“Sorry I’m late, Angela,” I said. “It was kind of a lost weekend. Starting with the party on Friday. You should have come.”

She smiled demurely, like she knew there had been no party, just a one-man wake.

“I got you some coffee but it’s probably cold by now,” she said.

“Thanks.”

I picked up the cup she had gestured to and it had indeed cooled. But the good thing about the Times cafeteria was free refills-at least they hadn’t changed that yet.

“Tell you what,” I said. “Let me go check in with the desk and if nothing’s happening we can go get refills and talk about how you’re going to take over.”

I left her there and walked out of podland and over toward the Metro desk. On the way I stopped at the switchboard. It sat like a lifeguard stand in the middle of the newsroom, built high so that the operators could look out across the vast newsroom and see who was in and able to receive calls. I stepped to the side of the station so one of the operators could look down and see me.

It was Lorene, who had been on duty the Friday before. She raised a finger to tell me to hold. She handled two quick transfers and then pulled one side of her headset off her left ear.

“I don’t have anything for you, Jack,” she said.

“I know. I want to ask about Friday. You transferred a call to me late in the afternoon from a lady named Wanda Sessums. Would there be any record of her phone number? I forgot to ask for it.”

Lorene shoved her headset back in place and handled another call. Then without pulling her ear free she told me she didn’t have the number. She had not written it down at the time and the system only kept an electronic list of the last five hundred calls to come in. It had been more than two days since Wanda Sessums had called for me and the switchboard got close to a thousand calls a day.