The Elaine Investigates index page.
©1 January 2025 Levite
http://themediadesk
1.
I spent at least several minutes after lunch a couple of times a week checking the reports of unidentified persons, living or dead, that had turned up anywhere in North America. Still looking for Sergeant Perkins.
It had been two months since the meeting where the Deputy Commissioner explained what it might have been that had pushed him over the edge to try to obtain supernatural power from less than ideal sources. But it didn't explain how an adult man, and a good amount of his personal items had gone completely missing. And had gone missing while his car had been left in the parking lot of the doctor's office.
But I had other routine assignments to look into, including a mystery on the County computer network to try to sort out.
Somebody had been using Suffolk Country's servers to store over eighty gigabytes of files of all sorts. And I mean, all sorts.
I went and talked to the network manager and viewed some of the files to get a sense of what it all was.
"It's everything, and no porn. That's what got our attention." They indicated the screen of files. "There's very little copyrighted material. I mean, that cookbook, says it was printed by the Riverhead High School PTA in 1957, so I they own the copyright. I guess."
"But why is it on your server now?"
"Exactly. It some of it was uploaded as a single zipped file late last year, others were put there about a month ago."
I looked at the file data. The images of the cookbook's pages had been created about a month before it had been uploaded several weeks ago.
"Maybe somebody was just backing up a computer and wanted to save it."
"We thought of that. But if you do that, you dump the documents folder to the server, and then pull it back down, and hopefully, delete what's on the server, you know, the next day or whatever. That was it for that day. But two days before they uploaded this stuff..." They clicked on a folder, then opened the first item, then the next one.
"Wedding pictures," I said, "and not new ones."
"There's no names or anything. But from the looks of it, maybe forties."
"Good guess. Is there any information about the source. The scanner or camera or anything?"
"Yes." They closed the image and clicked on the metadata for the file.
"That's not a lot of help," I said looking at the scanner information, "we've got a couple of those in our office."
"So do we, there's one in the room next door. I think it's the same model."
"Who has access to this server?"
"Who doesn't?"
"Well, I don't think I do."
"The server is a joint network server for admins and office managers. But the folder this stuff was in was restricted."
"By who?"
"I don't know. The name on it was encrypted. I had to use a data hack to see what was in it. You know, usually somebody will upload their stash of Swedish porn videos or something. If it was that, I'd just delete it. This stuff," they gestured to the black and white video of somebody's homecoming court from 1972 that was playing, "might be important. We just don't know whose it is, or why it's here."
"Can you give me access to the folder to see what all is there that might be identifiable. If I can figure out who they are, maybe that'll lead me to who put it there."
"You got it."
There were a lot of hints in the material. The software that had taken what had been on a VHS tape, the homecoming that had been filmed on a super 8 camera and then converted to VHS, and digitized it left a fingerprint on the file about the software used, but no name of who did it.
The oldest photos I saw in the folder called 'history' was a series of photos of photos that were taken in the 1870s. Some had dates or other information in them, in a couple of cases it was a hand written card in front of the old picture when the new image was taken.
And I had lots of information about the machines used to scan the wedding pictures, and the cook book. And the baby photos, and some rather tough looking farm hands posing around what was said to be a 1961 Farmall tractor... the name and date of the tractor was hand written on the photo, the men around the machine were unidentified. And the funeral dinner for one Mrs. Bernice Cousins on November 5, 1983, I had a copy of the program from the event, with the menu, and the fact that Pastor Greg Owens was officiating the service, but why anybody would have scanned that, front and back, complete with a photo of her when she was probably in her forties, when she was over eighty at her death, was a mystery.
Over a hundred and fifty years of information from.....
"The funeral was in Riverhead. The same as the cookbook." I said to myself. I looked through the other photos.
"There's one, this wedding was in Riverhead," I said to the joyous gathering to celebrate the marriage of Miss Elizabeth Smith and Mister Jacob Clarkson in June of 1975.
Now I had a working theory as to who this information might be important to. But I still needed to narrow it down as to who in Riverhead might had dropped it all onto a county server over the period of about six months, and left it there.
And then something got in the way of that investigation.
The receptionist called me one morning and said I had a visitor coming back to see me.
"Oh? Who is it?" I asked.
"The Police Chief from Hempstead."
My first thought was that I had driven into that town to talk to a witness in the missing persons case of Sergeant Perkins, and I hadn't told the police department in that city, or of Nassau County that I was going out of my jurisdiction to do so. And now they were coming over here to make a speech about inter-agency cooperation and all that.
