man from Apex, who put it under his arm without opening it.

At one-thirty the building woke up. Every machine came out of sleep in the same second, and every monitor in every doorway lit up with the vendor’s logo, and I watched it the way you watch a deployment you warned someone about. The maintenance window had set a wake timer on each of them. Restore session was turned on, because somebody in Florida thought it would be nice if your work was waiting for you after maintenance, so the computer in the little AV room off the chapel restored exactly what it had been doing that morning, which was Gerald Sorensen’s funeral. “Danny Boy,” on bagpipes. A slideshow of a man with a tan.

Lance made a sound. The man from Apex was next to him before it finished, saying something low into his ear, and whatever it was, it worked. It always works. Then he pulled the cord on the AV computer and went room to room putting the building to sleep. He held each power button until the screen went dark, which on those machines takes about a second, because in 2019 we set every power button in that building to sleep instead of shut down, so Dolores would stop losing her work whenever she bumped hers with her knee. Four seconds would have turned them off. He gave them one. Asleep, every one of them would wake for the next window, and in half an hour, when the clocks went back, the next window was going to be one-thirty.

I found Eugene in the vestibule, standing over the pages of GET on the floor.

“It’s going to happen again,” I said. “At one-thirty.”

He looked at his watch. “It’s one thirty-four.”

“The clocks go back at two.”

He understood it faster than anyone I’ve ever explained it to. Once a year somebody in his line of work has to write down which one-thirty.

“How long do you need?”

“Fifty-five minutes. And every computer in the building.”

“Is it billable?”

“No.”

“Then you’re a volunteer,” Eugene said. “Go ahead. The lights stay off. It’s still a vigil.”

I keep a headlamp in my bag, because server closets are never lit, and I put it on. There was no way to do any of it remotely. Every remote tool I own needs one of my agents on the other end, and ours had come off on Wednesday; the only thing listening on those machines was his, and his was the problem. And Windows won’t let a local account do administrator work over the network unless somebody has turned that protection off, and I don’t turn it off. I could have pulled every plug in the building. That would have held until Monday morning, when the first machine came back on and ran everything it had missed, because the window was set to run as soon as possible after a missed start. There was a ten o’clock service Monday. I’d seen it on the whiteboard behind Dolores’s desk: NOWAK, 10:00, CHAPEL. I didn’t want to find out what the Nowaks would hear.

So it was by hand. I wrote the fourteen machines down the side of the legal pad, under the change request I wasn’t allowed to make, and crossed them off as I went: wake each one, sign in, disable the task, turn off its wake timers, shut it down properly. To sign in I used our break-glass account, the local administrator Meridian puts on every machine we manage, which he hadn’t removed, because he didn’t know it was there. Its password had stopped rotating when he pulled our agent on Wednesday, so it was frozen at whatever we’d set last, and I had it, because the offboarding ticket where I hand those credentials to the new provider and destroy my copies had been sitting since Wednesday in a status called Waiting on New Provider. He’d never answered the handoff email. Nobody ever answers the handoff email.

I opened the PSA to log a ticket for the work, as I have for every change I’ve made in nineteen years, and it wouldn’t let me. You can’t log a ticket against a lost account. I could have reopened the account. It would have taken two minutes, and I had fifty-five minutes and fourteen machines. I closed the PSA. It was the first change of my career without a ticket, and it felt the way I imagine stealing a car feels, if you stole it to fill the tank and bring it back.

I started with the server, because it’s the one that wakes the others. At midnight the program had activated on every agent nobody had opted out, and the server, the only machine in the building that never sleeps, had woken the rest of them over the network, which is what Wake-on-LAN is for. Then all fourteen had run a discovery scan, knocking on every port of every device in the building to see what answered, and the printers answered. GET is the first word a web browser says to a server. A printer on port 9100 doesn’t know that, and prints whatever it’s sent, which is the finding on page four of my report. The 3:20 on Wednesday night had been the same thing, his agents taking their first inventory of the building, which those agents do by default unless somebody turns it off. He’d told Dolores it was residual. His gateway had also closed my open door on Wednesday, by accident, which fixed my finding and broke Eugene’s printing from home on the same night. I don’t know who Eugene called about the second part. It wasn’t me.

