"Excuse me..." she began, but stopped when she realized that she was speaking to an empty room. Thinking that they must have gone back into the other office, she moved down between the two desks and opened the inner door.

She did a startled little hop-step backwards as an old broom fell from the small closet and landed at her feet. She stood still for a moment, her head tilted slightly to one side as she gazed in disbelief at the tiny cubicle before her that held a dented metal bucket filled with dirty rags and a shelf with several dusty bottles of assorted cleaning fluids and polishes.

Turning slowly, she surveyed the drab room, her eyes shifting nervously back and forth. There were the two desks, the two chairs and the two file cabinets, all of them the same dull metal. It was the same room, right down to the peeling paint on the walls. She began backing slowly out of the office, her eyes on the open closet.

Had she dreamed the entire episode with the two strange detectives, she wondered? She had been under a lot of stress lately, after all. Perhaps she just imagined the whole thing. It had been a pretty weird meeting, all things considered. Too weird to have been real, she decided. She was just overly tired, that was it.

Reaching the outer door, she grasped the brass doorknob and backed slowly through the doorway, not wanting to take her eyes from the office. As she pulled the door closed, she noticed that the lettering in the glass section of the door looked surprisingly new and shiny and the top row of letters now read:

She pondered this new development, then saw a small white card taped to the glass below the lettering. It read, 'Back in five minutes.' She turned and looked down the short hallway and did some quick calculations.

The only exit from this floor were the stairs at the other end of the hallway and this office was the last one on the floor. There was no way those two strange little men could have left their office and gotten past her without being seen and there wasn't even a window in the cramped office for them to have climbed through, even if they had wanted to do so. She looked back to the lettering on the door, wondering again just what the term 'Dimensional Time-Frame Investigators' actually meant.

"Oh, what the hell," she said aloud. If Jake and those two little men were off somewhere together, then they deserve themselves, she decided. "I have better things to do with my life," she said, to no one in particular. She adjusted the collar of her coat, got a firm grip on her purse and started off down the hall once again, turning her back, hopefully, on the entire incident.

As she moved toward the stairs, the door to the office she had been standing in front of opened slowly, just a crack and if you listened carefully, you might have heard an audible sigh of relief from behind the door, before it softly closed again.