And when the Chief walked up alongside my boss, the Suffolk County Sheriff, I was sure that was it.
Boy, was I surprised.
"Yes, yes, Detective. Your reputation speaks for itself. I'm certain you can get to the bottom of the matter." Chief Armstrong said after the Sheriff did the introductions.
"I will try my best, sir. But why did you come here instead of going to your own County Police?"
"My dear lady. They were the ones to recommend you. They said if anybody could solve it, it would be Detective Elaine in Suffolk County. And here you are."
"And here I am. But what am I going to solve?"
"It would seem Detective, that the Town of Hempstead, has been cursed by a Gypsy."
I didn't laugh. No. I didn't.
Chief Armstrong was so adamant about my helping them he even presented me with a Special Investigator's badge and ID, issued by the Hempstead Police Department.
"I'm honored, sir. But what has been going on that makes you think the town is cursed?"
"It was about two months ago, a family of what is called the Roms came to town, there was, twenty of them, or so, all related in one way or another. They rented a house, and they all stayed there. And, as is the way of things, suddenly everybody was suspicious of everything and everybody. If some old man misplaced his cane, they said the Gypsies took it." He shook his head, "But, of course, when the old man went back and looked where he'd been sitting in the diner, he found it."
"Of course, but why did they curse the village?"
He looked around, then he began the story. "One night a couple of weeks ago, some of the younger men from the family were out on the town. And, you know, they had a bit of fun, and too much to drink, and were walking back home when, somehow or other they ended up in a fight with several of our own local young men, who were in about the same condition."
Things didn't go well, and the Hempstead Police ended up involved, as well as units from nearby as well as the County Police. And the majority of those involved ended up locked up in the building on Garner Way. The locals managed to either talk their way out, or posted bail, or whatever and got a ride home. The Rom men were held as their names were run through various databases checking for outstanding warrants.
Apparently one of them had run afoul of the law in Pennsylvania not long before and shouldn't have changed his residence to Long Island, New York without notifying somebody in Allentown's judicial system. While the others were let go the next day, he was held pending a decision from Pennsylvania.
While the gentleman was being held, he had some sort of medical emergency and was transferred by ambulance to the hospital. He survived, but he was in bad shape.
His grandmother, or perhaps his great-grandmother, it would seem that the identity of the matriarch of the group is somewhat murky, didn't appreciate the Town's involvement, and stood in the door of the man's room and in a voice that might still be echoing in the hallway, invoked doom and despair on the town.
"Doom and despair?" I asked the mayor.
"Those were the words the officers guarding him, and the nurse in the room, heard her say."
"So what's happened?"
"Everything. We've had two different fire trucks break down, and several police cars. A copier in the finance division fell apart. I mean you can see it in the camera in the copier room, she was running some copies and that rack thing on the end came apart and fell off the machine." He laughed in spite of himself, then he took a breath and continued. "We've had a run of the stomach flu go through city hall, people that never get sick have been off for a week. Our fleet fuel account has been frozen twice." He shook his head, "All of that, in just over a week!"
"Some would see it as a run of bad luck," I said.
"If it hadn't been all at once, and starting the day after she said that, I'd believe it."
I nodded, "that's almost too much of a coincidence to believe."
"Do you know how to lift a curse?"
"I need to see what sort of curse it was, then I'll work on that."
"We are in your hands, Detective."
2.
The first thing I did was to check the various reports of... no, that's not right. The FIRST thing I did was to drive over to the downtown area of Hempstead, which isn't as easy as one would think. Then I started checking the reports.
I started in the finance office and asked about the copier.
The office admin nodded and "Oh, yes, that happened the other day. But this morning our entire phone system was down. Karol had to use a cell phone to call the company and have somebody come out and reset it. It took them over an hour to get it up and running again."
Then I went over to the diesel repair shop that was working on the fire engine.
"I've never seen a failure like this. The ECM shut the glow plugs off, but it says they're on, and it wouldn't reset. We just replaced the ECM." The mechanic told me and showed me a large gray box with several electrical plugs on the sides. "Now it's testing good, I've just started putting it back together." He gestured over at another truck, "Then I've got to figure out the transmission on that one."
I found out that several of those that had had the mysterious stomach bug had gone to a walk in clinic, so I went over there and found a nurse practitioner who would discuss it in general terms.