The closet door was propped open with my report, all eleven pages, still in the plastic cover with the red spine, folded once and wedged underneath. It was the most use anyone had gotten out of it.

Eugene took me down to the preparation room himself. It’s in the basement, cold and very clean, with a computer on a cart by the door for the paperwork. There was a sheet over the table in the middle of the room. I didn’t ask. I said excuse me on the way in and thank you on the way out, and Eugene, who stood in the doorway the whole time with his hands folded and never turned on the light, gave me a small nod at the second one.

01:36  Verbal authorization, E. Mrozek. No ticket.
01:41  Server. Maintenance task disabled. Left running.
01:59  Prep room. Six of fourteen.
01:00  Clocks back one hour. Same window, second copy.
01:07  Front desk. Detained by deputy. Charger removed.

The front desk was the seventh machine. Dolores’s green notebook was open next to the keyboard, two months of entries in a careful hand. Nobody had ever asked her for it, and that included me.

I was on the third command when Lance arrested me. He cuffed my left wrist to the arm of Dolores’s chair and pulled my laptop’s charger out of the wall. The laptop was at nine percent, and the break-glass passwords were on it; it had been running the projector since before midnight. The cuffs were plastic, with a release button on the side that I could see from where I sat. I didn’t press it. He had the charger. I told him I was trying to stop it from happening again, and he told me that was exactly what I’d say, which was fair, because it was.

Then, from the doorway, the man from Apex said, “Lance. He’s with me.”

It wasn’t true. I let it stand, because it got me my charger back, and at nine percent I’d have let him say a lot worse. Lance plugged the charger in and pressed the button on the cuffs himself, and gave me a look I think was respect, and left. I typed faster after that.

The last machine was the one in the AV room, the one that had played the bagpipes, and it was the one I could have skipped. He’d pulled its cord, so it was off at the wall and couldn’t wake for anything. It would have stayed off until Monday at ten, when somebody plugged it back in for the Nowaks and it caught up on everything it had missed, which was Gerald. So I didn’t skip it. I unplugged the speakers first, and the cable to the projector, because I’d seen what that projector does when that computer wakes up. Then I plugged the computer in at 1:24 and pressed the button, and the screen said Working on updates, 0% complete, don’t turn off your computer, and I said a word I’ve said maybe four times in my career. It’s the same word every time.

Through the door I could hear everyone filing back into the chapel and sitting down, and nobody talking. It reached the login screen at 1:27. I disabled the task at 1:28, and at 1:29 I shut it down, plugged the speakers and the projector back in so the Nowaks would have them, and walked out into the chapel with the headlamp still on, and stood by the door.

01:10  Released. Charger restored.
01:24  Chapel AV. Speakers and projector disconnected. Installing updates.
01:29  Fourteen of fourteen.
01:30  No event.

At one-thirty, the second one, nothing happened, which is what a successful change looks like from the outside. After about a minute Dolores stood up and said, “He banished it for good,” and every person in the room turned and looked at the man from Apex. He nodded once. Lance put a hand on his shoulder and told him to bill him for both hours, and especially for the one that didn’t happen. I was standing by the door with the headlamp in my hand. I’d done that one for free.

I’d made the cleanest change of my career in an hour the state only counts once, with no ticket, so there’s no record of it in either copy. There’s one record, it turns out. On my way past the front desk I looked at Dolores’s notebook, and her last entry was in the same careful hand as the others: 1:30 a.m. (again). Nothing. Thank God. That’s correct, as far as it goes.

I was packing up the projector when Eugene asked me to come back to his office. He closed the door and sat down across from me.

“Dolores believes it was him,” he said.

“I know.”

“I don’t.”

I didn’t say anything. I’ve learned to wait when a client has decided to say something.

“Why did you do it?” Eugene said. “You’re not paid. You’re not even ours anymore.”