"It seemed to be viral, but the test results haven't come back yet. As for how they got it, I haven't a clue. It may have been in an ingredient in something they all ate or drank. It may have been airborne. I won't know until the tests come back."
Then I asked her about the symptoms and treatment.
"The symptoms were the usual for an intestinal virus, but fortunately short lived. With a day or two of rest, and fluids, the patient recovered. There were reports that some home made chicken and noodle soup made a world of difference."
"It always does," I answered.
The business office still didn't have the fuel credit account sorted out, even though the management company admitted the city had paid its bill on time, their backoffice accounting system was still showing errors on the account, including, somehow, the wrong ZIP code for the mailing address.
"Anything else unusual happen in the last couple of weeks?" I asked the clerk in the office.
"The coffeemaker died. The light comes on, but it never even gets warm. We ordered another one."
Then I felt like I had to go speak to the source of the curse. I got the family's address and drove to the house and tried to appear as non-threatening as I could be.
I rang the doorbell and when a man answered I tried to explain what I was doing.
"She is all right, Marconi," I heard a woman say from inside, "let her in."
Marconi glared at me with hard eyes for a moment, then he nodded and backed up a step.
I didn't even get to introduce myself to the old woman sitting in an antique chair.
"You are here because the gorgia have called you to try to remove my words."
She looked at me with the oldest eyes I've ever seen in a living person. And I remember going to a family friend's one hundred and first birthday party. She had said that "anybody can live to one hundred, one oh one, now that's something!"
"Yes, ma'am." I said to the woman in the antique chair.
"I cannot call them back any more than they can call back what they did to Marchetti."
"He was the one that was in the hospital."
"Yes. And he should have been here. I can care for him. Not them."
"They didn't know."
"They didn't ask."
I couldn't dispute that, "How is he now?"
"He will be fine. My elixir is powerful."
"That's good."
We looked at each other, and I could feel her eyes.
"You have seen much Miss Elaine, there is something about you. Yes. You are more than you were." She nodded at me and I could feel her gaze become less intense. "You are a good one. Not like the gorgia here, their pol ice. You are...." she paused and looked at me, then she just barely smiled and nodded, "you are a good one. That is why they called you. This is what I will do, for you." She looked over at Marconi, "bring my case."
"Which case, baba? The black one?"
"No. no. Not for this. The white and gold one," she said and Marconi left the room. "My dear, can you bring that little table over here." She said gesturing to a wooden TV table.
"Of course, ma'am." I did as I was asked.
Marconi brought in a large case that in another circumstance could be a working supermodel's makeup case. He sat it on the table in front of her and helped her open it.
"Yes. Thank you, now, Marconi, bring me the big yellow container from on the shelf in the hallway. And my biscuit mixing bowl."
She talked to herself as much as she was to us as she took whatever was in the yellow bin and dropped several handfuls into the mixing bowl. Then she looked through her case and picked a small bottle of this, and a plastic vial of that, and said some things in whatever old language she spoke. Then she was done and sat for a minute with her hands on the stuff in the bowl with her eyes closed.
"Now, I need..." she said and sat up and looked through the items in the bottom of her case. "I know there is one in here. Ah, yes, there." She held up a small cloth bag. "No, that's too small. Marconi, bring me one out of the black case."
Marconi went into the room where he'd gone to get the white one. "What color of bag, baba?"
She thought about it for a second. "The biggest red."
He returned with a red cloth bag the size of a plastic sandwich bag.
"That is what I wanted, there should have been some in here."
"There were only a couple in the other case."
She sighed, "I will get Hammacha make some more for me." Then she opened the bag and blew into it and said a few words in her language. Then she started putting the material into the bag. She shook it down a couple of times, and then put more in. When she finished, the bowl was almost empty.
Then she said something else, and handed the bag to me. So I looked in the bag.
"It's sand. Beach sand."
"It was sand. Now it is something more. One grain, each place, in a quiet spot. You speak the words."
"What words?"
"You know," she was looking at me again. "You will know when the time comes. One grain. Speak. And go."
"And that will lift the curse?"
"No. It must run its course, it will. I believe the word you would know is, diss-a-pate. But that, will help."
I looked at the bag. "One grain." I said as I smelled an herbal scent from it.
"Maybe a few, a small pinch you could say, no more. And speak the words that go in that place."
I closed the bag and nodded, "I can do that. Thank you, ma'am."