“You have the Nowaks at ten on Monday.”

He looked at me for a long time, and it was the first time all night he’d looked at me like a person instead of a situation.

“About your presentation,” he said.

“I know how it looked.”

“Every family has one,” Eugene said. “At the luncheon after. The one who stands up and says the true thing about the will.”

“What happens to him?”

“He’s right,” Eugene said. “And nobody sits with him.”

Then he asked if I’d made arrangements.

“2015,” I said. “It’s in a binder.”

Eugene nodded slowly. “Where?”

“Up near Kelly’s parents.”

“They do lovely work up there,” Eugene said, and meant it, and I recognized the tone, because it’s the one I use on the phone.

The Crown Victoria wouldn’t start. I heard it from the side door at 1:44, a click and a pause and another click, the sound of a car being asked for something it didn’t have. By the time I’d carried the projector out to the Camry, he had his trunk open under the light pole and was digging a set of jumper cables out from under a bounce house, and lying on top of everything else in there, on a freezer bag with a little blue light glowing inside it, was the extra, still in its report cover. The light was blue because the drive in the bag was plugged into a power inverter clipped to his battery, which was part of his problem. He saw me see it. Neither of us mentioned it.

“Not the coach,” Eugene said from the side door.

He looked at the minivan, which was Dolores’s, and at the G-Wagen parked across two spaces beside him, which belonged to a man inside in a sheriff’s hat, and then he looked at me. I moved the Camry over, nose to nose with the Crown Victoria, and opened my trunk.

He came around and looked into it while I got the cables out. The spring before last, in a law firm parking lot, I stood over his trunk and looked at that same freezer bag. Now he stood over mine. Jumper cables, coiled, in a bag, with a tag on the handle that says INSPECTED and a date. A first aid kit. Two road flares. A wool blanket, folded. A gallon of water. My firewall, in its box, which I’d picked up from under the overhang on Friday and hadn’t had the heart to carry inside. Nothing in there was sealed except the flares, which are supposed to be. He looked at all of it. I don’t know what he saw. I’d give a lot to know.

I said the order out loud while I hooked us up, because that’s how you do it in order. Red on his dead positive. Red on my positive. Black on my negative. Black on bare metal on his engine block, away from the battery.

“You say it out loud?” he said.

“Every time.”

“Even when nobody’s here?”

“Especially then.”

I let the Camry run to put something back into his battery, and we stood under the light pole with both hoods up and nothing to do, which is a situation I’d never been in with him and don’t expect to be in again. In the front window of the funeral home, Lance was watching us with his hat in his hands.

“It’s your alternator,” I said. “The battery’s only the one telling you.”

“Dion says it runs hot on the bracket side.”

“Dion’s right.”

He looked up. “You know Dion?”

“Everybody knows Dion.”

He was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “How’d you know? That it would come back.”

I thought about the answer: a schedule on local time, and the power buttons we’d set to sleep in 2019 so Dolores wouldn’t lose her work. I’d have liked to tell somebody. I’d been wanting to tell somebody for an hour.

“Small town,” I said.

He laughed. It was a real laugh, the first one I’ve ever heard out of him, and it went out across that empty lot and came back off the side of the building.

“Brad,” he said. “You’d be good at this.”

“I know,” I said.

The Crown Victoria turned over on the second try and settled into an idle that didn’t sound good. I took the cables off in the reverse order and said that out loud too. I told him it wouldn’t charge, that everything he ran from here came out of what my car had just given him, maybe an hour of driving if he turned off the heater and the radio, and that he should go straight to Dion’s and wait in the lot until it opened.

“I usually do,” he said.

The kid was asleep against the passenger window in the dog suit, and the dog’s head was on the dashboard, facing forward, like it was navigating. The Crown Victoria rolled to the edge of the lot with its headlights off, to save the battery, which is illegal, and which I hadn’t meant. It stopped at the road. The window came down, and he leaned out and called back to me across forty rows of empty parking, loud enough for Lance to hear it through the glass.

“Business is booming.”