"And then, after you do this. Go to the chief of the gorgia pol ice, and tell them to do what it right with my people."
"They should do that anyway. Perhaps they need to be reminded."
"And when you finish, keep what is left. It may help you in your work. Detective Elaine."
I hadn't used my Suffolk County Sheriff's Office title. She just knew it.
When I got back out to my car I felt tired and lightheaded, and it took a few minutes for that to pass.
I started my car and looked in the bag and took out a small pinch of the sand. It sparkled in the light. "One grain and speak some words," I rubbed my fingers together and the sand fall back into the bag. "OK."
3
I started in the finance office and just walked around and said I was just getting a feel for the place. Then, when nobody was looking I took the cloth bag out of my jacket pocket and tried to get as little of the sand as I could between my fingers.
"But what words to speak?" I said to myself as I slipped the bag back into my pocket. "OK."
Then as I sprinkled it into a corner behind a filing cabinet, "Whatever doom and despair has been sent here, the purpose has been served, go away and never return."
There was no sudden rush of air out of the place, no mysterious lights. In fact, other than my feeling slightly silly, nothing happened at all.
"I'll try again."
I stopped at the police station end of city hall and just did a dose of the sand in the front area after I told the officer behind the desk that I was just looking around.
He glanced at the badge his own department had issued me, "Look all you want, I'll be right back."
I went around to different city offices and buildings, and even the garage where the mechanic was working on the fire engine and repeated the process. With similar words. And then moved on.
I sprinkled some in the waiting area outside the police chief's office, and ended the same phrase with "... and may he get his officers to do the right thing."
Then I went and asked if the chief was around.
"He's around. They said the camera in the booking area is working again, so they're taking a couple of photos that they couldn't do last night."
"When did they get it to work again?"
"About an hour ago I guess. He said they'd changed the card and the batteries and all, and it wouldn't work. One of them just pushed the button on it and it came back to life. Just like that."
"Sometimes things work like that," I said and just patted my pocket, and its contents. "I'll go down there and see him."
I didn't tell the chief that an old Gypsy witch had given me some magic dust to lift the curse.
But I did tell him that the effects had probably hit their maximum and would begin to diminish as the days went on. Then I mentioned that maybe a few of his officers needed a refresher class on fair and equitable treatment.
"We're going to do that. I wanted some time between this incident and the class so, you know, certain ones won't think they're being singled out."
"Good idea." I watched them take a photo of a suspect that had been brought in early in the morning for driving when they shouldn't be. "If things like that suddenly go south again, give me a call."
"We'll do that."
But as I turned to walk out of the booking area, he followed me. Then he stopped me in the hallway outside. "Tell me, Honest Injun, I heard you were going around doing some kind of blessing to remove the curse. Did you?"
I hate that expression, but I answered him anyway. "It didn't remove it. It lessened its effects while the curse wears off over time." I nodded toward the booking room, "It evidently worked."
"And that's good enough, thank you."
When I got back out to my car, I took the bag out of my pocket and put it in my kit bag with the other items I'd been collecting. Then I thought about it and took one pinch and dropped it behind the back seat. "So that nothing ever follows me home."
Then on the way out of town I stopped by a certain old woman's house.
"It is good to see you again, Detective." The old woman said. "The action worked, did it not?"
"It seems to be working. It may take some time for them to get back to normal."
"One would hope that everything doesn't go back to what was normal."
I shook my head, "I talked to the chief. They are going to have classes on how to treat people again. Evidently some of their officers had forgotten that."
"Do you believe him, Detective?"
"For now, yes. I felt that he was being honest with me."
"Then I believe it as well. For now." Then she sat back and looked at me, again. "Do you have any questions you want answered?"
I felt a chill that started between my shoulder blades and ran down until it got to my knees. I had to take a deep breath. "Well, yes, I've got dozens of questions. But, I think I already know the answers to most of them."
"You do. And there will be more. And, for them, the answers are probably within you as well."
"Thank you, ma'am." I nodded to the two men that were standing in the hallway door.
"Oh, and Detective Elaine."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Take a sprinkle of your sand out to the causeway, on the lake, and tell them there to be at peace."
"I'll do that on my way home."
By that point, nothing the lady could have said would have surprised me.
I parked my car in the picnic parking area, went to my kit and got the bag, and then walked over to the monument to the train wreck. I read the entire inscription even though by the time it had been erected I could have recited it.
Then I walked through the clearing and out to the lakefront, then I ignored the No Trespassing sign and walked out onto the causeway. I was almost out to the culvert when I saw a couple of guys fishing, I waved and nodded to them and kept walking.
Then out where I felt the accident had occurred I stopped and looked around. There was nothing there, and I couldn't hear anything.
I reached into my pocket and took out the red bag.
"Be at peace." I said as I sprinkled a pinch of the sand onto the rocks on the lake side of the causeway where the cars had come to rest during the storm so long ago.
I didn't see anything, I didn't hear anything, but I could feel that somebody appreciated what I had done.
I put the bag back in my kit and looked around. It had been a long time, since I first started doing this. And the old lady was right, I had seen a lot. And I did have a lot of questions, but I was also pretty sure that I already knew the answers.
And then the analytical side of my brain kicked in.
I took a very small pinch of the sand and put it under the microscope on the lab side of our evidence room. The bag still had a scent that was probably sage or something like that in it. Probably either from an essential oil, or perhaps the dried and powdered herb itself.
When I looked at it, it was sand crystals, and a bit of salt, and some very fine white powder that I could not identify visually. But that was all it was.
It made sense, I knew that crystals like the quartz in the sand and salt have a unique relationship with energy of all sorts. Perhaps even curses.
I thought about sending it to the real lab to be identified, but then decided against it. There are some mysteries that are perhaps best left unsolved.
I took the small pinch of the powder that had been under the slide and blew it off the slide into the corner of the room behind the cabinet that had my other samples in it.
Then I said something that I thought I needed to say.
"May the truth always be part of this room and my work here."
4
Then I had to go back to the more mundane task of identifying who had dropped all that stuff on the county network server.
The first thing I did was log into the server and check. It was all still there, so I got a cup of tea and started looking at the files, just to refresh my memory of what it all was.
And it seemed to be what I had thought it was, historical, or at least local, information about Riverhead.
Besides the cookbook and the wedding video, there was a lot of single, or small groups, or photographs. But most were unidentified. I found another group that had been scanned and uploaded at about the same time with some descriptions in the file names.
"OK, it's Becky and Sam, but who are Becky and Sam?" I said to picture three of Becky and Sam. It was picture five that provided another link to the Riverhead connection. Becky and Sam were standing next to a sign in a park in town. Under the sign was a banner about a SpringFest, with a date.
"There's got to be a clue here." I said to myself, and then I did something on a whim that broke the case.
I had been looking at the larger files, the cookbook, the videos of weddings and a homecoming parade, the compressed file of photos of a senior ladies singing group. They were nice, but not a lot of help.
I told the machine to sort the contents of the top level folder by size, and then I went to the bottom of the list. The smallest items in the folder, plain text files.
The bottom one was just over 3,500 bytes, and contained a string of dates and file names.
The next one up was considerably larger, 21K, and contained an outline for a proposal for a web site that would be called "Back In The Day", that would also be available as a printed book, and offered for sale to those that didn't use the internet. It also contained the note the while the videos would be on the website, selected still images from those videos would be printed in the book.
I read through it, somebody had collected all this stuff. Including converting film and video tape to digital, scanning photos, and, apparently converting cassette tapes to digital format ....
I went and looked through the main folder and found several audio files in an interior folder, some were interviews with names on them. I wrote a couple of the names down and went back to the outline.
.... and they had been organizing it and working out a way to present it in a somewhat meaningful fashion.
A little further up the list from the bottom were several files of HTML code, with the names of the selected files included to display those images and their related text.
The photo of the 1961 tractor identified the proud new owner of the machine as Mr. Chase Rushmore from his farm near Northampton. Not far down the list were more photos of even older photos, except these were photos of daguerreotypes from the 1850s. Again, some were identified, others weren't. But they were there.
Somebody had done a lot of work. And now I knew why. But I still didn't know who.
So I kept looking. I felt the answer was there, but I wasn't sure where.
Then as I scrolled up the list I found some files with the suffix indicating they were from a word processor. So I opened one.
It was an essay about the history of the extension of the Long Island Expressway to Riverhead as Interstate 495. It was well written and interesting.
But even more interesting was the information in the file meta data about whose name the program was registered to.
I wrote down the name and looked in the county employee list, then I checked the city of Riverhead, and other official offices.
"Bingo."
Margaret Cheever was an active employee in the Riverhead Central School District office.
The next morning I parked in the visitor spot next to the district office and went into find the mysterious Ms Cheever.
'Ms Cheever' was Mrs. Cheever, and although she had written several articles about the history of the area for the new website and book, she had no idea how to construct a web page. But she did know who did.
Within five minutes of meeting her I was on my way back down Harrison Street to Riverhead High School.
I spoke to the technology teachers and then listened, and listened some more. I didn't say exactly why I was there and what I was interested in. I just said there was an issue with some county computer equipment that seemed to involve their project, and I was checking it out. And then they got together and called for members of a special working group that was doing the "Back In The Day" project, which included getting most of the students involved out of class.
"We've got everybody, from the yearbook, to the tech club, and even one of the captains of the girl's volleyball team. And we've got community people, from the historic office, the retired editor from one of the papers, all sorts of people, all working together on it," one of the teachers told me with some pride.
"Who was in charge of gathering all of the photos and videos and all that?" I asked.
"There were several different groups, by category."
"Oh. OK." I thought about it, "can I speak to a couple of the groups?"
Most of those active in the project, including those from outside, would be in an open classroom within the hour.
In the meantime, the two of the Directors from the district office had come over to see why I was there.
"I'll explain it to everybody all at once," I said, "but it is an official County matter, and I am investigating with the authority and permission of the Sheriff."
"But it isn't a criminal case." One of them asked.
"Not yet, and, given what I've learned about what happened so far, it is unlikely to be."
"Good," the one smiled and nodded, "while we're waiting, would you like a quick tour of the school?"
"Yes. Can we start in the computer room they use for the project? I just want to see it."
Word was out. Where there was supposed to be just those directly involved with the project now included the High School's Principal as well as the Assistant Principal who oversaw student clubs and groups.
"I think that's everybody," one of the teachers said to me.
"Very good."
I said "nobody is in trouble" about three times while I told them what had been found on the county server which had ended up in my talking to Mrs. Cheever, who was now sitting just off to one side of the room.
"While storing a large amount of data is exactly what the county's network servers are for, eighty gigabytes is a bit extreme to drop on it without anybody knowing what it was and why it was there." I looked at the teachers, "So I just want to ask, and a show of hands is OK. Like I said, nobody is in trouble. Who uploaded material to the county server?"
Several hands went up, but one was pointing a finger up and looking like he wanted to speak to me directly.
"Yes," I said to the young man.
"I uploaded the videos we converted to the address they gave me. I didn't know where it went, I thought it was a school server."
"Did it say Suffolk in the address?"
"No, ma'am. It was just a numeric network address, with the instructions on which folder to use."
Several of the others nodded and said that was exactly what they had done.
I waited until that died down and then looked over at the teachers, "Who arranged the storage?"
"Rob." One of them said and the other agreed.
"Yeah, Rob was at one of the meetings and said we could use the server at that address."
My next question was, "who's Rob?"
"His daughter was on the literary magazine last year when this project was proposed."
Rob turned out to be a former county employee that now worked the night shift for the Long Island Railroad covering one of the local stations.
So I went to the Ronkonkoma station that night and found Rob.
"I thought it'd be OK since it was for a school project." He said when I asked him about the county server. "I used to keep our offices schedules and maps and all on it. I worked for Highways and Waterways. There was plenty of space on our server."
"There's over eighty gigs of material there now," I said and he whistled softly.
"That's what she meant."
"What who meant?"
"Miss Leela, from the school. Back just before the end of school. They'd been keeping everything on thumb drives. I told her I'd come to the first meeting of the next school year with an idea. I forgot all about it until they sent out a text about the organizational meeting. So I got it and went and gave it to them." We watched the train pull out of the station on its way into the heart of New York City. "Is it OK that they're using it. It is for a school project."
I was silent as the train disappeared into the distance. "I'll see. It will probably be OK."
I had to go back to the county network operations center and talked to almost everybody.
Then I had to arrange a meeting between the county computer center management team and the project team from the school and a few others.
In the end, the county network manager agreed to let the school group borrow as much storage as they needed, as long as once the project was complete, they found someplace else to store their resource files.
And with that, another case was closed.
-end gypsy-
The Elaine Investigates index page.
[NOTE: The above stories were written as adventure fiction, they are to be taken as such. While most of the geographical features of Suffolk County, including the High School and Train Station mentioned, exist, and there is a Sheriff's Department, the rest of the setting is fictional.
Thank you, Dr. Leftover, TheMediaDesk.com]
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